每日特色中国图片：西安河南和上海

Photos today are also featured on the Dreamblogue’s Facebook group Over the Wall.

今天的图片同样发表在载梦博客的 Ｆａｃｅｂｏｏｋ 的 Over the Wall 圈子里.

This photo comes from Paul James on his trip to Xian:

这张来自 Paul James 在西安旅游的相片：

Paul added the following note: “This is probably my favorite picture I took in Xi’an. These are Chinese Muslims waiting to go to the prayer hall. A little history. Xi’an is the former site of ancient Chang’an, the historic capital of the Tang Dynasty (618 - 907 CE) and is still considered by most (except maybe the Communist Party) as the height of Chinese civilization. Chang’an was at that point the largest city in the world, and was the eastern end of the famous Silk Road. As such, it drew people from all over the world, including a new religous group known as Muslims. Many of the middle-eastern travellers who came to trade with China ended up staying in Chang’an and converting the locals to their new religion. As such, the 回民 (hui min) grew into what is now one of China’s 56 ethnic minorities. 回 (hui) in the Chinese language means ‘return,’ which explains how they got the name, because every Muslim, at some point in their life, is supposed to ‘return’ to Mecca. There is a wonderful Muslim quarter in Xi’an, and probably one of the coolest places in the city.”

This next photo is from Zine Van Der Walt and was taken in Henan province at the Fuxi Mountain Snowflower Caves:

接下来的这张照片来自 Zine Van Der Walt 的相片，拍摄于河南省伏羲山的雪花洞：

And finally, some Chinglish. This photo comes from Barbara Octaviani and was taken in Shanghai:

最后来一些中国式英语．这张照片来自 Barbara Octaviani 拍摄于上海的照片

Again, we are setting up a vote on the best photo of the day. Help your favorite get to number 1:

继续，我们设置每日最佳图片奖。快为你最喜欢的图片投一票，助它夺冠吧！

[poll=4]

Keep sending in photos to [*photos@blogofdreams.com *]!

继续发相片来这个邮箱：[*photos@blogofdreams.com *]!

Dawei and Yanzhi at the China Dreamblogue have a challenge for all of you. We want photos. And we wants lots of them.

The China Dreamblogue is sponsoring a photo contest to feature photographs of China. Anything is game: peoples, places, things, chinglish, heartache, humor and everything in between. Each month, we will select a winner from each of our three categories: student, amateur, and professional. We’ll give away 1,000 yuan (approximately $125 USD) for each winner. The top ten photos from each category for each will be placed in the final, year long contest, which has a prize of 10,000 yuan ($1,250 USD).

The entry fee for the photos is a link to the Dreamblogue on your website. Contest winners will be voted and decided on by the readers of the blog, and winners will be notified on the blog and by e-mail. Your photos will be posted here.

Send your photos to [*photos@blogofdreams.com*]. The contest starts on September 1. Winners are announced at the end of each month.

To enter，link to the China Dreamblogue on your website and send us an e-mail with the following:

• Screenname
• a valid contact e-mail and your location (not to be revealed);
• The name of your photo as you would like it to appear in its alt tag on our site;
• the province where your photo was taken;
• the category for your photo (student, amateur, or professional);
• a link to your website;
• a short statement giving us permission to use your photo and place it on the Dreamblogue
• and of course, your photo.

The first contest begins now. Send in your photos!

Some important notes:

1. Please submit photos no wider than 450 pixels.
2. Any format for photos is acceptable, but we recommend JPGs.
3. By entering the contest, you grant us permission to use your photos on the blog. We will credit you and link back to your website or blog.
4. You may submit your photos at any time, but please specify what month you want your photos posted. For example, you can send photos in October but ask that they are not posted until the December contest.
5. There is no limit on the number of photos you can submit or the number of times you can submit a photo, though once a photo wins a monthly contest, it cannot be submitted again.
6. Your photo must have some connection to China.
7. Please send picture files directly. Unfortunately, sometimes our access to service like Flickr is some limited.
8. We reserve the right to refuse to post any photos we find offensive.

浏览中文内容，请点击更多。( Read on »

The Dream:

Our dream is to travel in 2007 to every mainland province in China. During this journey, it is our intention to chronicle the everyday lives of ordinary Chinese citizens. Our motivation for the trip came from a group of women known as the League of Extraordinary Chinese Women. The LOECW was comprised of 5 women from various walks of Chinese life—wives, semi-professional women, a bookkeeper, and a student. The one thing they had in common was advanced-stage HER2 breast cancer. These women, with little access to formal education and less information from outside sources about the disease they had contracted, naturally and courageously combated their disease with friendship, enthusiasm, meditation, and what medical care they could afford.

One member of the original group has survived, and a newer, younger member has been added recently—a 22-year-old student who lost her leg to bone cancer. Both of the survivors lack the financial wherewithal to apply standard medical treatment to their illness. We devoted time and energy from our blogs and lives to raise money for members of the league. As a result of our initial efforts, we were able to extend the life of some members, and we enabled the student to purchase a prosthetic leg.

During this first effort, we began to think about other Chinese people left behind in the wake of this huge industrial growth. Around this time, we also met Thomas Stader and Laurie Mackenzie, two expats who have devoted their time, talents, and treasures to Chinese, educationally and economically left behind, by giving them access to life-changing education. Our meetings sparked Yanzhi Liu’s interest, as he was (and still is) a board member for the US-based group The Reading Tub. Because we are educators and bloggers actively involved in search engine marketing optimization and education, we sought to find a way to organize the entrepreneurial energy of the people we met and turn it into a force that would help us, and other people, realize the dreams we now hold dear.

We decided to experiment, via the Blog of Dreams, by asking students in our global internet marketing class to take a hands-on approach to global marketing by contributing to a positive world awareness of China while aiding worthy causes. Students immediately drove a brand new blog to the number 23 position (out of 75 million) in the Favorites section of Technorati, the premiere blog aggregator in the world. Students ensured that one of our blogs was nominated for and eventually won Best Asian Blog in the Annual Weblog Awards. This blog already held dozens of top ten slots in search engine slots for keywords related to China business. So, with this kind of early momentum, student commitment and huge volunteer support, we knew we could create a project that would make a difference in other people’s lives via the Internet.

The Dreamblogue is a simple concept. We will contact people through PR Web, Blogger News Network (BNN, for whom we write), Google News, Social Networks like Facebook and our volunteer network. We will also promote an Internet MEME that asks people be to share real dreams for themselves or someone else. After a specified period of time (maybe once a month or once a quarter), we’ll select a contributor who will win a prize donated by one of our charitable sponsors. We hope to give away vacations to China, scholarships for study abroad, equipment, Software and cutting edge gadgets that will appeal to our broad demographic. We want to attract a Postsecret-type (http://postsecret.blogspot.com) interest in our blog that will drive enough traffic that we can generate advertising revenue to give to educational and medical concerns.

The blog will use Feedburner and Blogads as its primary advertising revenue resources. The number of ads that we allow will be limited: no more than 1 ad in our feed, 1 ad in our posts, and 1 ad in our blog ads. All of the money generated from these sources will go directly from Feedburner and Blogads to the charities we support—we will never directly handle the money.

The other advertising that we will be present on the site will be for other corporations and institutions that sponsor our adventure, and those ads will be top listed display ads in the sidebar of the blog of dreams.

Any educational concerns that join us as sponsors for the trip will have direct links on our site to translated pages or individual websites that will advertise to Chinese students and more importantly, their parents. We will do all of the search engine optimization and translation and ongoing support for these.

The Blog of Dreams will have videocasts, podcasts, a China picture contest (to be turned into a coffee table book) , a weekly Chinese horoscope, weekly Chinese recipes (also to be a book), and most importantly, the daily dreams of people from around the world. In all, the Dreamblogue has been created to be a tool of understanding and a place where dreams can be spoken into reality.

We will be telling you more in the next few days. Right now? head for the siebar and please favorite us in Technorati and add us to your blogrolls!

ABOUT US: Read on »

Have picture of the Middle Kingdom you like and want to share with the world?

OMBW will sponsor a contest that will run all year and culminate in a coffee table book that will raise funds for China charities and the Literacy Group The Reading Tub.

It is simple:

Send your best shot of people, places or events in China to: dreamblogue@gmail.com with the information required below. We will post several shots, once a week, on OMBW and on http://blogof dreams.com where you and your friends can vote for your favorites. The top 250 will make it into the book. There is NO entry fee.

There will be prizes, yet to be decided, for the winners, links back to blogs or sites if requested, contributor copies of the coffee table book. All rights are returned to the creator upon publication and you are free to multiple submit your work to other sites, magazines or contests. First prize in each division will be an expense paid week on the road with Yanzhi and Dawei and the Dreanblogue Team during their charity and friendship tour of China

Ideally there will be three divisions:

Hobby Photographer: You take pictures for personal enjoyment and you have a shot that you would like to share with the world

Amateur: You aspire to be professional and have a bit more experience or training than do most of us in the amateur ranks

Professional: You get paid for your work, but are willing to share it with us at OMBW and the Dreablogue so we can raise a few dollars for charity

We will try to post new pictures once a week on Friday. The rules:

Make the photos as Web-friendly as possible: No more than 450 Pixels wide please. If you win we will ask for the high resolution file.

Include the following information with your email:

• Real name
• Division
• Province where picture was taken
• Name of Photo as you want it in the ALT tag
• Your location and email (not to be published)
• Your desired screen name for voting and picture tags
• A short statement giving us permission to place the picture on OMBW and The China Dreamblogue during 2006-7
• Your blog or website URL, if there is one, to which we should link the photos

Look for the first photos next week!

This is the China Dreamblogue, a home for the wandering adventures of Yanzhi and Dawei. For the next year, we will make our way across China and speak with people from every ethnic group and every province in China about their life, customs, and traditions. Our goal is to create an understanding of China in full and to create a life on the internet for China that matches the diversity and beauty of China’s people, customs, culture, and tradition. We will include photos, cartoons, maps, stories, recipes, interviews, and heartsongs on topics as varied as Chinese astrology, Chinese cooking, humor, and other inter-cultural issues.

As we travel, we also have other missions to complete. We will create blog posts about our journey, but we also want people from all over the world to participate in this blog by sending us photos, maps, information, captions, cartoons, comments, and anything else you want to add. In addition, you will have a chance to vote on where we go next.

A slogan we have at the Blog of Dreams is “One Dream, One Web.” This slogan reflects one of the goals of the Dreamblog: to create space for fair, open, and honest exchange about China. Too much of the Western world focuses on the negative about China. We want to support net neutrality–making space on the Internet for positive news about China.

We also want to use this blog to generate money…for charity. As this blog grows in internet power, it will generate more and more advertising revenue. We want to make sure this money goes towards people in China who need it most. We’ve created a system where we won’t touch the money–it will go directly to the people doing the work to make life in China a better place for deserving people who cannot afford items we take for granted—like books. We will include profiles of groups we give to, like Volunteer English Teachers, The Library Project, and The League of Extraordinary Chinese Women. We will also have a system where you can send money through our site to different charities that do work in China.

One of our goals is to create a dream list: we will ask people to submit their dreams and if ad revenues support it, we will grant their wish.

Finally, we want to create a better and stronger internet presence for China. We can do this and help you out with Link It Forward, a unique way we’ve created to build a stronger internet presence and network throughout China.

Join us on our journey to give China and its people an electronic introduction to the global internet community.

OUR #1 GOAL IS TO BE THE TOP RANKED SITE FOR LINKS AND FAVORITES IN TECHNORATI. HELP BY CLICKING THE FAVORITES LINK AND BY GETTING OTHERS TO DO THE SAME. ALSO LINK TO US AND JOIN OUR LINK IT FORWARD CAMPAIGN. THERE IS A BADGE ON THE SIDEBAR YOU MAY DOWNLOAD AND USE ON YOUR SITE!

WE NEED EDITORS, PHOTO REVIEWERS, TRANSLATORS, PR HELPERS, AND LINK MASTERS. IF YOU ARE INTERESTED LEAVE A COMMENT. IT WILL NOT BE PUBLISHED, BUT WE WILL CONTACT YOU!