About China blogosphere, travel, and entrepreneurship

The Chinese Blogger Conference was the first grass-roots bloggers’ conference of its kind in China. I went to this event in Hangzhou last year for the first time. I have left China for 5 years and just got back for 2 months, it was a great opportunity for me to catch up what was going on in China blogosphere. The actual conference venue (different from this) was in a small hotel in a remote area of Hangzhou. It was very crowded and exciting bloggers were everywhere: they were well connected online and exciting to meet each other in real life. I got to know quite a few Web 2.0 companies, such as Douban.com, Tudou.com (video share site) and City8.com, a visual map service I use almost daily now… Of course, I met bloggers: , Bruce Wang, Rebecca of Rconversation and more. It enjoyed a live video interview section when Chinese artists European artists were talking to each other via Internet. (But I can’t find other blog coverages about it today).

This year, in the 3rd annual CNBloggerCon I noticed a new blogger network called Chinese Blogger Network (中国博客网络组, CBN). This blog network gives another view into a new generation of Chinese bloggers, something I am personally interested in because it is another way, other then building a BSP, to explore the commercial value of blogs. Chinese Blogger Network was found around Dec. 2006 by a group of Web 2.0 and technology bloggers. It is an ad/link network. Its goals are to explore “how blogger/blog makes money” and “to promote this kind of network in China”.

Today, I read a post by 郭启睿 (Guo Qiyu Qirui) published on Dec. 20, 2007 to invite committed, passionated bloggers to join his Utopia Blogger Union (乌托邦博客联盟). He listed 10 criteria for qualification, here are a brief translation:

1. Must know the blogger in real life;
2. Has been writing blog posts for more than 6 months, respect Creative Commons;
3. Passionate about original writing and a perfectionist. Tries to avoid typos and use the most proper images on each post;
4. Be able to maintain a user-friendly blog user interface and make it compatible with most browsers;
5. Avoid others who copy or re-post the original writing without citation;
6. Not against blog promotion and advertising；
7. Stick to one’s own principle and not create controversy solely for the sake of fame;
8. Not focused on one’s own company, teams or products, but solely focused on one’s own blogging interests;
9. No spam and non contributing comments;
10. No politics, understand Internet technologies and MUST be a advanced user of Google Groups and Gmail.

I believe the above criteria can be applied to the bloggers worldwide, not just Chinese bloggers, in order to build a great (but not necessarily a big) blogger network. So far, my favorite blog network is Brave New Traveler, a blog encourages and publishs high quality original writings.

“Weblog” is 10 years old on Dec. 17 2007. There are 120,000 new blogs launched every day and 17 new post published every second according to Technorati on Mar 2007. I believe the commonly held vision of a “grassroots blogger” is an out-of-date identity for most (but not all) of the Chinese blogosphere. The new generation of Chinese tech bloggers are: born in mid 1980s, good in English, college-educated, enjoy Western entertainment programs - American TV shows, DreamWorks movies and pop music. In a word, they are the generation growing up together with Internet, and many of them are proud to be a new generation of geek bloggers.

Blogs in both networks mentioned above are not about “grassroots” media. Unlike most current well known tech and business bloggers (e.g. IT blogger Keso, business blogger Fangjun) the new generation of tech bloggers are not from the tradition media or press industry. Blogs of CBN focus on Internet technologies, Web applications, Google and Digg, and have 50000+ feedburner subscribers in total. Guo Qiyu Qirui is interested in Internet and mobile telecoms applications. Obviously, they are not going to beat BSPs, such as Sina blog, Sohu blog or Blogbus in the same way, but how far can IT blog network in China go? Is it a right time to build a blog (ad) network in China?

Guo updated his blog ONE day later on Dec. 21 and said he received about 30 applications. Very nice, congratulations! I’m looking forward to blogging more about this new generation of Chinese bloggers and their networks.

Cnbloggercon also held a panel discussion about China social applications. Moderated by Luyi Chen of the excellent China Web 2.0 Review blog, the panelists were from: Wealink (About in EN), Linkist (at CWRblog), Geni (at TechCrunch, at CWRblog), Haokanbu (Ignite2007 CEO presentation), and Aggua.

From the coverage that is out there, I found it hard to extract the key insights on the potential of social applications in China. Four posts can provide a starting point: David Feng’s Blognation Cnbloggercon day one post, John Kennedy’s live Cnbloggercon blog account, and Luyi Chen’s description of goals and summary of the day. If there are other insightful posts in Chinese or English about this panel let me know so I can add to this post. My key takeaways from the coverage and other blog commentary:

1. social networks and social applications will evolve differently because Chinese netizens are more mobile and more IM/chat oriented, and hence more focused on immediacy and in a mobile format.
2. social network applications may have a role in facilitating “first life” (aka real world) relationships, but to date what has been most widely adopted are social applications (such as BBS) that enable users to maintain anonymity and privacy.
3. there are some differences attitudes toward trust. For example, business social networks (e.g. like Wealink or LinkedIn) rely on an underlying willingness to trust strangers (or more accurately, acquaintances of acquantances) but this doesn’t reflect how Chinese business relationships work. There may be similar differences in social relationships–where people may have a smaller, more intimate real-world network of friends and a larger, more anonymous online network of Internet acquaintances with similar interests/passions but no need or desire to tie their online persona to their real world identity. The sweet spot of Facebook and LinkedIn is around online “friends” and “connections” who like to share an online persona tied to their real world identity…this might not be what most Chinese netizens want.
4. Everything is China is more complicated than it initially appears! Caveat emptor.

Luyi reports that according to Ian Chin, president of Wealink, “Chinese social networks [are] still in a disappointing winless season. If it was not the success story of Facebook, the topic we covered on the stage would have been totally different one.” According to David Feng: “In the panel was an English-speaking panelist, who stated that China copying SNS sites such a Facebook was not the way to go. The panelist also went over SNS demographics, noting that SNS users in China tend to be older, and that the Chinese tend to be more conservative. However, while the Western world trusts strangers, the Chinese, though not confident of trusting others, do have the tendency to meddle with others.” Who was this?

John Kennedy’s live blogging highlights a couple interesting points. First of all, the CNbloggercon attendees were totally unrepresentative of the overall Chinese internet consumer population, with 90% usage of social networks, 75% usage of Facebook, and 35% of LinkedIn. However, no one from Myspace.cn, QQ, or Baidu Spaces was present at the conference. Secondly, the issue of privacy was brought up. Ian Chin, probably in reference to Geni, reflected on the difference between ‘the West’ and China. In the West, children begin drawing family trees in kindergarten vs. ancestral relationships being a heavily guarded secret here in China. (is this still true? I can see why it was true during the Cultural Revolution but if it is still true today, why?) From John: “Classic Chinese behavior, Ian says, is doing certain things in a certain degree of privacy, in such a matter that specific parties will now know for specific reasons (ie. buying flowers for a girlfriend, buying them at a previously unknown flower shop as opposed to the one your classmate or aunt runs).”

Thomas Crampton also touches on this issue of privacy: “Unlike the US and much of Europe, where blogs dominate, a good deal of China’s conversations - on brands and other topics - take place in bulletin board services that allow a slightly higher level of anonymity than blogs.” As I mentioned in my previous post on China microblogging, this issue of privacy is more complex than a direct causal result of fear of government “harmonization” and the oversight of the Net Nanny. He also makes some points about heavy internet usage continuing to be from internet cafes, but even this point requires more detail (see below).

Via Kaiser Kuo at Ogilvy Digital Watch, I found a super insightful article in the Dec. 24 issue of Newsweek Magazine entitled “These Surfers Do It Their Own Way.” Quoting from the article:

In many ways the big difference in China can be summed up in three words: instant mobile messaging. The low proportion of home PCs has made the mobile phone the preferred Internet-access device. And Chinese clearly prefer instant messaging-chatty, real-time communications that takes place via PC or cell phone-as opposed to ordinary e-mail, in which you never know when your correspondent might respond.

Kaiser adds: “instant messaging and SMS are effectively soaking up much of the demand in China for social networking.” Unlike the US which seems to be heading toward a Facebook social network singularity (the Kango Palo Alto office is about 50 meters from the Facebook cafeteria, so hard not to think that), the China market may be much more fragmented between BBS, IM/chat based communities, social applications based on SMS, collegiate social networks like Xiaonei, Zhanzuo, Hainei, and many other flavors of social applications.

Sources: photos from Avenger, 94Smart

I got the best insight from three posts: David Feng’s posts on the (now defunct) Blognation, John Kennedy’s live blog post on this panel, and Thomas Crampton’s follow on speculations on whether China will Twitter. Actually, I think David Feng’s coverage is the best starting place for the entire conference.

The panel included discussion of Twitter, Jiwai.de, FanFou, and Buboo.tw. Not mentioned were other microblogging players iLaodao and TaoTao (h/t to a Crampton commenter. Any others of note?). In another great post about Jiwai.de vs. Twitter, Feng asks, “How big is microblogging? Maybe not that big in China — remember, most of us here are a bit more reserved than the laowai lost in foreign lands. Views about microblogging are more on the side of ‘this invades my privacy’, ‘I’m not the kind of guy to tell the World I just had cucumber for lunch’ or ‘I’m so bored that I started microblogging!’” Frankly, I think these sentiments are valid in the US market as well and am not (currently) a big fan of microblogging, except for Facebook Status! Thomas Crampton weighs the positives of high mobile penetration, the lack of home computer access, and a preference for chat/IM over email, vs the negatives of different attitudes toward privacy. Crampton: “Chinese generally prefer semi-anonymous platforms like bulletin boards over blogs. This is due both to concerns about the government keeping tabs on who is saying what, but also due to a preference for staying a below the radar when making comments.”

I don’t think its a foregone conclusion that Twitter will be a mainstream standalone success even in the US. Microblogging can be a nice add on feature to your social network, like Facebook’s Status feature. Success will be driven by the need for people to have microblogging cut across multiple social networks and not be trapped inside of one. But I think that people will in general invest in only 1-2 general purpose social networking platforms (e.g. Facebook) and few will engage in massively parallel SNS participation like Scoble (who I think has some special powers of some sort…I subscribed to two people’s Twitterstreams–David Feng and Robert Scoble–and already feel overwhelmed).

The China specific issues that layer on top of this is really in the area of privacy. On the one hand, Chinese society expects much less personal privacy from vendors and the government. For example, in 2006 I talked to a co-founder of one major online marketplace in China who collaborated with the government to do real-time identity checks against the national (identification) database upon account setup! This allowed the marketplace to use National ID data as data enhancement on top of the profile data provided by the customer. The government was motivated to do so because of their desire to fight against online fraud and fake identities. In talking to some other companies in China, I discovered that the transfer of data from one entity (say a mobile provider) to another (say a bank) was much less regulated and required little consumer notification or permission. Another Chinese entrepreneur said “Chinese people will sell their personal data for one kuai!” since that data is already being sold by both reputable corporations and grey-market data vendors alike. But after reading the Microblogging coverage, I realize that there are more subtle differences between US and Chinese attitudes toward privacy. I want to understand this better.

The vague potential of government control may also enhance these differences in attitudes toward privacy. Ethan Zuckerman, co-founder of Global Voices Online, blogs about a Michael Anti (Zhao Jing) presentation at Harvard where Anti concludes “the Chinese internet has gone “back to the old years” and “we’re making social change using web 1.0, not using web 2.0″ with the emphasis on mailing lists, email, and chat rooms. Many Americans may see things in black and white, with a government intent on repressing freedom of speech and a population struggling to gain this freedom. But in fact, my sense as an outsider to China is that the free-speech activists are viewed by many Chinese as outside the mainstream, and government “harmonization” (I hate this term) and censorship is treated mixed feelings and some degree of reluctant acceptance as people proxy server their way to Wikipedia.

There are probably not direct implications on microblogging but the indirect implications is that all social media will evolve in a bit of a different way, with perhaps people taking on online personas that are not 100% linked to their real life persona, and therefore SNS and microblogging that is explicitly tied to your identity will be less popular or at least need to share the stage with other media that is more in control, more distributed, and more private, such as email, SMS, and mailing lists.

Perhaps there is a role for microblogging as an alternative to RSS feeds in a feedreader, and better for a mobile form factor. A few examples for people to check out on Jiwai.de is CWRblog, or on Twitter CWRblog, DavidFeng, or Scobleizer. Anyway I am a microblogging newbie and would be surprised if this becomes a habit for me.

Here is a cool slideshow with pictures from the Cnbloggercon event. Unfortunately it seems to break my template!

| View | Upload your own

Source:
Cnbloggercon Blog

Back in November, I had the same sentiment that Robert Scoble and Wang JianShuo had: I wish I was at Chinese Bloggercon. Fortunately, Min was able to go, shot some photos on the way there, and wrote up a summary (in English and Chinese) on what was most interesting at the conference. This is first part of a multi post series. (Yes, I know the event was two months ago!) On a separate post (because it is breaking my template for some reason) is a nice slideshare I found on the Cnbloggercon blog itself.

Getting Oriented
Four posts helped me get oriented, including Min’s Cnbloggercon summary. Jeremy Goldkorn of Danwei provides a great overview of the event, characterizing the conference of 400+ as “an eclectic gathering of geeks, Internet entrepreneurs, bloggers, social activists and NGO bloggers, teachers and educators, medium people and free speech advocates.” The collaborative and open attitude of the attendees is also complemented by “a continually-updated series of messages sent by mobile phone and IM via the servers of local Twitter clone Jiwai. This screen soon started resembling the comments section of a particularly anarchic blog…” Another journalist, Joshua Chin, decried this community aspect contributing to a attention deficit disorder conference, “I feel so 2.0, my attention so divided I’m incapable of sustaining a single thought for longer than it takes to say ‘wireless’.”Isaac Mao, one of the organizers, also reflects back to his goals of creating a highly participatory conference reflective of his ideas of Sharism and the emergent Social Brain. I’m not sure how I would feel about the twitterstream (or more correctly, the jiwaidestream).Rebecca MacKinnon expresses well her excitement for this “egalitarian” and completely volunteer run conference:

“The best conferences naturally have interesting speakers and panels, but they also serve as catalyst and focal point for community…Cnbloggercon is definitely that kind of conference.”

Photos from Min (aka Grigo) and the Flickr Cnbloggercon group tag also helped me get a better sense of the event.

Rebecca’s follow on coverage also contrasted two other conferences, the Orange Labs sponsored Web 2.0 conference and China Foo Camp. Despite the valiant efforts of the sponsors, Foo Camp was less well run than the volunteer driven CNBloggerCon and she “was surprised by the 1.0-ness of the main Saturday conference.” Tim O’Reilly’s own post entitled “On the Outside, Looking In” was insightful both in highlighting the difficulty of bridging between the Western blogosphere and Chinese blogosphere, as well as his own feelings of not being the consummate connector that he is in the US. But despite the difficulties, more efforts like this are needed. Rebecca: “But with the Chinese-language Internet soon to become the largest part of the global Internet, we badly need more bridges, more collaboration, more dialogue, and better understanding.”

There are so many interesting themes here. First, there is a lot of discussion about what it means to be “2.0″ vs. “1.0″. Second, there is also the sense of a community that is egalitarian, diverse, and grassroots. Third, that established multinationals like IBM and US kingmakers like O’Reilly can’t just expect to replicate their model and leverage their US contacts to be successful in China. I’ll summarize the rest of the conference in more parts. I hope this is a useful resource but more than anything else its helpful for me to get my head around what is going on in the Chinese blogosphere.

During 2007, I’ve been busy with Kango, a new travel review aggregator that collects reviews from across the web and uses semantic analysis to make it all searchable. Our goal is to help people make better travel decisions on where to go, where to stay, and what to do. I’m VP of Marketing and a founding seed investor in the company. We just launched our private beta, and was recently covered in VentureBeat, TechCrunch, GigaOm, WebWare, Jupiter’s Diane Clarkson, Jens Thraenhart, and HotelMarketing (and many others). We also received coverage in the Chinese blogosphere here, and here. This was a surprise as we had not given any thought to the Chinese market at all.

There is an incredible one-way mirror (technically a two-way mirror) effect in the world today. People (ok, educated elites) in China have a high degree of awareness about what is going on in the US. But most people (including educated elites) in the US have a low degree of awareness of China.

Our recent launch of Kango was a great example. Kango is 100% focused on the North American market but nevertheless we received some Chinese blogosphere coverage. On the other hand, I don’t really know what is going on in our space in China outside of Ctrip, Elong, and Qunar.

Min Guo, my CNReviews blog partner based in Shanghai, told me about YeeYan, which crowdsources volunteer translation from English to Chinese. But the flow of translation from Chinese to English is pretty small. Another one-way mirror.

There is a vibrant and diverse community of China blogs in English. Sites like Wangjianshuo, Danwei, Sexy Beijing, EastSouthWestNorth, Sinosplice, GlobalVoicesOnline, China Law Blog, RConversation and CWReview are just a few examples. But for those of us still learning the Chinese language, the visibility into the Chinese blogosphere and society is via a relatively small number of bridges like these.

The one-way mirror was especially clear when discussing popular culture. Last year, I spoke at length at dinner with a marketing director at a company that I was advising. The conversation turned to American TV shows, and she shared that she was an avid follower of Prison Break and Entourage. This was a “zen slap” of sudden realization for me–a typical Chinese professional in Beijing knowing more about US TV shows than an American professional (me) in Silicon Valley. Later, Min shared with me that she and her husband spend the entire National Day holiday in China watching Desperate Housewives! I mean, isn’t this show incredibly culturally specific? Another “zen slap” realization that the world knows America but America knows little about the world.

So Min and I decided to embark on doing some blogging to bring greater awareness in both directions. We’ll just launch into it without having a clear roadmap and see where it takes us! So what are you interested in?

UPDATE:  As I’ve been blogging, I have found that I need an outlet for posts that are just off-topic for CN Reviews.  So I just launched a new blog at ElliottNg.com.   Go there for my other random ramblings!