About China blogosphere, travel, and entrepreneurship

The 4th Chinese Blogger Conference is underway!  David Feng is liveblogging and livetweeting like mad in the back of the room.  Elliott is helping to edit and clean up the posts.  Here we go!

Michael Anti (安 替) is starting off things.  He said that this is first time at the blogger conference.  In his work, he does night shifts all the time.  He learnt different languages while doing reception at a hotel.  He met Wang Xiaobo. Thought of Wang as an idol.  When Wang Xiaobo passed away in 1997, this was a huge negative blow to Michael Anti.

The Chinese Internet first started in 1998.  Opportunity: also how this links into education. Everyone made an effort.  Mao himself also had just a basic education but seized opportunities.  Cultural Revolution resulted in a massive setback with many lost opportunities all gone.  But since 1978 education came back.  People that graduated especially since 1978 got many opportunities in Chinese society today.

However, 1989 turned things around.  There was distrust.

Wang Xiaobo passed away in 1997.  The Internet came only a year later.

There are some problems with the way mainstream media works in China.  Xinhua has a major role in shaping opinion.  And as long as you can express yourself well in the media, you get chances.  You work your way up the ladder, media-step-wise.

Since 2000, especially on the Web, there has been tremendous media liberalization in China.  There is indeed hope for the Chinese blogosphere.  A key question is: will blogs have professionalism or not?  Blogs could be considered as part of a free extension to the media.

In 2005 the blogwave hit China.  In 2006 forums flourished and can be considered an extension to blogs.

Note: comments on Zuosa Stream (ZSS):  “People search” (negative): if they find enough info about you, you will be hunted for (人肉).

Pluralism and sensible discussion is crucial.  Anti speaks out against censorship.  If we cannot express ourselves, and we still want to do a citizen society… something must give.

Two sites of note: www.yeeyan.com is one of them.

Another development is group blogs; no longer just one person doing the blogging

ZSS (Zuosa Stream): Anti’s speech a tad boring; will this speech get harmonized?

Lots of foreigners are translating Chinese things; Anti: we need to translate CN->EN. More liberals from CN.

(Appears that there is a question from @zuola. Talks about Taiwan’s econ growth in 1960s, 70s.)

Anti: if CN media develops in the same way it has in Taiwan, Anti won’t do media.  The media is too partisan in Taiwan.

ZSS: We’re on to media freedom. This is getting un-harmonious…

Anti is calling for the US-fication, now TW-nization, of the media.

Screen to the left has Zuosa stream, feed to the right is from FriendFeed.

Were we ready for our arrival at the inaugural @china20 tour? Ready or not, we dived head first into Day One with @wolfgroupasia hosting the show. David Wolf, here in the Jing for a great many years, made Day One all that more special.

With the Jing still very much just “a recent thing” for the great majority of us (especially those that don’t live in the capital, unlike your prolific tweeter), we were on our way to making more sense of the capital. Off the driver went through the avenues that made up the capital of China.

The minivan started off with a trip just south of Tian’anmen Square, passing next to the Great Hall of the People and just missing the Xinhua News Agency. The Beijing West Railway Station was next as we were reminded that this was a sub-optimally designed station that kept on submerging, even if just slightly. We next went past the CCTV transmission tower before floating (so to speak) just next to the Kunyu River before arriving at the Summer Palace.

In fact, just before we got to the Summer Palace, @shelisrael got into a lengthy conversation with David Wolf. David more than knew his stuff and was a total expert. The minivan nearly went mute, with everyone totally hooked into David Wolf’s insights.

Right immediately, we were captivated into the magic that was the Summer Palace. Or as I put it…

Obviously, this was Summer Palace 2.0. Tweets included.

@christinelu already noted that I was a tad too tall. But this time, @wolfgroupasia took top honors.

Sadly, even with three tall guys, we still didn’t remain together as a whole. Some of us were attracted to people painting Chinese characters on the streets (@shelisrael’s writing was more Chinese than you thought it to be!), while others were addicted to even more history with @wolfgroupasia. As a result, the crowd spread out like peanut better — to the extent that some of us got lost.

Things turned out really bad at the end. I was in the Long Corridor with @girk (Melissa Sconyers), winner of the Mashable contest, along with a few others. We kept looking all the way back for folks like @mbites and @SheilaS. No luck.

Oh well. We just kept on going straight ahead. In the end, we spread out too far apart. It was breathtaking — as in the gaps that split us. I was wondering where the rest of the crowd were.

Never mind @christinelu. She’s probably mass tweeting the whole thing — she’s just like me, I guess, except for she’s at the tail end when I’m tweeting up front.

We came to a halt right in front of the entrance to the temple inside the Summer Palace. Time wasn’t precisely on our side, though, so all of us shifted into reverse gear and went back. I had a nice chat with Christine on the way back, and she told us why @china20 came into being. A very noble, realistic and above all just outright good plan it was. Before long, I was with @girk again, with each one of us outdoing the other in terms of how many languages we could speak. Incredibly enough, she was walking with this moving telephone pole (clocking in at 1.91 m), so we dumped the rest of the crew in no time. Oh well.

The minivan eventually took us to lunch with @kaiserkuo, @fuzheado (Andrew Lih), and the rest of the gang.

Yunnan food it was. Spicy at times, but the thing was more than worthwhile, as the group split into two tables, each with its own resident Chinese expert. This was fitting as we were in Zhongguancun, Beijing’s best attempt at Silicon Valley. @kaiserkuo did the show from his table, while I joined @fuzheado in decrypting the Chinese Net for the rest of us.

Of note were:

• Media and game startups are bigger in Shanghai, but Beijing is more universally-centered
• Sina and Sohu are big portal players — they’re like the Yahoo! of China
• Andrew had a book about Wikipedia ready, out March 17, 2009
• Numbers play a part in Chinese domains as they sound like Chinese characters. An example would be 51jobs, where 51 sounded like “wo yao”, or “I Want” in Chinese
• Baidu is the big search engine in China; they grew as the government “helped them out a bit” (by censoring or even redirecting Google to Baidu)
• The average Chinese Netizen in the street will use Baidu, but the educated masses will do Google, so there exist different audiences
• Sina is so big that even government officers have emails at sina.com (on the vip.sina.com subdomain)
• QQ rules the IM world in China; MSN is in second. Everything else is nearly unheard-of or unused
• Only 30% of Chinese netizens do email on a daily basis; the vast majority IM via QQ or MSN

Lunch came, but not without a quick primer into Chinese business practises. All of this was relevant as in the afternoon we’d be in our first biz meeting — with Victor Koo, the guy in charge of Youku (think of it as the Chinese YouTube if you must).

Day -1 of China 2.0 got off to a relatively late start — but this wasn’t anything bad or anything. Rather it was just a case that folks were just flying in to get the thing started at 19:30, when the whole gang met at the hotel lobby.

And what a start — to conclude an already sunny day…

The evening was really a who’s who of not just the Chinese blogosphere, but of quite a bit of the blogosphere overall. @christinelu, @mbites, @kaiserkuo, @SheilaS, @dutchproblogger were just some of those newer names floating around, and Janet from the China Business Network also made it. We, of course, had some folks here early — including, of course, our very own @elliottng and @shelisrael (of course!), just to mention a few. (I’m sure we had a lot more!)

The dinner was pretty much what I can an “All You Can Eat-athon”. I started off with salad with French dressing, which — until the thing entered my mouth — I presumed was as good as the Swiss “real thing”. (Turns out it was a tad below expectations — but it was a healthy start no less.)

@kaiserkuo, @elliottng and @mbites got much of the chatter started, with Kaiser, of course, starting into many a Jing story and the landscape of the capital (in general). Most of note was the one-to-one meeting with Mike Butcher, who I’ve a lot of respect for. It was quite good conversing with a “native”, accent-wise; everyone else had a US accent, it seemed, so we were pretty much the only ones with a UK accent. I knew Mike Butcher from TechCrunch UK, and he’s pulling off great work there. Mike knew me around the end of 2007 to early 2008, when what used to be blognation China imploded and techblog86 got an early start.

The dinner was good, but it was the bit that came after that was totally unforgettable. The last time I did a foot massage (if ever!) was around 2005-ish, and even then I totally forgot how it felt. I thought it’d be an easy thing. No way.

Off we headed then. Liangzi Foot Massage just outside Jianguomen. In pretty much the dead of the night in the Jing.

Consider your own @DavidFeng an excessively prolific — and ticklish — tweeter. @shelisrael knew best.

First, three team captains picked who would be with whom. After two rounds, I landed in the same group with @mbites and Janet — a group of four in all. This was going to be the funniest group ever.

Every one of us started by having his or her leg totally scalded, it seemed. The water was nearly all black, so I feared I’d have my leg turn black afterwards, but apparently, all was well.

Next came the foot massage. This thing felt totally surreal as everyone was treated to random David Feng cries and excess yelling as the masseuse touched a sensitive spot — I kid you not, this thing was more sensitive than the Great Firewall or those banned Google search terms. The whole room exploded with peels of laughter as I cracked jokes — both in English and what appeared to be my best mimic of Beijinghua Chinese. (The masseuse loved this so much that she (a) begged me to be her boyfriend and (b) coaxed me to come back the next day, both of which were unfortunately refused.)

Finally came the shoulder massage. After 85 minutes of having my poor feet boiled, frozen and everything-in-betweened, the shoulder was next to get a right royal beating. Let’s just say that there were still a few cries as the guy smacked his fists in the wrong parts.

At the very end, though, everyone felt great.

And that would be a great start to Day 1 of China 2.0…

The morning started on a rather confused note…

You see, writing tweets just around 06:20 isn’t exactly what I’m good at. The first tweet featured me in semi-dormant mode. (The keyboard was proof.)

That’s because I was about to head off to a day with @shelisrael, @elliottng, @winserzhao, @yenlee and @JensThraenhart. I’ve probably been to the Great Wall too many times, but Mutianyu itself was a first for me.

Just too many foreigners are sardinized to the super-cliché part of the Great Wall at Badaling and Juyongguan than deemed healthy, so we decided to head on over to Mutianyu instead. Unfortunately, things seemed less than “isolated”: busloads of people were seen at Mutianyu — just as “bad” as Badaling. (Yours truly often does highway rides on roads with near-zero traffic, by the way.)

But hey, we had to head to the Great Wall after satisfying our tummies first, right? And where better than — well, outside the Huilongguan Line 13 Subway station, where @shelisrael and @JensThraenhart were downright adventurous — and fulfilled their call of alimentary duty with a mere USD 0.22 breakfast?

A far cry from the threat of instant hospitalization and horrible stomach kernel panics, the “Twenty-Two Cent Breakfast” actually turned out to be great. Fellow munchers (or munching tweeters, rather) noted that it was a great breakfast overall — price wasn’t a factor.

Eventually, we made it to the Great Wall. Just before getting off the minivan, our @elliottng linked up once again with the omnipresent-it-seemed @christinelu. Apparently, the “cheating” didn’t work; yours truly started mass tweeting on route, keeping @christinelu and Co well informed of what was happening with #china20 up in The Jing.

The climb to the Great Wall was challenging, but things got off to a cheated start (read on: there’s a reason why) as we faked ourselves up high thanks to this human invention called a “cable car”. The six of us were packed (not unlike the average Beijing Subway rush hour sardine car) into one car. Twice did I have to resort to the immortal “please get ready for your arrival” as the cable car touched in at the other end.

At this point, @shelisrael was probably too excited. Minutes after getting off the cable car, he tried to tweet to the world that he was now standing on the Great Wall of China. What an achievement. Unfortunately, this trick didn’t get pulled off that easily — the app decided to take a day off, dashing any hopes of “live tweet coverage” of Shel and the Wall.

The entire group covered nearly all of one half of the Mutianyu wall. Things weren’t easy. At times, there was a staircase with not even a barrier — so if you tweeted and fell into the thing, oh well. (You’ll probably not be able to tweet in hospital if things get serious.) There was also an unwritten Twitter ban when we made it up the last flight of “stairs” to the topmost outpost. But made it we finally did.

The Great Wall got its more mobile bits tested today as I started mass tweeting from the scene. The signal was great about 70% of the way through, but after that, the signal went blank. (Oddly enough, I could still send a tweet out by SMS at the top of the climb.) Coverage, obviously, was lacking for the bit beyond the “legal limit” — as in the “wild” or unrestored (as yet in full) part of the Great Wall.

The wild part was wild alright. It became next to impossible to finish this stretch — and the descent was truly scary. Every one of us that made it up there had to use the actual wall itself to do any mileage downhill — unless one of us wanted to slide down the whole thing.

And slide we did. Well, actually @shelisrael’s mineral water did the sliding. It was a terrifying sight, seeing Shel’s mineral water pop out, roll and crash land. Eventually we recovered it — and Shel finished the remaining bit of mineral water. Luckily, unpolluted and with no bits of the Great Wall in the water… Suffice it to say that all of us made it back down in one piece.

We were next treated to a fantastic lunch (this is not a “everything-must-be-good” Xinhua-ish report; this was a truly great lunch the way my tastebuds think of it). The food soon started filling up the whole table, and it was quite a sight seeing a mix of locals and foreigners devour the whole thing. We were the only “foreigner” group in the entire restaurant — and Shel and gang made for quite a sight for those Huairou locals.

Late afternoon saw some times of rest before the evening Tweetup began. @winserzhao did the magic in organizing the Tweetup.

The whole gang was here, it seemed. Beijing Twitter Queen, @sioksiok, was there as always, as was @pdenlinger, @awflasher, @poeloq, @moderntime, and many others. (If we forgot to mention you, carve your name in in our conveniently-placed Comments textarea!)

The weirdest thing yet that this Tweetup saw no real mass tweeting.

A dead m.twitter.com for yours truly’s mobile devices and a nonfunctional wifi network really got things rolling — offline, that is. The laughter (even the tears at one point), the good food, and the occasional SMS tweeting made the tweetup special –

– as remarked by @poeloq, but someone stole the whole show away:

The actor you’re seeing now is a real miracle in the making. She could easily flip her masks with a nod or a quick touch (it seems). There were about a dozen different masks she must have worn. It was an incredible show, and applause could be heard nearly uninterrupted at times.

Pity, though, that it lasted only about five minutes or so. But those five minutes were the most magical.

Mask-wise, that is. You want more magical moments? (And more tech moments too, we think.) They’re still to come on #china20. Stay tuned to CN Reviews!

The Jing. Beijing. I think @kaiserkuo pioneered the use of the term — and this thing has stuck with me. Afternoon. 15:20. Beijing Airport — Terminal 3.

I think my car zipped into Terminal 3 just minutes after Shel Israel’s (@shelisrael) UA flight touched down at the airport. The tweeting, lost since I just left home for a radio show recording earlier in the afternoon, promptly resumed. After waiting for Shel at the main exit for about 30 minutes, I shifted over to the Starbucks — as agreed. The tweeting started long before I headed for the Starbucks. It continued, only with greater momentum.

Just before 16:00, Shel dropped by the Starbucks. This was it.

This was something big for Shel — his first-ever trip to not just the Jing, but to the whole PRC. And this whole thing started at a Starbucks. What a homecoming for Shel. (I hear that cliché “home away from home” chime. Let’s just leave it at that.)

Interestingly enough, Shel made me aware that we pay more for our tea and coffee at Starbucks in the PRC than we pay State-side. This was never a David Feng issue. David Feng had been sipping away Short Earl Greys for the low price of CNY 12 since time immortal (can’t exactly remember when he stumbled upon the first Starbucks in the Chinese capital).

The econ talk shifted over, inevitably, to the Twitter chatter. Totally unbeknownst to me, I had managed to totally outtweet Shel. (At present, @christinelu and the @Scobleizer tweet more than I do, but let me make it clear that my mission is not to outtweet them with sub-optimal quality tweets or irrelevant / irreverent chatter about the Beijing Subway, long missed by quite a few.) I introduced him to my Twitter gang — Mainland China, Taiwan, the world over. The chatter went on for nearly an hour as Shel took particular note of my British accent.

(Oddly enough, I had just managed to fake an Aussie accent on radio merely hours earlier.)

The talk went on and on, but evidently, we weren’t going to spend our night at a Starbucks. We moved slowly to the car park where I had parked my car. On the way we saw just how big this T3 thingy could be. I reminded Shel that my first visit to T3 — on the day of its opening (February 29, 2008 for those keeping count) was just — with my mouth wide open as I marvelled for the first 30 minutes. It had come to set a first impression for the trip: Beijing, and China at that, was all about being big.

We made our way across the car park to my car. We zipped through the 2nd Airport Freeway, where we saw more and more of urban Beijing come into view. We had a bit of traditional architecture to start the tour — Shel promptly spotted the Red Sandalwood Museum just inside the eastern 5th Ring Road as we went on the Jingtong Expressway into central Beijing. Then, it was onto a very new, and a very modern, Beijing.

Ten minutes before reaching the hotel, Tower 3 of the China World Trade Tower started things up, and a few minutes later, the massive CCTV Big Shorts made its presence felt as the car zipped just past it. The Jing was becoming reality for Shel as our talk shifted into all different aspects.

Before long, Shel’s hotel loomed large and clear. Getting to the thing, though, was less than easy. The hotel was inconveniently located at the wrong side of the 2nd Ring Road, and it took a near 360° turn on Jianguomen Bridge to get us in the right position. Once we were there, we started missing crossings as I was just too hooked into telling Shel all about the Jing. Our Jing, it seemed, and the Jing for every last soul in the city. Not unexpectedly, Shel was informed that the closest Subway station was Jianguomen — a convenient (but not so once you’re deep underground, thanks to crazy interchange designs) interchange between the west-east Line 1 and the round-it-goes-in-circles Line 2.

Getting to the hotel itself was a challenge. I had no idea the hotel entrance was so — well, in fact, easy to find. (I thought it was through one of those crazy back doors — thanks to too much rides to dayuan complexes where finding the entrance proved to be harder than algebra to the average toddler.) It’s true that I’ve done 250,000 km+ by car in the Jing and just slightly less by Subway, but Dongbianmen and the nearby Beijing Railway Station still remains a “less lighted-up spot” to David Feng. As we made ourselves to loopy U-turn islands (thanks to less-than-ideal Beijing traffic management practises, where you had to continue ahead, turn right, U-turn and turn left again at a crossing where left turns and U-turns were banned), Georg Godula gave us a call. I blasted off with Georg in Swiss-German, positively overwhelming him and Christine Lu nearby (I guess). Shel was in direct contact with Georg and Christine as I took a wrong turning and reversed my way out of a crazy, dead-end Beijing hutong. The adventure had just begun.

Thanks to this thing called Twitter, @christinelu spilled the beans.

@thijsjacobs was totally shocked — he apparently knew me as a Subway kind of guy who also felt his way across every single new road that opened its doors to motorists in the Jing. But, oh well, as I remarked, there do occur cases where the Sun rises in the west — where the unexpected happened. Thankfully, we managed to find our way to the hotel — but not without a minor traffic offense: I drove (totally unbeknownst it seemed) on the bus lane. Not a big deal though — no cops — and we finally made it to the hotel.

Tomorrow it is then for a trip to the Great Wall at Mutianyu. I’m really looking forward to the whole China 2.0 thing. And with people as nice as Shel, we couldn’t have asked for a better start.

(Yes, even with the crazy driving. And the jokes Shel cracked.) ;-P

On CNReviews, we showcase the best, the most innovative, and the most interesting debate about the Chinese Web 2.0 as the week draws to a close…

This week has been the first “real” week after the October Break, which this year was moved ahead two days to start September 29, 2008. We’re starting out with some of the most known tech-related sites in China; we’ll expand our view a tad later on and help shine spotlights on some of the lesser known sites that have interesting views to share…

Kaiser Kuo’s Digital Watch

Probably one of the most notable and Must-Keep-Your-Eyes-On-This tech blogs in the PRC is that from Kaiser Kuo. The bilingual Digital Watch posted quite a number of interesting posts throughout the past week…

• The US markets have plummeted beyond recognition, and the very same can be said for much of the world’s economy, so there’s a post about how the downturn will impact China’s Internet sector. Kaiser spoke with David Wolf of Wolf Group Asia. Funding is expected to get tight, but at the same time, local VCs with RMB-denominated funds could really jump into the limelight.

The DF (David Feng) Take: I chatted with my best friend in Singapore just days ago, and the consensus is that the world economy has taken a hell of a beating. China is likely to face less impact, though, as its economy is not exactly USA II (either in terms of policy, or “opennness”, or the somewhat-convertible Renminbi Yuan). However, bits and pieces of the PRC economically connected with the US on a larger scale will likely get hit — quite a number of export factories around Guangzhou and Shenzhen have apparently felt the punch.

As an entrepreneur-to-be (I do, after all, want to start my own company), the thing that gets you out of the starting gate is MONEY. The CNY still buys less than the USD if you’re looking at the whole thing on a “How-Much-Is-This-Dollar-Worth-In-Terms-Of-Actual-Renminbi” basis (as in USD 1 = approx. CNY 6.8 or something like that), but the Renminbi is the currency of the future. It will appreciate. Money from any (legit!) source is what gets your company out of the starting gate. If I had to start a company the next second, I’ll look for both local and global players to get the money in — never discount the local VCs!

The Mobinode

• Gang Lu’s excellent (and equally bilingual) The Mobinode tells of the imminent inaugural Open Web Asia 08 Conference. There’s a 10% discount (if you act really quick — they could’ve already disappeared…)

The DF Take: If it wasn’t for the fact that I’ve commitments in Beijing that have more than implanted me here, I’d have flown over to South Korea in no time. I wish the inaugural Open Web Asia 08 Conference nothing but the best, and am confident that they’ll do more than well. I hear that @loiclemeur’s headed to Seoul.

China Web 2.0 Review

China Web 2.0 Review, written mainly by Tangos Chan, but also by others of note, has been tracking the next-generation Web in China for quite a while and is worth a read.

• BlogBus is about to launch an SNS service — this is of note as Blogbus is a relatively well-established blog provider based in Shanghai. 100 users have been invited to test the new SNS service. Also of interest: the new SNS will not have games such as “Friends for Sale”. The report rounds up saying:

2008 will be marked as a year of SNS in China, but most of those social networking sites look similar. Can Blogbus bring some surprises to us?

Well said, Tangos. The PRC web needs more innovation and less imitation.

The DF Take: First of, I’m really pleased that the new SNS will not have pointless (the way I see it). Second of all, this is going to be a brave new step for an established blog provider.

Just before this post went to press the Internet, I heard by way of a few tweets that China Unicom may also have did its own SNS thing. There’s nothing wrong with SNSs — and do note that the Chinese as a whole are more group-oriented than individualistic — but doing 1.3 billion SNS services pushes the whole thing to saturation point. Things will eventually happen — and for some, it won’t be all that good.

• Also of note: Don’t Just Talk At Me, Talk With Me — two video clips about how to be newly successful in China’s changing branding environment.

Not enough on the previous go?  I thought so, but hey, writing a million-word post is probably not the best thing out there. The average attention span for the average human being is more along the lines of — something like two minutes.

And that’s why we need to start chopping things into chunks.

Now on with the show… a look at the rest of the year 2008… (or what we’ve had so far…)

A Freer Internet With Less Walls

You know the funniest stuff about the whole Internet thing in China as the Olympics drew close? We started hear less and less from the Great Firewall!

太阳从西边升起… (tai yang cong xi bian sheng qi; Chinese for “And the Sun will rise from the West”) …this was, in essence, the mood on the Chinese Internet. Auntie Beeb news — wall gone.

The blocks were soon lifted on the Chinese Wikipedia, ET Today (from ETTV Media Taiwan), and even on the — get this — Kuomintang’s website! All of a sudden, the blocks were gone.

But not in full. Falun Gong-related sites were still blocked. And websites that were shut down in mainland China domestically were gone from the public eye. But for a lot of us, the unblocking of the BBC and the Chinese Wikipedia were already big things. (They still remain unblocked to this very day as we write this.)

#080808: @flypig & Co Start A Classic

Nothing is more of a classic — or was more of a classic — than the #080808 invention just before the Beijing Olympics. While it was a bit too “obvious” that @flypig came up with the invention, others did come up with the very number as well, and thus to call @flypig the “sole inventor” is surely a tad on the unfair side.

The Chinese Twittersphere went completely crazy with #080808. #080808 found itself in many a tweet and, indeed, in many a Twitter icon. If “Chinese reunification” were to be attempted, #080808 would be the first unifier, as tweeters from both side of the Taiwan Straits went mad #080808-ing.

@flypig and Co’s invention were good enough to land themselves airtime in the New York Times. This is the Chinese Twittersphere in full force, and what a job they did.

Post-Olympics & Paralympics, What’s Next?

So the Games came and went. What’s next at the Olympics and Paralympics end? Here’s a more recent recap of what’s big on the Chinese Twittersphere:

• Chrome: When Google Chrome came out, the Chinese Twittersphere almost immediately reacted. Some of us went crazy downloading Chrome (while those on Macs presumably had to sit out and wait). Views were mixed — however, one of the more un-good piece of news was that Chrome for China was still unavailable (it was pretty much a case of an English-language-only case of the browser).

• New Twitter interface: @flypig famously remarked that this was nothing too new — “I’m convinced the new Twitter interface is merely a case of changing the soup, not changing the medicine.” On a more personal note, yours truly is just getting used to the fact that tabs are on the right — you see, almost everything he uses has tabs on the top.

• Sanlu: Sanlu got itself a whole load of trouble when its milk got tainted with poison. The Chinese Twittersphere took Sanlu to task, and when it was heard that all (or nearly all) Chinese milk producers were hit, talks of boycotts and “don’t-buy-Sanlu” rhetoric were all the rage. Jokes about Sanlu were also part of the fever. Finally, news proclaming Sanyuan’s takeover of the now-tainted Sanlu prompted calls to boycott Sanyuan, hitherto the only “clean” brand.

Closing Notes from @DavidFeng: Watch the Balance

Being a mass tweeter, I often spend too much time in Twitter — it’s only as of late that I’m moving back to my blog Raccolta Online, which served like a propaganda ghost town prior to the mass personal blogging beginning earlier this month.

I’m also appearing on Facebook more and more frequently. Those are good moves. Web 2.0 should not only be about Twitter and/or Facebook. There should be more to this.

Watch the balance is my word of the day. By all means, tweet like mad — but if you’re just having accounts on Facebook and other Web 2.0 sites “for the heck of it”, you’re missing out on a lot.

You may have noticed a recent reduction in my otherwise uncontrollable tweeting. Think of it this way: after dumping a huge chunk of butter on the bread, I’m finally spreading it thin throughout the whole thing. Facebook… blogs… it’s good to do multi Web 2.0 sites.

Just maybe not too much…

It’s just about two months before the Chinese Blogger Conference 2008 is reality — I’m already thinking of making a second trip back (last year was my first). Since that 2007 conf in Beijing (which was really close to where I lived), the Chinese Internet has changed quite a bit.

Ten months. Maybe not the best time for a Year in Review. Or maybe, a Year-Minus-Two-Months in Review. (They told me to lay off slashes in conversation, but they never said anything about dashes)…

Start of the Year: The Whales That Failed To Tweet

At the start of the year, it was obvious that Twitter was on the way up. Even if it was the Chinese Twitter, Jiwai.de, that had stolen the spotlight at the Chinese Blogger Conference in 2007, Twitter took significant leads in 2008 as its popularity continued to explode.

Of particular note was when @christinelu “did her magic” to get @goldkorn (of @danwei fame) tweeting. This was not the kind of thing a mere mortal could do. In the meantime, we got, by way of Twitter, news about Beijing gearing up for the Games, the occasional “must-check-this-out” link, but also, to some extents, more sightings of the infamous or even, at that, notorious Twitter whale. You know — the thing that comes up when Twitter’s on its last legs.

Sightings of the whale became disturbingly regular in April and May 2007, as even my occasional Subway tweets were fed to the whale. The semi-crippling of Twitter for WWDC 2008, it seemed, got Twitter through the worst (@TechCrunch was watching you), and apparently, since early summer 2008, we’ve seen less and less of the whale.

(Now that I posted this, though, we’re sure to see the thing back. I should have never posted this…)

Lhasa Riots + Clipped Photos = CNN Gets Taken To Task

When violence broke out in Lhasa, fellow tweeters were immediately informed of this. The Chinese media, for the first time, broke with precedent and showed “controversial content” that previously could not be shown — such as (in particular) the Tibetan flag and actual violent scenes.

Chinese central television continued to blame what they called the “Dalai Lama clique” for the unrest. Yet in an interesting twist to the story, Netizens discovered that western media organizations (notably CNN) appeared to have clipped photos to distort the facts. An anti-cnn.com site went up and was all the rage. People posted those pics across Facebook and took CNN to task. Jack Cafferty apparently insulting the Chinese — either the government or the people — proved to be the last straw, making both civilians and the Chinese government furious.

This was not the way to get into action in the final 100 days to the Olympics. Smear campaign, bad timing, whatever; even in “far-away” Beijing, things turned out to be not all that “harmonious”.

May 12, 2008: When The Earth Shook

The whole situation in Tibet was spiralling out of control. It looked like things couldn’t get worse.

Turns out it did.

At 14:28 on May 12, 2008, a massive, 7.9-magnitude shook Wenchuan, Sichuan, first burying schools, then causing a whole series of aftershocks. The death toll climbed to 70,000 (missing 17,000+). This was the worst quake since Tangshan, and the fact that the epicenter was pretty close to the ground made the whole thing a lot worse.

The Net was immediately abuzz with pictures of frogs crossing the street. In an interesting spin, local media reportedly reported (pardon the pun) that these frogs, scrambling for their lives, appeared to be “normal”. A cover-up, it seemed, may have been underway before the earth shook. YouTube also showed movies of what could have very well been earthquake lights.

The reaction from Zhongnanhai was almost instantaneous. Wen Jiabao rushed to the region, followed by Hu Jintao a few days later. In memory of those who died in the quake, and for the first time in PRC history (due to natural disasters), flags were lowered to half-mast from May 19 through to May 21, 2008, during the national period of mourning.

The Chinese Web immediately reacted to all this. Web sites in China went grey or black-and-white during the three days of mourning. Even sites like the Beijing Subway fan forum went grey; network maps, once a joyous mix of orange, green and aqua, went grey. Entertainment sites were sealed for 72 hours.

The Twittersphere observed three minutes of silence from 14:28 through to 14:31 as the Internet world appeared to stand still. Search engines recorded a massive drop in search requests during these three minutes. The effects of the quake and its aftermath were felt across the nation, and across the Internet. Even before and after the three minutes, Chinese tweeters turned themselves grey, or black-and-white; yours truly went totally black.

Outside in the “real world”, cars stood still and horns and sirens sounded at 14:28. Radio announcers were full of emotion — the kind that jerked tears from many a listener. People who were totally unaffected by the quake burst spontaneously into tears as the sheer force of a nation coming to a complete full stop at 14:28, to the sound of wailing sirens and car horns, was too much to bear. Even the platform TV screen on the Beijing Subway’s Line 5 service, which used to announce when the next train was about to come, went black. Flags across the PRC were at half-staff. Newspapers turned totally black to mourn those who lost their lives in this tragic quake. Museum guides prefaced every tour with a note of the quake.

Socials Through The First Half of 2008

Yet despite the tensions in Tibet and the tremors in Sichuan, the Chinese Web 2.0 world continued — and feasted through the first six months. Yours truly, along with @sioksiok, co-hosted a number of Beijing Tweetups (and they’re about to make a comeback). The tweetups were incredibly good opportunities to get to meet the people behind the tweeting, to share a few good pics and laughs, and just, all in all, to have a good time. Some people, though, started tweeting during the tweetups — which could be little short of just an amazing practise.

Also of note was the CHINICT meeting in May 2008, which brought together noted Web 2.0 bigs in the Chinese blogosphere. The meetup co-organized by sites and groups including CN Reviews at the Loong Bar, in particular, proved to be a fantastic chance to meet Web 2.0 key leaders and players. Also, meeting people while subscribing to their Twitter feeds turned out to be a good thing (on a personal note, though, it’s just “too bad” that yours truly turns out to be too prolific, thereby drowning out the conversation).

You know what? There’s too much that happened in the ten months leading to this year’s Chinese Blogger Conference. We smell a sequel.

Think the games are confined to the Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube? Well think again, outside of China the Olympics might be confined to your TV set or your computer screen, but not so here in Beijing. Let’s move out into the streets.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on which side of the fence you stand upon), even miles away from the Olympic Green, the Games are still very much a part of life for Beijingers.

Want proof? 16 pictures — will that do?

Beijing Subway: Olympic Mania

Yours truly’s second home (a mobile one at that), the Beijing Subway, has been successfully brainwashed into Olympic Mode. In many a Subway station, you see this:

The whole thing gets scarier when you approach the station at platform level: Actually, it gets scariest at busy stations, where whole crowds assemble and watch the Games. Sudden yelps of sheer joy (or, if it’s a soccer game, shouts of sheer anger), are suddenly here and there. It’s no rocket science, we guess…Above Underground LevelWant to escape the underground world for a bit non-Olympic Beijing? Above ground, it’s just as Olympic as underground:
  Even outside major corporations and even government buildings, the atmosphere is still very much Beijing 2008 Outside Central Beijing Outside central Beijing, the slogans still have it that this is one heckuvan Olympics City. Unfortunately, I couldn’t exactly pull of the trick of shooting photos while driving, so I’ll leave you with just one pic I took when the car was pretty much still: This is in Huairou, about 40 to 50 miles northeast of central Beijing. Even here, though, Beijing is still in Olympic fever. One More Thing Yes, your eyes are not deceiving you. That’s the back of a ticket to the Olympic Games!

OK, maybe not a full-blown meme yet, but look at this:

Notice something that you’ve seen about four times in these seven tweets? The string #080808.Thanks to the efforts of @flypig (of Chinese Twittersphere fame), the #080808 tag campaign is well underway. Everyone’s going crazy with sticking in the #080808 icon or sticking a photo of them going “#080808“!Check out some of the cooler ones we’ve seen from…

• @thecarol (the original)
• @evilape (neat)
• @christinelu (saw hers after @thecarol)
• @isaac (self-harmonization?)

Yours truly actually came out with a very David Feng, and at that, a very Beijing Subway version:

Subway Line #080808? Please get ready for your arrival!Here’s how to take part in the whole thing:1. Nab an icon. Some are at http://tag080808.com/
2. Add “#080808″ to all your tweets
3. That’s it!

This is the third time that the Chinese-language Twittersphere has gone in a “Twitter movement”. It started earlier this year when people started rooting for the Chinese Taipei team, then spread throughout all of China when the earthquake hit on May 12, and finally, everyone is getting ready for Olympics mood.

#080808 away!

UPDATE from Elliott:  Contributor Meg Stivison added her own thoughts on us meme-sheep (a pretty cool meme-related-meta-meme) and her own version of #080808 straight from the town of Hohhot (in the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region, 内蒙古, Nèi Měnggǔ):

Photo courtesy Meg Stivison, Simpson’s Paradox