Chinabites

Posted: Jun. 19, 2008

Chinabites.com was first and foremost a site to help me learn a web application framework.  Second, it was my initial foray into what I hoped would become a series of entrepreneurial new media publishing projects.  These projects would be data-driven web sites which eventually would become self-sustaining both in terms of generating money and generating content.  Until I could think of something more creative, I would be trying to make money off of these sites with advertising revenue.  The overarching initial goal of chinabites, or any of my sites, however, would be to create something that people liked using, instead of pouring effort into advertising.  I was trying to put the horse before the cart.

The project was initially conceived as the answer to a need that I had observed.  As a 6 year resident of Beijing who, like many expats, eats out almost every day, I had come to know and love Beijing’s restaurants.  Having hosted many a newcomer I also know that folks who are fresh off the boat, especially those who don’t speak Chinese, have very little chance of getting consistently good meals when they arrive.  So the goal for chinabites was to provide a resource to help those people get a great meal.

I wanted people to go to the site and browse for the type of restaurant they wanted to check out, then print a page with the bilingual address and a bilingual menu to use with their cab driver and waitress respectively.  A big part of the draw of the site was that it would store information and pictures about individual dishes.  I imagined that it would be really cool to look at a gallery of pictures of kung pao chicken or Peking duck from all over Beijing.

From the start I knew there were a couple of serious problems with these goals.  The most obvious is that it is the ’/90s and no one owns or uses printers.  Almost all restaurant directory sites these days use text-messages to send addresses to their users’ mobile devices.  The next issue was data collection - only highly skilled data collectors could photograph and record bilingual information for these dishes.  This site was going to have a hard time getting community editorial input.

I decided to go ahead and develop chinabites to my original specification despite these concerns.  On the printing issue, I thought data that could be printed could be easily reformatted for display on a mobile screen, so that could be dealt with later.  Since evereyone is going to have a mobile device with a web browser in a year or two, I figured the printer concern was really a non-issue.  In terms of the complexity of data entry, I thought that simplifying data entry for users would be a good challenge for my non-existant javascript skills, which I would be developing right after my non-existant python skills.  Simple, right guys?

Guys?