About China blogosphere, travel, and entrepreneurship

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!

I have been to the Chinese Blogger Conference annual event twice, and have gotten to know some great geek bloggers. But based on the number of comments on their blogs and other measures of popularity, I know they are not the most popular ones in terms of page views and visitors. So who are the most popular Chinese blogs right now? And aslo, what else topics and subjects are popular that attract a lot of traffic and who are these non geek bloggers.

Sina and Sohu come to mind as the best place to start our search. For the past two years, there has been a fierce competition between these top two portals–who are also blog service providers (BSP)–to win celebrities and best seller authors as bloggers. Though the top Chinese search engine Baidu.com replaced Sina.com as the biggest online advertising market share owner in China in the first six months of 2007 (source: Analysys International) , most Chinese users are still accustomed to visiting portals instead of search engines for information. So to host a celebrity blog on a portal is a win-win solution for both the BSP and the blogger.

All the data is on Dec. 25, 2007.

#1:Lao Xu (老徐): blogger Xu Jinglei (徐静蕾), hosted on Sina, 132 million Page Views (PV) since Oct. 2005.

Xu Jinglei was a popular teenager idol back in mid 1990s and became well-known after a TV show about the love and life stories of a few college students. She has been running a digital magazine since her Sina blog became unexpectedly popular. She is basically the first super celebrity blogger. Xu blogs about her life as an actress, a movie director and an editor. She likes to share personal stories and photos.

#2: Han Han (韩寒): blogger Han Han (韩寒), hosted on Sina, 111 million PV.

Han Han’s story of ” dropping out of high school to become a full time novelist” caused a controversial debate back in late 1990s. People disagreed on whether a person could live a better life without a college degree. I think the answer is known today–based on the number of copies of his books sold. Han blogs about current news, society, personal stories. His writing is fun to read but sometime his point of view is very representative of the “born-in-80s” generation.

#3: Lao Sha Blog (老沙博客): blogger：Sha Minnong (沙黾农)，hosted on both Sina and Sohu, 105 million PV on Sohu and 79 million on Sina.

Lao Sha is the founder of 4 financial newspapers. He blogs about financial stuff. If you know about the craziness of China’s stock market in the past two years, you will understand why a financial blog receives nearly 200 million PV. I wouldn’t know about this blog had I not done this research. Laoshao keeps a column called “ Stock Market 8 AM” which he reivewed the world stock market status on the previous night and headline news of the day. I bet it is a MUST read for many “stock cizitens” on every trading day.

#4: Acosta——极地阳光: blogger Acosta (Chinese name is non avaliable), hosted on Sina, 79 million PV since Mar 2006.

Acosta is the first “grassroots” blogger to crank up to the top 3 on Sina blog. Nobody knows his real name, but he posts a lot of his personal images. Quite some of these images are very high quality, and he himself is a good looking guy with sweet smile. I think being mysterious is a secret source of his popularity. But he is definitely not a “grassroots” person, as evidenced by a photo showing him sharing dinner with a super famous TV actress and her husband. Acosta writes short stories and reviews on current events, and his writing is highly endorsed by a few writers.

# 5: Zhufeifei’s Blog (朱菲菲的Blog): blogger Zhu Feifei, hosted on Sohu, PV 78 million.

Her blog tagline is “To share things in entertainment. I feel happy if people enjoy them! ” (发一些娱乐圈的事，众乐，我亦乐). There are only blog titles on her blog homepage and you need to click on “read more” to read a word.　Here is the title of her most recent post: The Beautiful Daughter of Jiang Kun was a Singer (images).姜昆的漂亮女儿曾是歌星(图). (Note: Jiang Kun is a well-known commedy show actor). The blog is updated around once a month, but all with photos of celebrities.

# 6 -#10: On both lists of Sina and Sohu, the bloggers fall into the four categories: novelist/writers, financial bloggers, entertainment reporters or teenager idols.

Sohu Top 10 Most Viewed Blogs

Sina Top 10 Most Viewed Blogs

Let me know if you are intereted in any of above blogs and want to learn more, or let us know if you want to recommend other Chinese blogs.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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