We've added another blog to our Yunnan blogroll: South of the Clouds. This new blog is written by Jeff Crosby, an American who has spent several years in Kunming and elsewhere in Yunnan and now works for the Menghai Tea Factory.

Much of the blog is related to Jeff's experience in Yunnan's art and culture circles as well as his more recent experiences in the tea industry. Not to be confused with Cloud South, another quality Yunnan blog, South of the Clouds looks like it should be good for getting glimpses of the more unseen aspects of Kunming and Yunnan.

We've recently been introduced to a Kunming-based blog about learning Chinese: LaowaiChinese.net. The site seems quite useful for beginning and intermediate learners of Chinese and it covers quite a bit of situations encountered in daily life in China.

Elsewhere in the Yunnan blogosphere, in the last few weeks the proprietors of Kunming blogs Expreference, China Shuebox and Migrant Worker have left the Spring City for greener pastures in the US and Beijing. Good luck to all.

Currently the Kunming/Yunnan blogroll includes the following sites:

Cloud South
Elizabeth in China
Greg in China
Laowai Chinese
My life in China

If you are blogging in Kunming or elsewhere in Yunnan, or know of a blog we're missing, please contact us and we'll add it to the list.

It took us a while, but we finally discovered a Dali blog: Cloud South. Run by a lad from Leeds and a Kunming native, this is already one of our favorite Yunnan blogs.

One of Cloud South's standout features is Cecilia Pym's excellent photography - the above image was taken from a post about the Wa 'Rub you black' festival in Cangyuan County, Lincang Prefecture.

Cloud South is also brimming with interesting posts, our favorites being 'Beliefs' and 'Bluff your way in Yunnanese'. The site offers a wealth of knowledge about customs, culture and language in Yunnan. For the most part, all posts are informative, insightful and entertaining.

Check it out.

KunmingEnglish.com is a website focused on connecting English schools in Kunming with foreign teachers and Chinese students.

Useful features on the site include teaching job listings, Skype English corners (next one on November 4), English corner listings, language exchange and more.

Contact KunmingEnglish.com with posts, questions or comments here.

Disclosure: As you may have noticed, KunmingEnglish.com is an advertiser on this site.

Bumped into Shannon Shue last night and discovered that she was blogging right here in Kunming. Her blog china shuebox is full of thoughts on life in Kunming and has loads of good photos. Check it out.

Migrant Worker aka Even Pay, a fellow at the Pesticide Eco-Alternatives Center here in Kunming, was recently interviewed for this story, entitled 'Why the stink over China's organic food?' in US-based business magazine BusinessWeek.

The story is a masterpiece of alarmism that inexplicably gives more credibility to unnamed sources than to cited experts in the field, including Even and the head of the US Department of Agriculture's organic department. Here are the major offenses:

1. The piece starts off stating China is 'getting skewered for churning out cheap organic food', yet nowhere in the article does a person with a name say anything negative about China's organic produce. There are numerous references to 'critics' of China's organic agriculture, but none are named.

2. The first quote, attributed to an unnamed US consultant working in China who considers China meeting US Department of Agriculture standards 'a joke': "U.S. laws do not work in China."' One: anybody can call themselves a consultant. Two: Unless there is a plan to impose US law on the world, (cough, cough), why would it be imperative that US laws 'work' in other countries?

3. The closing sentence: 'Even with these safeguards in place, however, making sure that every carrot, cabbage, and strawberry imported from China meets USDA standards is impossible.' Hmm, so even though the USDA says there have been no problems with organic produce from China, Americans should not trust organic food from China because every single item of produce cannot be accounted for. It's good to see that in modern American journalism kneejerk suspicion of everything Chinese trumps those pesky 'experts' and 'facts' that can often clash with one's prejudices.

We don't want to talk too much trash, we understand that China can seem frightening over in New York -- where the story was written.

The money quote in this story comes from Barbara Robinson, head of the USDA's National Organic Program, who said her department had received no complaints about Chinese organic produce that had entered the US, adding: 'I don't know why everybody picks on China.' We'd fare to say that scaremongering articles such as this one could explain some of the distrust of China on the other side of the Pacific.

For her part, Even - who unlike BusinessWeek's unnamed consultant is a true expert on agriculture in China - eloquently explains her stance on organic agriculture in China in this post which BusinessWeek should have run in place of its fear-fuelled propaganda, which almost borders on bioxenophobia.

We've made a few changes to the GoKunming website:

For those of you who write blogs, and would like to link to our blog items, there's now a link on each item that will take you to a single GoKunming item - look for 'Link' at the top of each item.

We've also added a comments function, so that registered users (click here to register) can have their say about our blog items - look for 'Comments' at the top of each item.

Anyone who saw the old GoKunming knows that we've come a long way from our days as a lowly listings site.

Now we're interactive, with classifieds and forums. And we don't get any people telling us about how we're not rendering correctly in Firefox anymore (thanks Matt). Our favorite new feature is the blog style, which allows us to indulge our creative writing urges without having to be coherent for more than a few paragraphs.

As a good neighbor in the Kunming blogosphere, we'd like to give a shout out to the bloggers here who are sharing their experiences and views on life in Kunming and China. Interestingly, all of the urls for these blogs follow a '....inchina.com' format. Here it is, our unofficial Kunming blogroll:

Greg in China Greg comes to Kunming from the UK, unleashing his wit on the more - er - quaint aspects of life in southwestern China.

Elizabeth in China Most recently from the American Midwest, Elizabeth is relatively new to Kunming. Her experiences should be useful for foreigners thinking about moving to Kunming.

My Life in Kunming Jonathan, also American, appears to travel quite a bit in this part of the country, recording his impressions and experiences along the way. Some good travel photos.

There it is... if you or anyone you know has a Kunming-based blog please let us know.

Ryan has been in touch to tell us about his blog - seems he's been doing a spot of travel lately... but he's posting again from Kunming round about now - check it out: Expreference.com