Babbage | Dark matter for Thursday

Dark matter for Thursday

China's tech industry quietly makes foreign acquisitions and a Macedonian blogger runs numbers on his country's YouTube successes

By BG | WASHINGTON

EVGENY MOROZOV says that China's tech industry is going quietly global, and asks when Congress will start holding hearings on the Chinese internet takeover.

Jan Chipchase wonders when we'll start designing credit cards to physically deteriorate as they approach their expiration dates.

Via Filip Stojanovski of Global Voices, Igor Mihajlovski, a blogger, has analysed Macedonian pop videos on YouTube and discovered that the best-performing songs tend to be hip hop or duets with foreign artists. Nothing, however, beat Tose Preski's (actually strangely moving) interpretation of the folk song "Zajdi zajdi."

My bureau chief suggested I translate the song title. Does anyone speak Macedonian?

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