About China blogosphere, travel, and entrepreneurship

An interesting conversation unfolded on Meg’s blog post about China Visa problems. Commenter CnInDC offered a well-argued explanation of the root cause of work visa limitations in both countries.

But one thing he (or she) shared helped me understand the feelings that some Chinese people must have:

I agree that the current visa “crackdown” was caused by security concerns about the Olympics. If you watch news in China you’ve probably already noticed that the China’s domestic Olympic propaganda has been dramatically toned down from wanting a most successful Olympic to a merely safe one. The reality is there, that a most successful Olympic is already beyond our reach. The people they wanted to impress the most, the western media and the general public from the western countries, are impossible to please. So they go for the next best one, that at least it’s safe, no ugly scenes (or at least not a major one), and the Chinese can enjoy the party all by themselves. I’ve heard this before from the Chinese people around me and think it may have a point: “大不了办成全运会”, or, “At least we can turn this into a national sports event”.

Photos from my visit to see the Good Luck Games in May:

It reminded me of this poem entitled “My Friends, What Do You Want From Us” I saw earlier in April on China Digital Times (also on China Herald) from cbc forums via C’est la vie blog:

What do you want from us?

When we were called “sick man of Asia”, we were called peril.
When we billed to be the next superpower, we’re called the threat

When we closed our doors, you smuggled drugs to open markets.
when we embrace free trade, you blame us for taking away your jobs.

when we’re falling apart, you marched in your troops and wanted your fair share.
when we’re putting the broken pieces together, “Free Tibet” you screamed! “it was invasion.”

So we tried communism, you hated us for being communist.
So we embraced capitalism, you hate us for being capitalist,

Then we have a billion people, you said we’re destroying the planet.
Then we limit our numbers, you said it was human rights abuses.

When we were poor, you think we’re dogs,
When we loan you cash, you blamed us for your debts.

When we build our industries, you called us polluters.
When we sell you goods, you blamed us for global warming,
When we buy oil, you called that exploitation and genocide.

When we were lost in chaos and rampage, you wanted rule s of laws for us.
When we uphold law and order against violence, you called that violation of human rights.

When we were silent, you said you want us to have free speech.
When we were silent no more, you say we were brainwashed.

Why do you hate us so much? We asked. “No”. You answered, “we don’t hate you”.
We don’t hate you either Bud, do you understand us?? “of course we do”, you said, “We have CNN, BBC, and CBC”.

But why, we still feel, your western people are not happy with us.

What do you really want from us??

My friend, What do you really want from us??

There is plenty of angry rhetoric from people who take extremist political positions on China on the China Digital Times post. There is also some extremely thoughtful points there too. Please read that comment thread first before posting some extreme rant (either highly critical of China or highly defensive against perceived criticism of China) that has already been said over there.

I propose we just take the time to try to understand the feeling expressed in the poem above and figure out how we can all take this feeling into account in our behavior with each other.

(Why am I posting this? I figured this poem would be hard to find in the future and wanted to just capture it on the blog where I know I could find it)

Beijing Airport Express (机场快轨; jichang kuaigui) opens up to the public today at 14:00. CNReviews reported on the Beijing Airport Express back on 6/27, when the inservice date was originally 7/1, but the launch date has been in flux ever since.

Photo courtesy of Beijingology

This news was first reported to the Anglophone world on Twitter by our fearless correspondent David Feng:

News on the opening is also on China Daily, and Sohu (zh). According to David on Beijing A to B, the fare will be RMB25. According to David on Beijingology:

The line will have only four stops along the entire line. There will be two stops in central Beijing — Dongzhimen and Sanyuanqiao — with the two remaining stops at Beijing Capital International Airport. The Airport Express reaches Terminal 3 before reaching Terminal 2; passengers for Terminal 1 need to use the transfer passageway at Terminal 2.

Service intervals are expected to be 5 minutes at the start, with the entire trip taking around 18 minutes (Terminal 3) or 25 minutes (Terminal 2).

The new subway line will be a driverless system.

The Airport Express will feed into the overall Beijing Subway system at Dongzhimen (interchange with Subway Line 2 and 13) and Sanyuanqiao (interchange with Subway Line 10). The Line 10 interchange is especially exciting because it provides one-transfer access to Beijing’s CBD and to Beijing’s Haidian high-tech district. For a high-tech entrepreneur traveling to Beijing, this is transit nirvana!

Here’s a video of an earlier test run I found on YouTube:

More on this live from David Feng once he recovers from staying up all night waiting for the Beijing Apple Store Sanlitun to open up!

David Feng chimes in with the following first-day travel experience:

I think it’s been like this for — let me think — the best part of 58 years since Beijing Airport entered the real world. The old brown terminal, Terminal 1, Terminal 2, and now Terminal 3. For too long, Beijing Airport was just a road-and-air biz. No trains. No way.

Enter the airport on and after 14:00 on July 19, 2008.

When the guys that built Terminal 2 got their hands dirty with the construction work, they left virtually zero space for a Subway connection — hence making the Terminal 2 something like an add-on. The thing’s not big, by the way: only one side platform. (To make it up, though, it has probably one of the widest side platforms ever.)

When the guys that built Terminal 3 got into action, however, they left the new T3 (as we call it in shorthand) with a glitzy new Airport Express terminal connection, with platform screen doors, faregates (later installed), and just about everything that plain shouts at you METRO STATION. Except for one thing.

The train.

Oh yes — the train. Flashback forward to July 19th — and to the new Airport Express service.

The new Airport Express links Beijing with the airport — and by that, we mean really quickly. This is a four-stops-only biz: two stations in central Beijing, two on at the airport. I got onto the train at Sanyuanqiao, which is the second stop; I hailed from the Line 10 interchange. (The transfer passage, by the way, was so short that it seemed nonexistent.) I tapped in with my Beijing Super Pass (I think I was the only one; other got Single Journey Tickets for the line), and waited for the train, sure not to miss it. (If you miss your train, by the way, you’re treated to an excruciating wait of 15 more minutes before a 4-car Airport Express heads your way. 2017 plans call for gaps of 4 minutes only between trains. We sure hope they start shortening the gaps — soon.)

The train wasn’t exactly smooth — even with semi-autopilot on, the train behaved at best like a boat going through sorta-rough waters. (The “vomit-inducing”, as I later noted, weather outside — the heavens threatening to open up — made the trip that bit more miserable.)

However, the trip was pleasant for one thing: you got a seat. Imagine standing (like you do on main line Subway lines) for 15-odd minutes. (A repeat trip today saw me getting productive on the road — I pulled out the MacBook and got online while mobile. By the way, I cheated — a la GPRS. No wifi on the Airport Express — yet.)

Also, one of the best things about the Airport Express is that they run to an invisible schedule — 15 minutes as we have it. The gaps are uniform from the first train to the very last one. Little wonder, then, that when I finished my bit of Yoshinoya at T3, I was able to head back to central Beijing — in good time.

The Airport Express is a “good thing”, but here’s what they could’ve done (or, indeed, could do — remember, there’s plenty of room for improvement coming down the road) to make the thing better:

• Shorten the gaps between one train and the other.
• Add a station near Dashanzi/Wangjing East. (It won’t kill you, by the way; Line 14 is expected to snake its way across the region.)
• Add wifi to the thing and either make it free or affordable. (Wifi on the Heathrow Express is about GPB 5 — OK in the UK, but bloody murder in Renminbi Yuan.)
• Make the thing smoother. Make the thing more quiet.
• Finally, make all faregates super-wide. (About 30% - 40% of the faregates are — a massive improvement over what they have on downtown Subway lines.)

For Day One, though, good stuff!

CNReviews was invited to attend the media preview event of the Apple Store Sanlitun today. David Feng of CNReviews (who is also from TechHub86 - techblog86 and BeiMac) was able to attend. In these pictures exclusive to CN Reviews and TechHub86, we can see the opening of the first-ever Apple Store for all of Greater China.

Apple4.us (h/t Flypig on twitter) has some great photos from the event:

More photos at Apple4.us.

Also on Twitter, Stephen Schwankert aka @chinabuzz (who’s day job is China Correspondent for IDG News Service) remarked on Twitter that “our new best friend: John Ford, Sanlitun Apple Store manager“.

UPDATE: Stephen (aka @chinabuzz) posted more details at PCWorld:

This is the first of many stores we will open in China,” said Ron Johnson, Apple’s senior vice president of retail, in remarks at the store. He later added that Apple will open stores “in Beijing, in Shanghai and beyond,” and confirmed that another store will open in Beijing’s Qianmen area, a shopping street south of Tiananmen Square that has been renovated ahead of the Olympic Games, which begin next month.

UPDATE: More great photos from Apple4.us on a new post:

Thanks again to Amy Barney of Apple Computer for the invite.

The store will opening on July 19, 2008 at 10:00 (reported by David Feng at TechBlog86).

invite courtesy of TechBlog86.

If you have a foreign bank account, foreign currency account, and are a U.S. person, you need to have reported those accounts by June 30, according to this reminder IRS press release (dated 6/17). As you can infer from the date of this post, I blew it and now have to beg for mercy from the Department of the Treasury and IRS.

Dear Department of Treasury, I beg for your mercy.

I now endeavor to help others not make this same mistake by providing some FAQs on the process of submitting the appropriately named FBAR (Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts) form.

But first, some background on how I lost faith in the U.S. dollar

Image courtesy of Freaking News

• On 3/20 I posted about the new CNY exchange traded notes announced by Morgan Stanley & Van Eck Global on 3/17, as a way of hedging RMB appreciation.
• By 3/30 this year, I concluded that RMB appreciation was inexorable and might even require a “one-off maxi-revaluation” to stem speculative inflows.
• On 4/2, I posted about the decline of the US dollar’s reserve currency status as another contributing factor toward USD/RMB exchange rate.
• On 4/11, I posted that I exchanged USD for RMB at the rate of 6.9835 into my China Merchants Bank account, and that I had established an Everbank RMB account (in the US) at 6.9544. On 4/10 the central parity rate was set at 6.992.
• On 7/11, Xinhua announced that the central parity rate of the RMB was set at 6.8397 (see China Foreign Exchange Trading System website Chinamoney.com.cn (zh) for more info). So the RMB has appreciated by 2.2% in 3 months, or a 9.2% annualized appreciation rate. So clearly, putting all my spare cash in RMB (even in the 0% interest Everbank WorldCurrency Access Deposit account) is a no brainer.

USD-RMB exchange rate chart, 2008. See a pattern?

Source: Yahoo! Finance

Now back to the FBAR. I choose to pronounce this “fubar” which has another meaning in English.

Q: Who needs to file the FBAR (Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts)? I mean, I really don’t have a lot of money abroad.

A: If you have a foreign account, and the value of that account exceeds $10,000, you need to file a FBAR. More at IRS.gov here.

Q: Is this part of my Federal Tax Return? Can I get an extension?

A: No and no, that would be too easy and too obvious. According to the IRS:

The FBAR is not to be filed with the filer’s Federal income tax return. The granting, by IRS, of an extension to file Federal income tax returns does not extend the due date for filing an FBAR. There is no extension available for filing the FBAR. Account holders who do not comply with the FBAR reporting requirements may be subject to civil penalties, criminal penalties, or both.

Q: Umm, how was I supposed to know about this?

A: Well did you monitor the press releases on the IRS website? The IRS published a press release IR-2008-79 on June 17 specifically to remind taxpayers to report certain foreign bank and financial accounts by June 30. An interesting fact from the press release:

Since 2000, the number of Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts (FBAR) forms received by the Treasury has increased by nearly 85 percent, from 174,528 in 2000 to 322,414 in 2007. Despite this significant increase in filings, concern remains about the degree of reporting compliance for those who are required to file.

Only 322,414 were received in 2007, and I’m sure that there isn’t 100% compliance with this requirement. But even then, it seems like a very small number of U.S. persons actually have a foreign account.

Q: What’s the deadline again?

A: June 30, 2008 for the 2007 calendar year. Yes, if you haven’t done this already, you are delinquent.

Q: OK, what form do I use?

A: Form TD F 90-22.1 (pdf) located on the IRS website. If you only have 1 account, its less than 1 page long.

Q: Where do I send it?

A: Don’t send it to where you send your normal tax returns. According to the IRS, you should send it here:

U.S. Department of the Treasury
P.O. Box 32621
Detroit, MI 48232-0621

Q: No offense, but I don’t trust anything in the blogosphere these days! Where can I get the official information?

A: Yes, in general, don’t trust bloggers for legal, tax and compliance information unless they happen to be licensed professionals in the right field. So go get the real deal here:

• IRS FAQ on Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts (FBAR)
• IRS copy of Form TD F 90-22.1 (pdf)
• email the IRS: FBARquestions@irs.gov
• call the IRS at (800) 829-3676

Q: Why do I have to do this?

A: This seems to be under the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), an agency of the US Department of Treasury. It seems partially motivated by tax compliance and partially motivated by addressing money laundering for drug trafficing and terrorist activity.

Fellow bloggers: how do you measure success with your blog?

Bloggers and metrics: I’ll show my stats if you show me yours.

Some of my most fun meetups in China were with passionate bloggers lik38e Aw Guo Qirui (Awflasher (zh), Ifgogo) and Paul Denlinger (China Vortex). Some of those meetings I would characterize as “I’ll show you mine (stats) if you show me yours.” LOL. Apologize in advance for the self-referential 自恋 (narcissism…or is it 自我自恋?) inherent in this post.
Aw and Lisa were nice enough to pick me up at the Beijing Airport. But first thing Aw did when I got to my hotel was crack open his laptop to compare blog stats! Funny. But this turned out to be a blogger bonding moment. When Aw Guo talked about his focus on RSS subscribers as the ultimate stat I felt I had found a kindred soul. With another Ifgogo blogger Lisa Lee, we then talked about readers, traffic, Google, metrics, GFW, the new generation in China, blood types, Myers-Briggs, fortune telling. Here he is in my overpriced room at the Beijing JWMarriott:

Then the next day I had the same conversation about blog stats with Paul Denlinger! Here’s Paul and I going at it at the executive lounge at the JWMarriott:

Photo courtesy of ChristineLu.com

I later met with Paul and he said: “You really like numbers, don’t you? I can tell from your posts.” He called it. So here I am feeding my metrics obsession with another mega-post. How do you measure success with your blog?

First half of 2008 in review

With the close of the second quarter ended June 30, 2008, I thought I’d take the opportunity to look back at the first half of the year and measure some of our progress with CN Reviews. In summary, I’ve been pleased by our progress, but also feel like we need to restructure our blog and our focus to get better success in the future.

One of my favorite posts of all time on blog metrics is from Avinash Kaushik of Occam’s Razor. He met with us in Palo Alto and gave us some great blogging tips (like focus on RSS subscribers). I have followed his six recommendations closely to evaluate our own progress on CN Reviews.

Framework: Six Recommendations for Measuring Blog Success from Avinash Kaushik.

Here’s what Avinash recommends based on your “blog persona”:

CN Reviews is a “business blog” in Avinash’s framework. Below, I have followed his suggestions #1 through #4 and added a #5 which I call “Search Engine Optimization”.

Summary of my self-assessment of CN Reviews

• Raw Author Contribution - We have done a great job since our start on Dec 25, 2007, with 153 posts or 24 posts per month. The team, with David Feng being the #1 poster, has maintained a steady stream of posts for our readers. However, our posts are too long (including this one) and our writing is not accessible enough for non-native English speakers. Post length of 998 words/post needs to go down!
• Audience Growth - We are pleased with our audience growth, with June traffic of 12k visits and May traffic of 31k visits. We created a duplicate content situation which caused Google to start suppressing us in late May and June so we are recovering from that. Because we are a niche blog, we are also focused on quality of audience rather than quantity. So I don’t care so much about overall traffic. However, I do care about RSS subscribers and we have failed to build RSS subscribers at the rate we would like. So we need to focus our coverage and theme the blog more strongly to encourage more people.
• Conversion Rate - I’m pleased with the participation from the blog, with 2.5 comments/trackbacks per post on average.
• Citations/Ripple Index - Right now, our Technorati Rank is 51,951, and our Technorati Authority is 164. Our TA was 2 in January 2008.
• Search Engine Optimization - We are doing a good job with Search Engine Optimization. Google Page Rank = 4. Google Pages Indexed = 286. Yahoo Link Domain 2 = 16,878

And now on to the details…

#1 - Raw Author Contribution

Raw Author Contribution =

(A) Number of Posts / Number of Months Blogging
(B) Number of Words in Post / Number of Posts

I installed the General Stats plugin to measure these stats (on 7/4/2008):

CNReviews Raw Author Contribution is:

(A) 153 posts / 6.33 months (since 12/25/07) = 24
(B) 152,840 words in post / 153 Posts = 998

On average, 24 posts per month and 998 words per post. The frequency has been great, but long posts are not good for non-native speakers of English.

#2 - Holistic Audience Growth

Following Avinash’s methodology, we looked at our first measure of audience growth: Onsite Audience growth.

In June we had 12,082 visits, vs. 31,131 visits in May.

Our May traffic included a large spike due to the May 12 Sichuan earthquake, and then a drop in June due to a duplicate content problem on our site that caused us to be suppressed in Google and seriously damaged our Google traffic.

Here are some comments the Google suppression that we saw:

• May - We had a huge spike of traffic immediately after the China earthquake. May 16, was our peak day, with 4,641 unique visitors that day. But by 5/30, we noticed that we seemed to be suppressed in Google (for example, we couldn’t rank even on keyword query matching our post titles) and we were down to 497 unique visitors on 5/30.

• June - By 6/12, Min found the reason why. Thanks to a bad WordPress plugin, WordPress Contact Form 7, we had duplicate content for almost all of our pages. We found 495 pages in Google with this query: site:cnreviews.com “?wpcf7″. But our total indexed pages in Google was less than 900. We ended the month with 10,394 absolute unique visitors and 12,082 visits.

The second measure of audience growth is our “Offsite” Audience Growth or Feedburner and Feedsky (since Feedburner is blocked in China) subscribers.

We currently have 93 subscribers via Feedburner:

We also have on average 24.4 subscribers via Feedsky:

#3 - Conversion Rate

As Avinash says, blogs are a conversation. And comments are a reflection of how many people want to get into the conversation.

Conversion Rate =

Number of Visitor Comments / Number of Posts

To date, we have 546 total comments and trackbacks. However, many of those comments and trackbacks are our own:

• Self-trackbacks = 11% , or 61

• Self-comments = 19% , or 102

• So visitor comments and trackbacks = 70% of total reported comments, or 382

So our conversion rate is 382 / 153 = 2.5 comments/post

#4 Citations / Ripple Index

How broad is your impact across the blogosphere? Avinash recommends measuring “citations,” or how much people refer to your blog.

Citations / Ripple Index =

(A) Technorati Rank
(B) Technorati Authority

Right now, our Technorati Rank is 51,951, and our Technorati Authority is 164.

#5 Search Engine Optimization

From 1/1/2008 - 6/30/2008, we received 66% of our traffic from Search Engines.

Search Engine friendliness is a key factor for getting high quality blog traffic. We look at the following measures.

Search Engine Optimization =

(A) Google Page Rank
(B) Google Pages Indexed
(C) Yahoo! Link Domain (LD2)

Using a Firefox greasemonkey tool called SEOQuake, we can capture the following measures:

• Google Page Rank = 4

• Google Pages Indexed = 286

• Yahoo Link Domain 2 = 16,878

In summary, I’m pleased with the first six months of CN Reviews. Its a great start. But I would characterize it as a group of passionate people that have written on a number of interesting topics. But this group of people have not yet brought it together into a consistent, easy to understand concept that can get lots of RSS subscribers. That is what I’ll be working on with the CN Reviews blogging team to develop over the next few months. Stay tuned!

I consider Wang Jianshuo one of my blogging mentors, and I read on his blog about the announcement that Kijiji.cn is changing to Baixing.com (百姓网):

Baixing logo

Kijiji logo

Baixing screenshot

Kijiji screenshot

Baixing.com seems like a great name for China

Baixing (百姓) is reminiscent of the term lao bai xing (老百姓), or literally “old hundred surnames” and can be used to refer to the “ordinary people” or “commoners.” This is meant in a positive way, like “people power” or “The People.” As such, the name seems very populist, and very Chinese. Kijiji, on the other hand, is a completely foreign name that means “village” in Swahili. So maybe to Chinese the new brand means “The People’s Classifieds Network” or something like that!
History: Kijiji started in March, 2005

Wang Jianshuo joined Kijiji around March, 2005. At that time, Kijiji was just getting started. According to Wikipedia, Kijiji launched in March 2005. China was one of the initial launch categories at the time. Here is a picture from the Wayback Machine of Kijiji.com on March 6, 2005:

Today: Kijiji in the United States

Meanwhile, eBay Live is going on in Chicago and eBay (the owner of Kijiji worldwide) just issued a press release celebrating Kijiji’s launch in the US (h/t AuctionBytes):

Kijiji will mark its one-year anniversary in the U.S. online classifieds market and commemorate its success of reaching more than four million unique visitors per month. This milestone clearly positions Kijiji well ahead of most major competitors who have targeted the online classifieds market. With the goal of creating a free, clean, and easy-to-use online classifieds platform for local communities, Kijiji has exceeded expectations with phenomenal growth and adoption since the site went live on June 29, 2007.

So clearly eBay is not abandoning Kijiji worldwide…yet.

Question: Are international brands an asset or a liability in China?

The big question this name change raises is: is an international brand an asset or a liability in China, and in which categories? Clearly you can identify foreign brands that have cachet, especially in luxury goods. But what about internet brands?

Kijiji has been in the market for 3 years, and is the dominant classifieds site in Shanghai. They have been building the Kijiji brand for over 3 years. The classified business is competitive, and Kijiji competes with many classifieds players including Ganji (赶集), Koubei (口碑), and Taobao (淘宝). This change suggests that a good local brand that is memorable, easily recognizable and has some Chinese meaning and positive connotations was worth the switch.

The other implication is that Kijiji failed to build sufficient brand preference in the last 3 years such that the switching cost of changing to a new brand was low relative to the benefit of a good brand foundation for the future.

Last year, Wang Jianshuo also highlighted some of the historical reasons why classifieds was not popular in China in the past, and his belief in why that will change in the future. Many of the reasons offered were because of historical restrictions around where to live and where to work. Many of those restrictions are now gone, and Chinese have the same needs as people in other countries to buy and sell things. So this change may also be driven by a belief that there is a great future for classifieds in China and it is not too late to make.

Congratulations to Wang Jianshuo for driving this decision and doing what he felt was right for China. It was probably a difficult decision for an international company like Ebay to make and I can only imagine the amount of convincing that he had to make.

Here are some pictures from the Baixing office from our recent visit!

Baixing.com office building:

Jianshuo Wang, Head of Baixing.com and blogger at Wangjianshuo.com

View from the Baixing office down onto the grounds of the Shanghai Jiaotong University Xujiahui campus (SJTU):

Congratulations again Jianshuo!

I attended a panel at the Supernova 2008 conference entitled “All the World’s A Game” and then posted about it at length on the UpTake blog. The panel was meant to answer the following questions:

Massively multiplayer online games offer glimpses of how social interactions and work will develop in the Network Age. What can they teach us? How can businesses and online communities leverage insights from virtual worlds to develop more effective systems and practices?

At CNReviews we’ve blogged about Gaming in a Strange Land and China Vortex has some great posts about the sordid reality (and some more choice words here in part 2) of the Chinese internet cafe and by extension the Chinese internet user.

I posted detailed notes on this panel on the UpTake blog. I won’t repost the whole post here. But I wanted to highlight Professor Douglas Thomas’ thesis that the Five Characteristics of the Gaming Disposition can help gamers deal with the workplace of the future better than non gamers. Do these apply to Chinese gamers?

source: The Guardian UK

Five Characteristics of the Gaming Disposition

Douglas Thomas’ thesis is well described on a post on the Harvard Business School Publishing Blog here. I will excerpt from this liberally below:

1. Gamers are bottom-line oriented

From the HBS post:

Today’s online games have embedded systems of measurement or assessment. Gamers like to be evaluated, even compared with one another, through systems of points, rankings, titles, and external measures. Their goal is not to be rewarded but to improve. Game worlds are meritocracies where assessment is symmetrical (leaders are assessed just as players are), and after-action reviews are meaningful only as ways of enhancing individual and group performance.

2. Gamers understand the power of diversity

From the post:

Diversity is essential in the world of the online game. One person can’t do it all; each player is by definition incomplete. The key to achievement is teamwork, and the strongest teams are a rich mix of diverse talents and abilities. The criterion for advancement is not “How good am I?”; it’s “How much have I helped the group?” Entire categories of game characters (such as healers) have little or no advantage in individual play, but they are indispensable members of every team.

3. Gamers thrive on change

From the post:

Nothing is constant in a game; it changes in myriad ways, mainly through the actions of the participants themselves. As players, groups, and guilds progress through game content, they literally transform the world they inhabit. Part of the gamer disposition is grounded in an expectation of flux. Gamers do not simply manage change; they create it, thrive on it, seek it out.

4. Gamers see learning as fun

From the post:

For most players, the fun of the game lies in learning how to overcome obstacles. The game world provides all the tools to do this. For gamers, play amounts to assembling and combining tools and resources that will help them learn. The reward is converting new knowledge into action and recognizing that current successes are resources for solving future problems.

5. They tend to “Marinate on the Edge”

From the post:

Finally, gamers often explore radical alternatives and innovative strategies for completing tasks, quests, and challenges. Even when common solutions are known, the gamer disposition demands a better way, a more original response to the problem. Players often reconstruct their characters in outrageous ways simply to try something new. Part of the gamer disposition, then, is a desire to seek and explore the edges in order to discover some new insight or useful information that deepens one’s understanding of the game.

I have a feeling that the theory that multiplayer gaming cultivates this kind of behavior is a little utopian. These behaviors may be great qualities that successful gamers have, but I’m not sure that games actually create these behaviors. On the other hand, these qualities seem to be what it takes to be successful in China. Let me rephrase and see if it fits:

1. Successful people in China are bottom-line oriented
2. successful people in China understand the power of diversity
3. Successful people in China thrive on change
4. Successful people in China see learning as fun
5. Successful people in China “marinate on the edge”

Seems to fit pretty well, eh?  Or at least 1,3, and 5 do in my mind.   Doesn’t mean you should hang out in s—holes and firetraps to cultivate these qualities!

Certainly for foreigners coming to China, I see these 5 characteristics as helpful. Maybe that is why Sinosplice says that Living in China is like an RPG, and Tom Melcher says that China is like a video game and why Meg Stivison says that China is Like being the protagonist in a fantasy novel. (also on Meg Stivison’s new blog).

I’m at a Supernova panel called Liquid Conversations that is generally about the migration of comments and participants away from the blog and to other venues, like Seesmic, CoComment, Twitter, FriendFeed , Disqus. It started out as “Who Owns My Comments 101″ and then went in some other interesting directions.

Dave McClure moderated the panel. Social media A-Listers Loic LeMeur (Seesmic), Matt Colebourne (CoComment), Bret Taylor (FriendFeed), and David Sifry (OffBeat Guides previously Technorati).

1. Fragmentation is our friend, not our enemy

So far, the most interesting example was given by Bret Taylor , founder of FriendFeed. When Barack Obama gained the delegates needed for the Democratic candidates, 1000s of conversations about the nomination cropped up on FriendFeed. But because the distribution of these discussions were fragmented across many different posts and shared items, they became more:

• semi-private or at least opt-in
• more intimate
• more in depth or meaningful
• anchored by more shared context or at least a real identity

These became more useful than “people yelling at each other” in the comments section of the NewYorkTimes website.

Bret called this the “power of distributed conversation” and is a very subtle point that helps explain why Twitter and FriendFeed have been so useful as a selective and personalized information filter for people.

Implications for designers of social applications: Fragmentation helps people come up with a much more personalized set of conversations, and insures that they don’t get drowned out by the loudest and most common news and information that floods all channels. Don’t make it TOO easy to find people, and don’t make it TOO easy to find the most popular feeds. Create space for a more idiosyncratic, personal space.

2. Soon we will have the rise of the celebrity commenter and comment DJ artist

According to Matt Colebourne of CoComment, just as we had the rise of celebrity bloggers, we will in the future have celebrity commenters or as Dave McClure sez, “comment DJ artist.”

My first reaction was “no!” Its hard to “shape” the conversation without long-form written content. But then I thought about examples where “celebrity commenters” or “DJ artists” already exist:

• Wikipedia
• Wikihow
• Twitter
• FriendFeed
• Forums and BBS
• Facebook

Personal reputation can be built on different platforms. But reputation requires a long-term interaction through that medium with a community around a specific topic or interest. All the more reason to tie your username and identity in one system to another.

3. Nirvana of universal flow between one system to another is not a standards or business issue but “impedence mismatch between one service vs. another”

Several people brought up the issue of sharing information back and forth. Bret Taylor gave the simple example: “if you are posting a reply from FriendFeed to Twitter what happens to the 140 character limit?” Do we split it into two Tweets?

Aside from basic bookmarking, its just as likely that these platforms will actually diverge rather than converge in order to become differentiated participation platforms. So an “impedence mismatch” happens when objects to be shared are in different forms in different systems.

This seems like a reasonable explanation for why it will take time for systems to be interoperable. I personally don’t have any real interest in following the progress of standards efforts, many of which are likely doomed to failure.

Other Supernova2008 coverage

Summize search for Supernova OR Supernova2008, TechCrunch, NextWeb, KennethCarter, DNWallace, Sanford Dickert

While Kai Pan has been attending and liveblogging the CIRC conference, I’ve been watching it from afar, frustrated that my Silicon Valley responsibilities kept me from coming to Hong Kong. Here’s some aggregated information to help you follow it too if you are not there.

1. What is CIRC?

The CIRC conference is called “China and the Internet: Myths and Realities” and focuses on academic work. Some questions highlighted at the official site:

• Does the Internet bring more democracy to the country?
• Is there freedom of expression on the Internet?
• Does the Internet foster greater integration of China and its diaspora?
• Do the Chinese use the Internet for entertainment only?

For more, go to the CIRC Asia conference site.

2. Who is speaking at the CIRC Conference?

photo courtesy of Ching CHIAO

Here’s the schedule. Day 1 was today, Friday Jun 13. Day 2 is tomorrow, Saturday, Jun 14.

3. Who is tweeting at the CIRC conference?

Here is the conference twitter feed:

• CIRC2008 http://twitter.com/circ2008

Here’s an incomplete list I’ve compiled:

• Fuzheado http://twitter.com/fuzheado
• Lokmant http://twitter.com/lokmant
• Feng37 http://twitter.com/feng37
• Ch_infamous http://twitter.com/ch_infamous
• Lonsonlo http://twitter.com/lonsonlo
• Davesgonechina http://twitter.com/davesgonechina
• Chiao http://twitter.com/chiao
• Neokai (intrepid CNReviews blogger) http://twitter.com/neokai
• Rickmak http://twitter.com/rickmak
• Chpapa http://twitter.com/chpapa
• Isaac http://twitter.com/isaac
• Rmack http://twitter.com/rmack
• Dshupp http://twitter.com/dshupp
• Lokmant http://twitter.com/lokmant
• Goldkorn http://twitter.com/goldkorn
• Charlesmok http://twitter.com/charlesmok

Also, davesgonechina has aggregated a list of CIRCtweets here.

4. How do I see what people have tweeted about the CIRC conference?

One easy way is to use Summize’s Twitter search. Search for these terms on Summize:

• CIRC
• #CIRC

Now all their Twitterstream are belong to you!

Also, DavesGoneChina suggests using Twifan for Fanfou and Jiwai.de tweets.

4. who is blogging about the CIRC Conference?

Kai Pan of CNReviews just posted about the CIRC Conference Day 1. IMHO The conference organizers chose a noisy tag “CIRC” that brings up all kinds of stuff in Technorati, Google Blog Search, and Ice Rocket. Request to bloggers: Can you also use the tags “CIRCAsia” (also a noisy tag), “CIRC2008″ and “CIRCConference” also?

Here’s some posts from some other bloggers:

China Journal at Wall Street Journal has a great summary post highlighting Roland Soong’s study with the following interesting factoids about Chinese bloggers (quoted from the post):

• Bloggers are more likely to be young and female.
• Almost all bloggers use the major Internet portals.
• Among people who write blogs, 80% read blogs as well.
• Internet users eat more often at Western fast-food restaurants than the general population, and they prefer to pursue a life of novelty, challenge and change.
• Internet users value tradition less and care more about career than family, they are less involved in local civil issues and they feel less compelled to buy Chinese brands.
• Bloggers were even more likely than general Internet users to eat Western fast food and seek out challenges.
• Bloggers are more likely to enjoy spending time chatting with friends and seek to be regarded as leaders.
• Bloggers are less likely to value lasting relationships with a partner, get involved in local issues, and generally don’t believe a woman’s role in life is to make a happy home for the family.

See the post for more coverage on Deborah Fallows as well.

Ching CHIAO from Taiwan blogging at CCB 2.0. His CIRC Day 1 post here. Jeremiah Foo posts on CIRC Day 1 here [zh]. Lokman Tsui also posted resources (already compiled on this post). DavesGoneChina of Mutant Palm also posted resources.

Best coverage is on the CIRC Conference blog

The best coverage so far is on the CIRC conference blog. Go here for the most in-depth coverage. Here are their posts from Day 1.

• Session 5: Roundtable on Corporate Action and Responsibility
• Internet and the Chinese Diaspora
• China’s Great Firewall as the Iron Curtain 2.0
• What has China’s Earthquake Done to its Internet by Deborah Fallows
• Session 3: Roland Soong
• Panel 2: Discussion Summary
• Situational Characteristics of Language on the Internet
• Jingpo Kachin People Defined Online
• Diversity and Segregation in the Chinese Internet
• Web 2.0 as a Must Have Accessory in Shanghai
• Getting Farmers on the net in Anhui
• College students open to Online Health Information
• Panel 1: Please don’t blame the Internet
• Community Resources

On this post they propose the following tagging:

• Blogs: “CIRC” tag or category. But this is a noisy tag so can people also tag with CIRC2008, CIRCConference, CIRCAsia as well?
• Del.icio.us: Use “Chineseinternetresearch”

5. Where can I follow the CIRC Conference by IRC?

This is what Davesgonechina suggests but I don’t know if it is actually in use.

#CIRC Twitter a terrible pain right now, for an alternative go to mibbit.com, choose freenode.net and join chat #circ

http://www.mibbit.com/

6. Is there a Conference Wiki?

Yes, here is the CIRC Conference wiki.

7. What other links should I follow?

• Interesting Far Easter Economic Review essay on China’s censorship.
• Delicious: http://del.icio.us/tag/chineseinternetresearch

More to come on Day 2. Great job Kai, especially on 0 hours of sleep, jetlag, and a travel-induced ulcer!

There are times when the places and times of your life coincide with significant historical events. Those moments in time and space can come and go, but you are left with a sense of being a small part of history.

For me, one of those moments was the summer of 1989 in Hong Kong, nineteen years ago. I had secured a summer internship in Hong Kong from a small consulting and trading firm. I was excited about the summer, and also following closely the events in China.

I flew into Hong Kong, most likely on June 8, 1989. Prior to boarding my plane, I was following the massive rallies and demonstrations in Hong Kong mourning the victims of the cr4ckd0wn a few days earlier. After a typically harrowing landing at Kai Tak airport, my 7th aunt picked me up. I expected the hustle and bustle of one of the most densely populated places of the world. But instead, the city was eerily quiet.

My aunt told me that riots had occured earlier that day in Mongkok, on the Kowloon peninsula, and the city was shut down by the police. There were motorcycle police driving around and a few cars, but hardly any pedestrians. I had been to Hong Kong a few times before, but never saw the city deserted like that.

I think the city felt like it was perched on the edge of history. There was growing anxiety, increased by the June cr4ckd0wn, about the impending 1997 handover to China. At that time, there was no pledge of 50 years of stability from the Chinese Government. The doctrine of “one country, two systems” was hard to believe that summer for Hong Kong residents. People were glued to their TV sets. I watched Pearl Channel, Jade Channel and devoured the South China Morning Post and the International Herald Tribune, tracking the aftermath of the protests. Yes, I even bought a slew of Giordano t-shirts, commemorating the various student leaders.

In that moment, Hong Kong seemed caught between the East and the West. Hong Kong still had the feel of a British colony, with an appointed governor from the U.K., a very limited form of democracy, and defective “British National (Overseas)” passports that did not granted the right of abode in the home country. There were certainly grievances against the British government, and plenty of pride in being Chinese. But the colony had freedom of speech, freedom of press, personal liberties, and especially that summer a sense of responsibility to speak out. And many people felt the unstoppable movement toward reunification in 1997 and their own personal stake in the outcome of events in China.

Despite the fashionable sentiment that Hong Kong’s best days are in the past, I still feel Hong Kong has a special role to play in China’s future. During the next day, as we come up on the 19th anniversary of June 1989, I will be thinking of that summer in Hong Kong and the sense of history in the making. Jia You Xiang Gang!

source: AP Photo/Vincent Yu via Hong Kong Today

UPDATE 6/5:  some related links on the general sensitive subject - Brendan OKane (h/t ChinaLawBlog), SydneyMorningHerald, Hypocrisy.com, PekingDuck (h/t Kai Pan).