Just how crazy can the Chinese media react to seeing a beautiful girl?

A young woman was caught taking off her coat behind US President Barack Obama during his town hall meeting in Shanghai early November.

I would not be naming her anymore as her name and photos are all over the internet now. And well, I am sure this blog would merit her more unwarranted attention.

But really, I find it weird how the press would just be entranced by her presence.

Anyone care to share their analysis on this topic? This is really one of the more distorted things I have noticed in Chinese broadsheets.

Some off-the-wall, “weird” news” keep popping up in the papers. Does this confirm what I read about the Chinese media lacking in “in-depth” news due to them being politically sensitive?

It’s quite entertaining though.

“I don’t want to be popular this way.” [from her blog]

Ummm…yeah.

Weekly Review:

CHINAYOUREN Blocked

So guess what now:  I am blocked.

I am banned, prohibited, harmonized, river-crabbed. Censored, in short, by the Great FireWall of China. If you are reading my blog now and have not noticed anything strange, it is because either:

1- You are reading the blog from outside China and therefore you are not going through the GFW (Chinayouren is hosted outside China, you are on the same side of the Wall). Or else,  2- You are reading this from mainland China and you are using some means to connect anonymously and pass through the wall. Most probably a web proxy or  VPN, which is what I am using now.

So, just to get this clear: my website works normally, there is no change at all in the blog itself, since the server is out of the reach of Chinese authorities. The only thing that is happening here is that the GFW is preventing users in China to access my domain. You can read more on how this works here.

I know this was bound to happen some day, and I though it would be funny, and it would make me proud in a way, because not every blog is important enough to be censored. But no, it is not funny at all. Although I can easily connect and write using my VPN, the 50% of my readers that are based in China can not do it so easily (actually they can, but they will not bother, I know this very well because I have been in that situation before and I also got lazy with blocked blogs).

There is of course an added point that makes the GFW censorship extremely annoying: it does not officially exist.This means that there is nowhere I can go to complain, and if I do find my way to the relevant government office, nobody will admit to having blocked my content. And what is worse, I have no idea of how serious their block is, or how long it will last, which makes it very difficult to find a solution. Why? Because if I pay the money and waste the time to move to a different host, I have no guarantee that I will not be blocked there the very same week.  Or  worse still, that the censors decide to unblock my original site just when I had paid the fee for the new host…

As you’ll notice, I’ve gone ahead and reprinted the entire text of these posts for the convenience of our readers who aren’t inclined to twiddle with VPNs and proxies to get to ULN’s GFW’ed blog.

Censorship is a popular China topic, and for good reason: it affects just about everyone, and perhaps most poignantly for foreigners who have a larger frame of reference than local Chinese who have never or experienced, er, better.

GFW 1st July: Waiting for my Anonymous saviours…

So OK, I am censored, but why NOW?

I mean, I haven’t been writing anything for ages, is the Propaganda Department punishing me for being lazy? Has some big Chinese BBS  linked to me recently, is Uln hot now? As I was looking around for an answer, I found out that the Peking Duck blog was blocked more or less at the same time as mine, and it was asking the same kind of questions.

That is when I got this idea of the LIST, which I wrote on their comments. Everyone knows that GFW is unpredictable, it starts and stops and nobody ever knows why, if you don’t believe me look at this funny chronology. But this random behaviour usually affects only some websites, and never touches others. So necessarily, the guys at the GFW Control Deck are working with a number of websites that have been shortlisted beforehand.

I am quite sure of the existence of this LIST, because I noticed very precisely the moment my blog was shortlisted. It happened earlier this year with that political post that was picked by the New York Times. Since then I had strange things happening, with miniblocks now and then, a perceived slower speed loading in China, and, of course that particular Charter08 post has been blocked ever since (even as the rest of the blog remained open). Also, look at that weird comment in Chinese in that post, where the guy says I am interfering in China’s internal affairs… could be a troll. Or could be not.

Anyway, my guess is that this blog and the PKD’s block have probably nothing to do with our recent activity, but rather with the tense atmosphere in the censors office these last weeks, after the Green Dam fiasco and the Google affair. At some point someone must have said: “hey, let’s block some more sites”, and we were unfortunately the next names on the LIST. And, unlike Google, I am afraid sites speaking specifically of politics are blocked permanently, such as this one, or this one. I hardly imagine the censors taking the trouble to monitor our blogs every day to see if we are behaving better. So my guess is, both for me and for PKD, that the block is here to stay and there is no solution.

… or perhaps there is?

You might have seen this manifesto of the Anonymous Netizens,  found on the RConversation blog. They promise some action on the 1st of July.  I like the document, it is well written and, unlike other efforts, it is very clever in that it sticks to its objective and doesn’t try to change the World from zero. It doesn’t ring very Chinese to me thoughLook at these 2 extracts (but if you got time read it all):

For the freedom of the Internet, for the advancement of Internetization, and for our rights, we are going to acquaint your censorship machine with systematic sabotage and show you just how weak the claws of your censorship really are …  You are trying in vain to halt the wheels of history. Even with your technocratic reinforcements, you will not understand the Internet in the foreseeable future

….

NOBODY wants to topple your regime. We take no interest whatsoever in your archaic view of state power and your stale ideological teachings. You do not understand how your grand narrative dissipated in the face of Internetization. You do not understand why appealing to statism and nationalism no longer works. You cannot break free from your own ignorance of the Internet. Your regime is not our enemy. We are not affiliated in any way with any country or organization, and we are not waging this war on any country or organization, not even on you. YOU are waging this war on yourself. YOU are digging your own grave through corruption and antagonization.

Perhaps it is just this anarchist instinct of mine, but I find the discourse inspiring, and I hope it makes some noise in China and local netizens here get the message. Because it works well to defeat the old nationalistic shield of the Chinese government against outside critics.

Not that I think the Attack announced on the 1st July is going to change much. These guys are not really Chinese, they are the people at the 4chan bbs, you can read a bit more about them here. They have done some interesting actions before, in particular against the Scientologists, and I am curious to see what is coming on the 1st July.

But however smart the guys are in the West, I am afraid they don’t have a chance in China. It is a completely different playing ground, they have no popular support here and as far as I know their BBS in the West have no links to the Chinese ones here.  I might be wrong, but I have the feeling that this is exclusively a Western initiative, perhaps with the participation of some overseas Chinese.

The thing with Western internet activists is that they seldom realize the massive size of the Chinese internet, and its limited connections with the outside World. We will speak about this some other day, but let me just say that the Chinese internet is an enormous island within the internet, an island that we all know is there and we all now it’s big, but we have no idea of what’s inside or how to get there. Something like Greenland, perhaps.

But I am digressing. I just meant to write: keep an eye on the Anonymous Netizens on the 1st July. They will not overturn the regime, they will not break the GFW or send the Nanny to the retirement home where she belongs. But they might -they just *might* – manage to ridicule the Chinese censors and expose them enough for all the Chinese to see what a bunch of incompetents they have in that Department. And how efficiently they are destroying the image of China in the World, and causing the country to loose face by the hectare.

And then perhaps someone in that office will decide that, after all, Chinayouren is not noxious for a harmonious society. Until then, I remain, blocked.

We mentioned the Declaration of the Anonymous Netizens thing earlier this week as well and it really was quite inspiring. The English translation (or version) was also far too inspiring to have been written by the average disgruntled Chinese netizen either, so ULN’s suspicions and muted enthusiasm that it was the work of outsiders rather than insiders is fairly appropriate. I’m not so sure about there being a “LIST” of sites waiting to be blocked, but who really knows why this or that site gets blocked?

ULN elaborates on his “China internet is an island within the internet” idea with his next post:

The War of the Internets

So there you are. July 1st passed without any major incident and the famous Anonymous Netizens didn’t show up. I am as blocked as ever and the Nutty Nannies of China are still running loose on the web, unimpressed by the headless suit .

I cannot say it is a surprise, frankly the chances of anything significant happening were one in a wan*. As I said in a previous post, these anonymous Netizens are not Chinese, but Western, from the mostly American chan boards, in particular chan888 (no link here, I have enough trouble as it is with the GFW to get me the hackers as well). These guys surely had some Chinese to advise them, but the initialive looks entirely Western, and the style was very similar to their -quite succesful- attacks on Scientology.

There are at least 2 reasons why their attack on the Chinese censors was destined to be a failure: In the first place, China is not a website that you can hack, it is country, and pretty massive at that. You could manage to confuse the GFW for a while with some coordinated attacks, but that would not change the – mostly offline – internal censorship of Chinese websites, which is what really matters here.

Secondly, the kind of attacks that the Anonymous do are not applicable in China, because they are based on giving negative publicity to the victim. But this country is already such an accomplished expert in creating PR trouble for itself, and in the most prominent media in the World, that one occasional attack by hackers, no matter how succesful, would hardly make any difference.

The China Internet Isle

But there is one fundamental reason why these Western initiated internet attacks have no hope to succeed here. The internet is a very powerful tool of social mobilisation, but only through the voluntary participation of the netizens in one community. The power lies not on the web itself, nor on its pirates, but on the millions of users that get connected for a common cause.

Let me remind you here of that misunderstanding that got my blog blocked in the first place: A famous New York newspaper took me for a Chinese hero fighting for Liberty, and then the censors of China agreed with it. Following that glorious moment of Chinayouren, I got some fellow fighters offering all sorts of contributions to the cause, such as banners to hang on websites. You can see some in the comments here .

It became clear to me then the little awareness in the West of the meaning of the Chinese internet. The Chinese internet is not only the single largest national community of netizens, it is also a largely isolated island, with very few connections with the outside World compared to its size.

Partly for language reasons, partly because of the GFW, but I guess mostly because of cultural differences, the Chinese live on a parallel dimension of the web. They don’t use the facebooks, or Youtubes, or Yahoo news, or IRC chats. They have their own means to communicate on the internet, and this largely excludes interaction with people outside China.

And that is where the problem comes. It is the same situation for a company seeking to advertise itself on the Chinese internet as for a social movement who tries to push its way here: you need to be inside the island to have any impact. You need to understand the Chinese and they need to be part of your idea, and only when the wans of Chinese feel that this movement belongs to them, only then the internet can become the most terrible of weapons.

So yes, I do think the internet has still its last word to say in China. But I am pretty sure that when this happens, it will be a Chinese initiative.

*I coined this the other day. Wan is 10,000 in Chinese. And yes, I find it hilarious.

Yes, July 1st came and went and nothing happened. The gold of this post, however, is ULN’s incisive observations about China’s internet, its internet microcosm, and attempts to effect change on it from the outside. There are a lot of people who understand this, largely through their own observations and experiences in China. Rebecca MacKinnon is perhaps the most popular and credentialed of this group, in trying to dispel some of the popular misconceptions of how internet censorship is actually done in China. Unfortunately but understandably, far more people do not actually understand and ULN’s post does a good job of raising some of these nuanced points that are usually oversimplified or overlooked.

However, I’m personally not so sure the main reason the Chinese “live on a parallel dimension of the web” is cultural differences, and I don’t see ULN trying to explain what those “cultural differences” are or how they contribute to this “parallel dimension” any more than cultural differences separate the netizens of other countries from each other. Instead, I still think language is the largest factor influence the interaction (or lack of interaction) between one nation’s netizens and another’s.

Crossing the GFW (excerpted)

This week I had some interesting conversations on other blogs, mostly regarding my state of internet blockdom and the possible actions that a webmaster can take to solve this problem. I will share here some conclusions that might be of interest.

Just to make sure we don’t forget anything, I will go first over the most obvious points:

1- If you are any kind of commercial undertaking, or if you depend on your site for a living, please pay attention to what you publish. Sites in English have quite some leeway to publish political content, but the bigger you get the tighter the line will be, and any kind of political activism can get you down.

2- The worst position is when you are big enough to attract the censors attention, but small enough to be insignificant in the general scheme of the internet. Say the BBC gets blocked: this makes a lot of noise, and eventually the Chinese government feels the pressure to reopen it. Inversely, if you stay small enough, you will never be blocked regardless of what you write. When you are in the middle, like these sites, the risk is biggest.

3- Finally, if you are already blocked, you can try your luck at 9 Dongdajie, Qianmen, Beijing, as a commentator suggested (this is the address of the Beijing Public Security Bureau) or any official body of your choice. I have no experience with this, and I am very skeptical about the results, but it is not impossible that the legal system works once in a while. We have seen stranger things in China.

Getting through the block

Once you have gone through the points above and decided that none applies to you, here are the typical solutions for users to get through the Wall. There are many of them, so I will just list the most well known, such as: lists of free web proxies, ad-supported or fee-based VPNs, networks like Tor or activist software like Freegate.

I will not go over each of these because you can find lots of information on the internet already, but I have tried a few of them and they all more or less do the trick: you can open in China sites that have been blocked by the GFW. These solutions are well known to the Chinese netizens users, as you can see in this Chinese blog which has even more options, such as giving a SSH number and code to your users.

So, you might think, what’s the big deal with the Great FWall? It is full of wholes big enough for a whole horde of Mongols, like it’s always been.

You are right, and yet, the GFW is a powerful system. For anyone who had a website blocked, it is very easy to see the impact on the stats of incoming hits from China. Depending on your size and content, it can be down to a 25%, and if you remain blocked for some time, chances are most readers will not find their way back to you. My guess: a mixture of laziness, hi-tech aversion, and the excess of info flowing on the net means that a missing site is quickly forgotten, and nobody goes through the trouble of opening a proxy for you.

Another possible solution for the block is the use of RSS feeds, which are not stopped by the GFW. The problem of course, is that for people to subscribe to your feed, normally they need to find your site first, and direct searches or even linking sites that hit a reset connection will not bring them over to you, in most cases.

ULN’s fourth post touches upon some more practical aspects of how GFW blocks affect the website operators/bloggers, their audience, and shapes the mentality of internet users living under it. The GFW indeed isn’t meant to perfectly censor information as much as it is meant to discourage people from seeking that information by simply making access to that information more costly in technical knowledge, effort, or time. The GFW isn’t meant to stamp out dissent or activists or “minorities with ulterior motives”, the GFW is meant to interfere with their ability to disseminate information and assemble mass support. It plays on the fact that while the masses can be easily excited with the right leader, ideology, or cause, their attention spans are also quite short and mere curiosity is easily derailed.

ULN’s point that small websites usually go unnoticed and large websites are too big to fail be blocked for long is also pretty spot on. Unfortunately, there really isn’t an English-language China blog that is big enough or, more importantly, critical enough to Chinese internet users to qualify as being too disruptive to block for long. The Huffington Post, arguably one of the largest blogs in the world remains blocked to this day. It even seems that Danwei, the old stalwart and one of the largest English-language China blogs, was recently blocked, having been inaccessible since Friday afternoon.

So what can you do? What can you do when you don’t even know why you or anything was blocked?

Welcome to China’s internet, buy a hoody:

Hear more from ULN by subscribing to his RSS feeds: “http://www.chinayouren.com/feed” (Spanish) or “http://www.chinayouren.com/eng/feed” (English). You’ll need to copy these URLs and manually enter then into your RSS reader (i.e. Google Reader).

Liu Yongxing

Quail breeder Liu Yongxing is being hailed as China’s working class fairytale and the country’s richest man. As reported by MSNBC, Liu and his three brothers founded a quail-breeding farm around 1980 with $125 in the impoverished village of Gujia and are now worth a combined estimate of more than US$5.2 billion. While mainstream media clings to this heartfelt rags to riches story, the first thought that came to my mind was, “I wonder when the Forbes curse will trash his nest.”

Liu Xiaoqing

As Chinese novelist Wang Gang pointed out in an interview with Gady Epstein, if you’re Chinese and “you get onto the Forbes list you’ll be dead meat in no time.” He has a point. Rich people in China who happen to find themselves in the public spotlight are also known to end up in jail. Just look at sports beverage executive Zhang Hai, real estate tycoon Zhou Zhengyi, orchid king Yang Bin, actress Liu Xiaoqing, and entrepreneur Tang Wanxin. They’ve all basked in the glory of Forbes fame, and they’re all perched behind bars today.

In the incredibly insightful book China Entrepreneur, importer-exporter Oto Petroski states that “from the moment private people become richer than the national banks, then the central government cannot tell these people what to do. In the last few years, some very rich people have emerged but the Chinese government can still find something in their background to expose them, and then remove them from the page.” As the Chinese Communist Party’s 60th anniversary approaches on October 1st, China’s well-heeled may want to consider keeping a low profile until nationalist fervor dies down.

Tang Wanxin

As for Liu Yongxing, while many will find the tale of his rise to the top inspiring, others are surely asking the question, “how’d he do it?” for very different reasons. If you study the economics of happiness, you will find that people generally do best when they share the same income bracket with their neighbors. Once circumstances shift and your neighbor demolishes his hut to make room for a mansion, the green-eyed monster tends to rear its ugly head. Given this lesson, Mr. Liu may want to consider building a very high wall around his nest before he lays anymore golden eggs. Oh and, maybe Forbes will be kind enough to overlook him next year.

Ever since chinaSMACK popped onto the English China blog scene with its regular translations of popular and quirky (if not outright scandalous) news and phenomena from China’s ever-vibrant and ever-teeming BBS discussion forums, more and more other English China blogs have begun copying their formula.

To be sure, chinaSMACK wasn’t the first (nor the last) to succeed in the niche of what it calls “cultural voyeurism,” offering insights into China’s modern society and culture through translations of original Chinese material. Both EastSouthWestNorth and Global Voices Online preceded chinaSMACK, the former translating mountains of Chinese news articles and the latter regularly translating Chinese netizen comments to contentious and often political issues as they appeared on China’s internet.

However, chinaSMACK is arguably the first English-language blog about China to really position and promote itself as featuring (and only featuring) translated Chinese internet pop-culture phenomena, putting the thoughts and comments of actual Chinese netizens front and center. This contrasted starkly if not refreshingly against the majority of English China blogs dominated by the personal (and often political) commentary of the “Western” expats that operated them. By translating, offering context as needed, and even supplying a glossary for common Chinese internet slang and memes all in one place, chinaSMACK made Chinese commentary of China accessible, and you were more or less left to draw your own conclusions.

Growth and Success

By most accounts, chinaSMACK has been very successful, itself citing an average of 7000 visitors per day. Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast all show chinaSMACK’s growth and healthy traffic, despite all of them being flawed in their own ways (i.e. Compete doesn’t measure traffic from outside the United States).

Mind you, it isn’t YouTube, but these are pretty damn good numbers for a niche blog about China. The only other major English China blogs with more traffic are Danwei and Shanghaiist. However, both have been around for years, whereas chinaSMACK has only been online for a prepubescent nine months. Furthermore, chinaSMACK boasts a healthy community of commenters, with each post now easily garnering 50, 100, or hundreds of comments.

Changing The Game

So is this sort of success motivating other English China blogs to expend the effort in directly translating Chinese source material, including Chinese netizen comments from the depths of China’s popular discussion forums? Has there been a shift in English blogging about China?

Having long watched and subscribed to many English China blogs, I certainly have noticed so. A lot more content on English China blogs these days are being sourced directly from China’s news portals and discussion forums by an increasing amount of blogs, so long as their authors can read the Chinese.

One notable example: Shanghaiist. Despite its namesake, Shanghaiist is something of an aggregator of news for not just Shanghai but all around China. If you look through their archives, you’ll notice that they typically derived most of their past content from the Western news media (WSJ, New York Times) or portals (i.e. Yahoo News), official Chinese news media sources (i.e. Xinhua, China Daily), or other smaller English China blogs. Yet, starting from this past January, we suddenly saw a lot more posts from Chinese news portals and discussion forums, particularly Netease.

However, the most telling signs of chinaSMACK’s influence upon the English China blogosphere comes from the flattering imitations of…

China Digital Times, an exhaustive American aggregator of all China news inconveniently blocked in China:

• A Satire That Caused an Uproar in Both China and The Philippines
• For Sale: One Life in China
• Official Sacked for Overseas Trip, with Netizens’ Reactions
• Persian Xiaozhao: My First “Tea” Experience (Part V) (With Comments)
• Persian Xiaozhao: We Are in This Together
• “Erroneous” Western Democracy Not For China, Says Official (Updated with Bloggers’ Reactions)

ChinaGeeks, a well-written blog that was recently redesigned and starting to make a name for itself:

• On Dating Foreigners and Penis Size
• Thoughts on the New Healthcare Proposal
• Do Chinese People Only Listen to Foreigners?

And the most recent example who today just threw up its first two posts translating Chinese discussion forum mischief?

littleredbook.cn, an aspirational China advertising media portal that combines 1 part business portfolio, 1 part blog, 1 part psuedo-Alltop, 1 part Ning social network, all mixed with a generous squeeze of good design and poured into four shot glasses:

• Visa; Going out to dinner with China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan; Chinese netizens react to politically charged ad
• Chinese netizens respond to ladyboys publicly crying for help in southern China.

Yeah, I’m not sure why an advertising blog is posting about Chinese netizen reactions to transsexuals either.

All of this is absolutely fantastic to any China-watcher who wants to get a broader, deeper, or better idea of what is going on in China amongst the Chinese themselves (as opposed to Western journalists and expats). Tons of stuff are either happening on or being reported on Chinese discussion forums that escape the notice of the vast majority of major English-language media simply because they cannot read the Chinese language. The more people who can translate this stuff, the more everyone benefits from an expanding coverage of China and its denizens.

The Challenges Ahead

But here’s the problem for chinaSMACK: The one thing that made it unique and fresh is now being commoditized. As such, it risks being overshadowed, crowded out, or outright replaced. Sure, it may be inherently male of me to say this but if chinaSMACK wants to remain the standard-bearer, in the niche of translating Chinese netizen pop-culture for the consumption of the voyeuristic English-reading masses, it needs to step up its efforts.  There are only so many people interested in reading informative or entertaining content about China with only so much time each day. Does chinaSMACK want to remain the one website, the one name, the one brand that these people will think of and recommend to future China neophytes?

chinaSMACK has benefited from and increasing global interest in China. That same increasing global interest is also what is attracting a new crop of well-written, well-designed, competitive blogs with more contributors, more content, and possibly more funding than a single girl by her lonesome tip-tapping away at the keyboard somewhere in Shanghai, translating what piques her interest that day from the Chinese discussion forums. Understandably, translating Chinese into English is an extremely labor-intensive proposition, but chinaSMACK needs more than one post a day, and the stream of content and activity simply cannot stop just because the founder is sick. It needs its contributors to do more, or it needs more contributors. It needs a better hosting plan.

chinaSMACK was onto something good, but it cannot afford to rest on its laurels, especially if other websites are taking hints from its playbook. There’s an appetite, if not hunger, for what chinaSMACK offers, but it just isn’t serving it up fast enough to satisfy demand. Far greater success with far greater rewards lie in overcoming these challenges. I hope chinaSMACK is up for it because I want to see it succeed.

There’s probably a good motivational story in it.

Anyone who pooh-poohs the social impact on Twitter should be put on notice by the two Twitter Firsts that happened last night.

Twitter History: First Marriage Proposal

Mashable just broke some news that we may have witnessed the first wedding proposal over Twitter from @maxkiesler (website) to @emilychang (eHub).

His proposal: To @emilychang – After fifteen years of blissful happiness I would like to ask for your hand in marriage? 03:13 AM March 20, 2008 from web

Her response: @maxkiesler – yes, i do! 03:14 AM March 20, 2008 from web in reply to maxkiesler

Congratulations to both @emilychang and @maxkiesler!

Another Twitter First: Beijing TweetMeet

I discovered this Twitter first through another Twitter first: The 1st Beijing TweetMeet, held Friday 3/21/2008! My friend and fellow CN Reviews blogger @DavidFeng posted the link to Mashable and that’s how I discovered this, even though Mashable is on my Google Reader.

The more complete TweetStream is below, but here is @DavidFeng’s take:

This is the first-ever Tweetup in Beijing. Ladies and gents, you are witnessing Twit-stery (Twitter history). ;-)….

For those of you who have never been at a Tweetup, the whole thing feels surreal. People are literally GLUED to their laptops, tweeting!…

We are twittering like mad. We are actually thinking if the server is about to go down chez Twitter ‘cos of the Beijing TweetMeet!…

Question: How did Twitter generate such emotional attachment from its users, so that people would meet up to Tweet together and that other people would get engaged over Twitter?

Just one month ago, I didn’t “get” Twitter. Now I see it in MMORPG terms.

Just 1 month ago, I “didn’t get” twitter and thought of it solely as microblogging. But the fact that a small group of Twitter fanatics met at the Beijing Bookworm (Building 4, Sanlitun South Road near Gongti North Road in Chaoyang District of Beijing) this Fri evening to Tweet to each other highlights how Twitter can be much more than a blogging platform. It can become a nexus of personal relationships and social exchange that makes it similar to Social Networks like Facebook or MMORPGs like World of Warcraft.

To non bloggers and non Twitterers (Tweeters? Twits?), microblogging and blogging can seem like information exchange and a process of social discovery of information. But in fact, it is not just that…it is space and place for social exchange. Microblogging far underestimates the power of Twitter. In fact, Twitter is a specialized form of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) but one in which the “role” is tightly bound to your real identity (in most cases).

Amy Jo Kim of Shufflebrain has a brilliant exposition of game dynamics. As an expert in game design, she identifies 5 factors that make games addictive. Here’s how I think it applies to Twitter:

• Collecting – # of followers, # of “friends” that you follow
• Points – # of updates or tweets
• Feedback – people follow you back! And you get an email with an exclamation point! It’s flattering when @JasonCalacanis is following me on Twitter! (before I followed him)
• Implicit Exchanges – Implicit exchange represents the positive feedback you receive as you “follow” more people and see more of who they are through their tweets. You implicitly exchange with your followers when you tweet and share what’s going on with you.
• Explicit Exchanges – Direct messages are explicit exchanges. But @twitteruser messages directed to someone else but visible to everyone’s followers, is also an explicit exchange recognized by the entire community. You are on stage, in the commons, sharing your life with everyone in the village commons.
• Character Customization – Yes you can reskin your Twitter profile page. But more importantly, you can customize your character and your persona by modifying the composition and mix of your Tweets.
• Interface Customization – Web? IM? Gtalk? Twitbin? Tweetbar? Twitterfox? Twirl? Twitterific? Directory here at the Twitter Fan Wiki. Enuf said.

If you are not already familiar with her work, you must go flip through her Game Developer Conference 2007 slides available at her website. Her blog is here.

And now back to the Tweet-by-tweet coverage of the Beijing TweetMeet

I don’t know all the people at the Beijing TweetMeet. But from the TweetStream of @DavidFeng, this is what I captured (in reverse chronological order):

• @sioksiok OK, OK… You will see me with TWO laptops next time! about 1 hour ago from web in reply to sioksiok
• OK, that was my MacBook. Now tweeting on my iPod touch… about 1 hour ago from web
• OK guys, my MacBook’s battery dies in 5 minutes. No sweat – that’s why I’ve the iPod touch!… about 1 hour ago from web
• @davidavdavid The Beijing Bookworm, we are 8 strong live… about 2 hours ago from web in reply to davidavdavid
• @webleon You want my iPod touch to tweet with? Sheetake, I should have brought my PowerBook G4 17-inch along!… ;-) about 2 hours ago from web in reply to webleon
• I think I can easily hit that magical 2,500 mark in terms of updates this weekend. Unless an Act of God happens in the Twitter world… about 2 hours ago from web
• @BlogAndGrow QQ = China’s biggest IM service. This thing is MASSIVE. about 2 hours ago from twitterrific in reply to BlogAndGrow
• @BlogAndGlow I think so! :-) about 2 hours ago from twitterrific
  OK guys I am floating this proposal around – a KTV fest for all Beijing Twitterers. Tweet back if you’re in for this! :-) about 2 hours ago from web
• @BlogAndGlow Welcome to read Chinglish. ;-) about 2 hours ago from twitterrific
• @elliottng OK, how many Web 2.0 services are you on?… ;-) about 2 hours ago from twitterrific in reply to elliottng Icon_star_empty
  This is scary: QQ + Twitter + CN = http://www.taotao.com/ about 2 hours ago from web
• Tweeting AND eating… a David Feng tradition… now shared with all fellow Twitter-ers… ;-) about 2 hours ago from web
  Late dinner – Spaghetti for me… ricey-kind of stuff chez
• @sioksiok… about 2 hours ago from web Icon_star_empty
  OK ???: ??????… http://fanfou.com/DavidFeng about 2 hours ago from web
• @isaac @thecarol ????! :-) about 2 hours ago from web in reply to isaac
• @sioksiok ?, There are no secrets in the Twitter world… ;-) about 2 hours ago from web in reply to sioksiok
• @kaiserkuo One of your fans (and Twitter-ers) greets you. ;-) Musically… (hint hint) about 2 hours ago from web in reply to kaiserkuo
• @thecarol NOW we are ready for you! :-) TweetMeet ?? featuring… ;-) about 2 hours ago from web in reply to thecarol
• @elliottng Zhichunli ;-P about 2 hours ago from web in reply to elliottng
• @WebLeOn :-) about 2 hours ago from twitterrific in reply to webleon
• @elliottng THIS is the hair that I’m — well, after for better or worse… ;-) about 2 hours ago from twitterrific in reply to elliottng
  I just got a haircut, so if you’re seeing me look a bit funny, that’s… the hair. about 2 hours ago from twitterrific
• @thecarol @webleon No sweat! ???! :-) (We all make mistakes…) about 2 hours ago from twitterrific in reply to thecarol
• @WebLeOn @thecarol They probably mean @DavidFeng :-P about 2 hours ago from twitterrific in reply to webleon
• @WebLeOn @carol They probably mean @DavidFeng :-P about 2 hours ago from twitterrific in reply to webleon
• @isaac Greetings from us from Beijing. You in Shanghai right now? about 2 hours ago from twitterrific in reply to isaac
• OK folks, first pics from the Beijing TweetMeet reality: http://www.flickr.com/photo… about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• Salve* @chengfen (* Latin greetings) about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• This is the first-ever Tweetup in Beijing. Ladies and gents, you are witnessing Twit-stery (Twitter history). ;-) about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• I think everyone’s Twitter list at the meetup just went that bit more stratospheric. The ISS is next in terms of altitude. :-P about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• Allegra* @zhengle (* Rhaeto-Rumansh greeting) about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• Cute baby pics at the Tweetup! ;-) about 3 hours ago from web
  With horror, fellow Twitter-ers at the Tweetup discover that yours truly speaks 10 languages. Gasp! about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• We are talking about Swiss nationality at the TweetMeet since I’m a Swiss national with Chinese ethnicity… about 3 hours ago from web
• We are twittering like mad. We are actually thinking if the server is about to go down chez Twitter ‘cos of the Beijing TweetMeet!… about 3 hours ago from web
• Bonsoir* @webleon (* French greetings) about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• Buonasera* @nickcheng (* Italian greetings) about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• For those of you who have never been at a Tweetup, the whole thing feels surreal. People are literally GLUED to their laptops, tweeting! about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• Link for tonight: AllTop: http://twitter.alltop.com/ about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• (Guess who is the 1/2 Mac / PC user…) about 3 hours ago from web
• 4.5 PC people, 2.5 Mac people. This is an INSULT for the Mac citizenry, having a BeiMac meet just tomorrow! :-P LOL about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• (Bad keyboard!) about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
  Grüezi* @PhilipJohnson8 (* Swiss-German greetings) about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• Grüezi* @PhiipJohnson8 (* Swiss-German greetings) about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• @sioksiok and @davidfeng hosting the first Beijing Tweetup… enjoy :-) about 3 hours ago from twitterrific in reply to sioksiok
• OK Ladies and Gents! Live Tweetcast! Live Tweetcast! Beijing Tweetup! Live Tweetcast! :-) about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
  3 more people with the fellow Twitter-ers in Beijing. about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• Venue: The Bookworm, Nansanlitun Road. See: http://www.beijingbookworm…. about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• People are getting married via Twitter! http://tinyurl.com/36tcys about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• Bilingual tweetup, English and Chinese about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• Grüezi* @JoMangee (* Swiss-German greeting) about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• I am seated at the long table at the front entrance. about 4 hours ago from twitterrific
• Am at Bookworm… @sioksiok and others? about 4 hours ago from twitterrific
• Heading to the Bookworm. God pray for no traffic jams! about 4 hours ago from twitterrific
• Äh… Twitter meetup… silly me… about 4 hours ago from web
  Facebook meetup in about 35 minutes. Will be on the road soon for the big meet-up. :-) about 4 hours ago

If you read carefully, @DavidFeng is threatening to combine his two addictions: Twitter and KTV! I will have to come out to Beijing for that combination. I will have to break out my Wang Qing Shui (忘情水) rendition for that event.

So Twitter, the MMORPG, has kept me from my day job at Kango of helping people plan family vacations to San Diego, Santa Barbara family hotels, and other such places. OK, David Feng will follow up with a full report once he recovers from a long night of Tweeting and networking with other Twitterers.

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.