About China blogosphere, travel, and entrepreneurship

If you are a blogger, you have to read Avinash Kaushik’s blog Occam’s Razor. We met with Avinash yesterday and he generously shared some great advice. Avinash was my former colleague at Intuit, who started his blog in May 2006 and has built what may be the #1 Web analytics blog (Technorati Authority of 1106 as of 02/08). He posted some great tips here and here, and I’ve repeatedly gone back to read this post.

I haven’t completely synthesized all the input he gave us yesterday. I might do that on a follow on post. But I’ve adapted his 20 tips into the best 10 tips I will try to follow here at CN Reviews. I am hoping that we will have some other guest bloggers on CN Reviews, so I hope this inspires some dialog between current and potential CN Reviews bloggers on what we should do here.

Here are the tips:

10 - Nobody cares about you, they care about what you do for them.
9 - Be as simple and succinct as possible.
8 - Pattern your readers by being consistent.
7 - Create a dialog with your readers.
6 - Add one “correct” reader, one at a time.
5 - Blogs need constant promotion, participation, and evangelism.
4 - Make it personal with your own point of view.
3 - Pick a subject matter you are passionate about and/or that you are good at.
2 - Have clear goals for the blog.
1 - Become very good (top 25% in the world) at two things.

And now for more thoughts on these 10 tips.

10 - Nobody cares about you, they care about what you do for them.

This was a bit of harsh truth from Avinash, but I think he is right. People will spend their scarce time reading our blog only if we are doing something for them. Prospective target readers for CN Reviews: (a) people who know both Chinese and Western cultures but more of one than the other, want to learn what they don’t know, and share what they do, (b) people who want to learn more about travel and entrepreneurship in China.

9 - Be as simple and succinct as possible.

Awflasher told us: “don’t make the post too long but make it very readable.” We are not achieving this right now. We should target 250-350 words per post. If the post is longer, then it should have a short summary. We should aim to write at the 6th grade level. We should also embrace Globish, language easily written and read by non-native speakers. Livid also gave us the same tip to keep it short.

8 - Pattern your readers by being consistent.

We’re doing this! When David joined us, we created three specific posts: Monday Metro(pol) which talks about Beijing transportation and infrastructure, CN Reviews Mind The Gap Wednesday which talks about cultural differences from David’s point of view, and an unnamed “Lifestyle” Saturday (or Sunday) post. Min and I have been relatively less consistent.

7 - Create a dialog with your readers.

Yes, but how? What I’m doing is: (a) commenting on the blogs of our readers if I know what their blog is, (b) emailing a quick thank you to people who comment on CN Reviews, (c) trying to ask questions at the end of the post, and (d) doing shorter posts that are focused on getting readers to give us their feedback. But I think comments is one of our most important metrics to drive and to track. I just started experimenting with Twitter and Facebook, which both seem like a good way to create dialog with readers and friends.

6 - Add one “correct” reader, one at a time.

Avinash wrote this in the context of getting Dugg and comparing his Digg traffic to his Yahoo! Groups traffic. Here is his chart:

Lesson: you just don’t want traffic. You want the right readers. I’d love to have a community of bloggers, contributors, and readers who care about bridging China and the West. So for us HaoHaoReport is more important that Digg.

5 - Blogs need constant promotion, participation, and evangelism.

There is no silver bullet. Here’s my short list of ideas: (a) post and link to other bloggers, thus generating a trackback link from their blog; (b) comment on other blogs, (c) build up Twitter as a distribution method, (c) social bookmarking at HaoHaoReport and De.licio.us, (d) occasional posting links on Facebook, (e) write about popular topics that people have set Google Alerts for, e.g. people’s names, (f) emailing commenters to engage in more dialogue. I also like participating in wangjianshuo’s community and ifgogo.com as well.

4 - Make it personal with your own point of view.

Livid gave us some advice: make it more of a journal than an essay. Avinash gave us some other advice: think about writing a book, not a diary. Here’s how I synthesize this: Be sure you can answer the question, “If I had to write a book from the blog, what would the book be about and what is the table of contents?” But then, “Make the book personal, infuse it with your personality and your unique point of view.”

3 - Pick a subject matter you are passionate about and/or that you are good at.

Blogging takes a lot of energy. Everyone is really busy. In the end, you can only really blog about what you care about. Which means you can’t be too theoretical about tips #10 and #6. “Correct” readers mean people who care about what you care about. “What you do for them” is ultimately tied to what you care about most.

2 - Have clear goals for the blog.

Have clear objectives (as stated in words) and clear goals (as stated in numbers or metrics). Well I saved the hardest tips for last. Yes, we are not clear yet what our goals are for the blog. But Avinash’s advice was to focus on one thing first, and then expand from there. He gave his own example of starting with Web Analytics, then moving on the Competitive Intelligence, then to Qualitative Insights…but always under the overall umbrella of Data for Decision Making on the Web.

1 - Become very good (top 25% in the world) at two things.

Well, I’m still figuring out what this is. But I think the direction that Avinash is giving is good.  Thanks Avinash! There was much more that was discussed but I need to digest it further.  Topic for another blog post.

What are your goals? And what are the two things you want to be world class in?

Thank you for reading CN Reviews! But who are you and what do you want us to write about? We actually have more than a handful of RSS feed subscribers now, and sometimes more than two handfuls For those readers in particular, I want to know why you subscribed, what you like, what you don’t like.

I recently read a ProBlogger post from 2007 entitled 34 Reasons Why Readers Unsubscribed from Your Blog. I’ve reposted the top 5 reasons here:

1. Too many posts (the post levels are too overwhelming) - 37
2. Infrequent Posting (or the blog is effectively dead) - 29
3. Partial Excerpts Feeds - 25
4. Blog Changes Focus (too much off topic posting) - 23
5. Too many posts that I see elsewhere (Redundant, Repeated or Recycled News) - 19

So we want to keep you! We are currently aiming for 5 posts a week, and we might move to 7 posts a week in the future. Is that too much? too little?

The question I want your help in answering is “what is our blog’s focus”? We intentionally want to explore the “white space” between the existing, well established blog spaces. So defining our focus is hard. We are like the kid in school that is friendly with lots of groups, but not really in one group or another. (Actually, come to think of it, that was what I was like in high school!)  But we get excited when we bring different groups together!

So what should our vision and our voice be for CN Reviews?

P.S. thanks for our wonderful commenters this month: Kai, Jian Shuo, AW, Fidelmeister, Michael, and Jason Elder. Thanks!

Via Techmeme, I saw a post by Louis Gray entitled Mashable Uses A-list power to Steal B-list buzz alleging that Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins of Mashable stole a quote without attribution.

Aside from getting me a bit indignant about the plight of the little guy, the post reminded me of a Mashable post from Mark bashing the tech blogosphere for being obsessed with Robert Scoble’s Facebook erasure versus the violence and disputed election in Kenya. Which then spun out-of-control into criticism of Robert Scoble himself. Which then resulted in Scoble defending himself and explaining why he doesn’t blog about Kenya. Via RConversation, I also read Global Voices co-founder Ethan Zuckerman’s defense of Scoble that also does a great job explicating the “known bug” of the blogosphere that people write and read about what they know about, and they often don’t know and don’t care about international issues like the Kenyan post-election events. If you read this, please take the time to read Ethan’s post now!

In fact, Robert Scoble is already global, and his post on wanting to go to CNbloggercon was one reason why we opened this blog. He has also repeatedly tried to share his blogger fame and fortune generously with Global Voices’ founders Ethan and Rebecca MacKinnon. He is already a globalist. So we emailed Scoble late last year and asked him what he wanted to learn about China.  This is what he had to say:

1. Who are the best tech bloggers in China and how do they differ from bloggers elsewhere in the world?
2. What is being a blogger in China like? What perceptions do you have of bloggers elsewhere in the world?
3. Take us around your local technology store and give us a tour.
4. How do you perceive American companies like Microsoft/Yahoo/Google/Sun Microsystems and how are they behaving in China?
5. What are the big topics in China? News we should pay attention to?

(I didn’t get advance blogging permission on sharing this so I hope its ok Robert that I share this!)

These are the issues that we intend to cover at CNReviews. We want to create greater awareness and cultural understanding. We are not sure what the dividends are but it will be surely goodness.

At the same time, we want what we do to have reach and to generate profits, and agree with Ethan’s view that the problem is on the demand side, not the supply side. I also engaged in a great dialog about this subject with Kai Pan at Tripdingo.com (disclosure: I work at Kango and Tripdingo.com is a Kango sponsored blog) where he shared some similar insights about what people really gravitate toward and some tough questions about who our target audience is. In Beijing, I also had one of the best chocolate croissants in my recent life in Chaoyang (contact me if you want to find out where!) with Kaiser Kuo where he shared a data point that one very respected China blog is only getting about 1000 unique visitors/day, and only has about 1000 RSS subscribers. That was a bit depressing because I really viewed this blog as a giant in the field. There is clearly a demand problem.

So I’m excited about 2008 and the journey that we are on with CNReviews. I know we can make a contribution, and I know we can engage with some great blogs and some great bloggers. I hope we can get some people to read the blog too! In the meantime, we’ve got some great feedback from Robert Scoble and hope to tackle some of these issues in the months ahead!

Photos with CC license for commercial reuse: DEMOSH from Kenya; Kai Hendry from China

April 18, 2004 5, was an important day for Andrew Yu and the kids of more than 200 elementary schools in remote villages in China. On that day, Andrew founded 1kg.org (多背一公斤, duā bēi yi gōng jīn), a non-governmental organization (NGO) that sought to build a volunteer network of travelers to help kids in remote areas of China by delivering much needed books and other school supplies. “[The idea came up] in a lunch with a few good friends, also for Sichuan food,” said Andrew. “A friend shared his recent trip to Yunnan Province, where he observed the poor conditions of the local schools. We talked and all agreed that it is far from enough for only a few of us to bring something to the kids when we travel. We needed more help. So I came up with the idea to enable more travelers to help….” Andrew, known as 安猪 (ān zhū) in Chinese, shared with us how 1kg first got started, when we met with him in Beijing over dinner at a Sichuan restaurant.

I became aware of 1kg.org about two years ago when one of my college friends started to feature the 1kg.org logo as her MSN messenger image. I followed the stories on her blog and was amazed by how many young people were willing to help the kids as volunteers. However, I was disappointed that I didn’t see much coverage of this organization in the mainstream media. (See search result on Google and Baidu.)

Today, 1kg.org manages a database of over 200 elementary schools which includes information on: 1) how many students are in the school; 2) what is the kids’ primary need; 3) the school name and contact person; 4) detailed directions, including method of transportation, of how an independent traveler can reach the school. Last year, more than 130 independent travelers volunteered to carry one kilogram of stationery or books to the kids on the travelers’ trips.

Helping kids on your adventurous backpacking trips is an idea that must come from a true travel enthusiast with a generous heart like Andrew. Not only enjoying travel himself, Andrew also enjoys helping people prepare and share their trips as a moderator of a Ctrip forum. Unlike the United States or Europe, where independent travel (not with a tour package) dominates the market, independent travel in China is very small percentage of the market, even in 2008. Three years’ ago, I can imagine how much less information there was for people to plan a trip themselves, even to well developed tourist destinations like Jiuzhaigou. I don’t think people used the word “vacation” in Chinese very often three years’ ago when there was less disposable income for leisure travel.

“There are more than 400,000 elementary schools in remote villages, but less than 10% of these schools received any sort of governmental or NGO support in order to improve education quality, ” shared Andrew. During the past three years, after many 1kg trips, Andrew realized that “the original idea to encourage more and more travelers to help kids hasn’t changed.” But “[today] I have a deeper understanding of what the kids really need for education, other than books and stationery”.

So, how does 1kg work?

There are only 3 FULL time people for 1kg.org. Suave Su in Beijing is responsible for the website development and maintenance. Vivian Liu (a.k.a. 小V), based in Kunming, Yunnan, is a program administrator. Andrew focuses on PR and marketing. The 1kg website is 1) a database of the rural village schools with location, contacts, financial status and needs which are collected by the volunteer, and 2) an online communities for volunteers. When traveling to a new destination, the traveler can download a standard form, print it out and give it to a school contract to fill out, after which they can submit all the detailed information online to 1kg. Meanwhile, the traveler can share their experience with the online community. 1kg suggests that travelers pack “1kg more” stuff, like inexpensive stationary or books, and donate them to the schools. By spreading the word on forums and blogs, organizing informal volunteer gatherings, and hosting photography exhibitions in Beijing and Guangzhou, there are now more than 2000 people who take part in the activities.

On the question of why this service model will work, Andrew compares 1kg.org with traditional NGOs in China. He believes that traditional NGOs operate as agents responsible for results, control information, and direct the work of volunteers. This process generates a lots of administration & management cost and leads to low working efficiency. It furthermore limits the creativity and initiative of the volunteers. 1kg, a grassroots NGO, has a different operating model, and is inspired by the social collaboration power of wikipedia, encouraging knowledge creation and sharing to understanding the needs in order to help them.

Andrew has an ambitious objective to reach 5000 schools, cover 1 million students and collect 3 million books by the year 2012. I like his idea to collect 10,000 used computers and set up computer rooms with Internet access for 1,000 schools.

I am not a backpacker. Honestly, I don’t know if I can make my way to any of those remote villages on my trip, but I hope I (and all my friends) can do this at least once. I have a concern that there won’t be enough people that will travel independently to the schools. But when I learned that the profiles of volunteers have started to change from white collars to students. I interpreted it as that 1kg.org has created quite some social awareness of charity action on the younger generation. Today, there aren’t propagandas about “Learn from Comrade Lei Feng” (向雷锋同志学习, xiàng léi fēng tóng zhì xué xí) ” to ask everyone to help others selfishless any more, but more and more people are starting doing it. Maybe I am over concerned. Anyway, besides of hoping for and wanting good things, people also have the needs to do good things for themselves. This is a good experience if you are going to backpacking around China, isn’t it?

Good luck, Andrew!

Happy New Year! Greetings from China.  I celebrated New Years in the air, leaving SFO at 12:13 pm on December 31, 2007, and arriving in Shanghai at 6:30 pm on January 1. I hope United counts the entire 6000 miles as flown on 12/31, because I still have 100% bonus miles from having Premier Executive status on United, which I am certainly going to lose for 2008!

I’m trying out a few services that will make it easier to stay connected while on the road. I would like to review them more fully after I get some experience using them this trip. There are two things I want to achieve: make it easy for US people to call my China mobile phone, and make it easy for me to call US people on my China mobile. This post reviews only the first–to make it easy for US callers to call my China mobile phone for cheap.

In summary:

• Use Skype if you want to provide one US area code “virtual” number to everyone and don’t mind paying $60 a year plus $0.021/minute. It takes a few steps to set up and cobbles together several Skype features to do this, namely: SkypeIn, SkypeOut, CallForwarding.
• Use Jajah or Jaxtr if your callers are trying to access you from the Web or social networks, or have a few callers that you can set up as “friends” in their system and train them to use the system. With Jajah, callers between US and China can call each other free from landline and mobile numbers. If one of the recipients is not a Jajah user, then it costs $0.033/minute. I can’t figure out how much it costs to use Jaxtr.
• Use eCallChina if your users are calling frequently from the same phone number, so you can set up pinless dialing for them. This is the cheapest option at $0.016/minute but they need to know how to dial your number from the US (e.g. 011-86-xxxxxxxxx) and they need to remember the local access number.

The Details

Here are 4 ways that I’ve tried to make it easy for US phone numbers to call a China mobile phone.

1. eCallChina pinless phone card

I set my office up with a pinless rechargeable phone card and linked the office phones to the phone card so people can dial a local access number (in our case, an area code 650 Mountain View number) and then dial the China number (with 011-86 preceding the full number including city code if applicable) without entering a PIN. So this is easy if you can remember the local access number and are a location where the pinless feature is already set up. We’ve used eCallChina’s rechargeable pinless card and it is the cheapest option here at $0.016 per minute, or 1250 minutes for $20. I then posted all this info on the Kango internal wiki.

2. SkypeIn number, combined by Skype Call Forwarding

For people who already have Skype, this could be the easiest way to allow your friends to access your China mobile phone. Rates to China are $0.02 per minute, and more rate info here. Skype doesn’t have a single feature that addresses this user scenario of “forwarding calls from a US number to a China mobile phone” so I had to cobble together a few features. Here’s the general steps:

1. set up an ordinary Skype account if you haven’t already
2. set up SkypeOut by purchasing SkypeCredit. From the Skype application. Select menu item Tools/SkypeOut. Then follow directions to purchase SkypeCredit. This allows you to call out from Skype to local numbers. This is very useful if you are on your computer already. Many times, people in China are not at their computer and I need to reach them on their mobile phone or landline. However, this feature alone allows you to call other people, not other people to call you.
3. set up SkypeIn. From the Skype application, select menu items Tools/SkypeIn. It will then direct you to a Sign up page on their poorly designed and difficult to navigate website. SkypeIn information can be found here. Current rate is $18 for 3 months, and $60 per year, unless you do it as part of a SkypePro premium account. Current rate for SkypePro is $3/month with a 60% discount on a SkypeIn number, which is about $36 per year. SkypeIn allows people to call from their phone to you on Skype, but not yet to your cell phone. (I just discovered another feature SkypeToGo which may address my need for a cheap calling solution from my China Mobile number to call the US. I’ll look at that later.)
4. enable Call Forwarding. Select menu item Tools/Call Forwarding. Be sure to type the full phone number including “+” sign and country code. For example, a China mobile might be something like “+8613555555555″ or something like that.

SkypeIn allows people to call your Skype account. Call Forwarding allows your Skype account to call your mobile when you don’t pick up on Skype. SkypeOut allows you to call other people, and also is the payment method that enables Call Forwarding. If you have any questions, just comment on this blog and I’ll try to answer it.

3. Set up Jajah

I signed up for Jajah. By visiting my personal URL at http://www.jajah.com/elliottng you will come to page which allows you to request a call to be set up between me and your phone in the US. I pay for the call. Here’s a badge so you can do it directly from this page. It is $0.033 per minute or free between Jajah users. Here’s the rate info.

4. Set up Jaxtr

I also signed up for Jaxtr. I’ve known Konstantin for a while and thought I’d try out his product too. Similarly, you can go to my personal URL at http://www.jaxtr.com/elliottng to initiate a call to me, or use the widget below.

Get jaxtr | Login

So I’ll put these in use and see how it works out. The key issue is making it easy for people in the US to adopt this technology. Giving my wife a bunch of URLs and asking her to go to her email to find the URL and then surf to a page to initiate a call, is less easy that giving her a phone number that she can just program into her cell phone memory. I think both Jajah and Jaxtr creates a “virtual” phone number that is tied to your mobile phone after you use the widget. But its not clear what that phone number is until after you make the first call. Both Jajah and Jaxtr would be well served to make it more clear that you are creating these “personal, virtual” phone numbers that can be used for calling me in the future without having to go back to your computer. Skype, on the other hand, doesn’t make it easy for me to set up a US access number for my China mobile phone, but once I have it set up, the biggest benefit is that there is one number that I can provide to everyone, without all the steps that people need to go through to call me using Jajah or Jaxtr.

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.