About China blogosphere, travel, and entrepreneurship

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

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

1. Fragmentation is our friend, not our enemy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other Supernova2008 coverage

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

On 4/29 I attended a Asia American MultiTechnology Association dinner called “Silicon Valley-Style” Startups in China: The Next Wave. The panel was moderated by Evan Ng, of Dorsey & Whitney, a Silicon Valley law firm. Flickr photo set for the event is here.

(more…)

This is a bit off-topic for CN Reviews, but relates to how Silicon Valley celebrates Chinese New Year. Last night, we attended a Chinese New Year gala hosted by Yew Chung International School (YCIS) Silicon Valley. My older son who is now six goes to the Yew Chung Afterschool Program (YALP) to take Chinese lessons. (My son used to attend pre-school and Kindergarten full time at YCIS before we moved him to our local public school. This was a tough decision because we really liked YCIS. But I pay a ton of property tax to live in the #1 or #2 ranked K-8 district in the state, so I felt we had to save some money on private school tuition.)

Yew Chung is a foundation that now has campuses in Silicon Valley, Shanghai, Beijing, Chongqing, Qingdao and Hong Kong. The Yew Chung Silicon Valley campus is about 7 or 8 years old and has had its ups and downs in recent years. But I was so proud of what the school and the YCIS-SV Parents Organization accomplished this year with this Chinese New Year gala. One parent from China told me it “gave them a good feeling of completeness” to celebrate Chinese New Year. He had been missing this before he had kids, and the school helped bring Chinese New Year to him here in Silicon Valley

Lion dance team from a local Kung Fu group

Yew Chung Afterschool Program (YALP) Martial Arts performance

YCIS-SV Pre-Kindergarten-1 Welcoming the New Year with Great Health

Yew Chung Afterschool Program (YALP) Gong Xi!

My 6-year old son is one of the 2 boys making the announcement at the microphone. He is wearing the Chinese outfit that fellow blogger Min and I purchased when I was in Beijing this January. He was a bit shy and silly in his announcement!

\

Yew Chung Afterschool Program (YALP) Fan Dance

YALP has all kinds of electives that the kids can take. The program is from 3 pm to 6 pm so working parents can pick up their kids after work. The girls have lots of fun electives like this Fan Dance class!

YCIS-SV First Grade class performing “The Mice Family”

These are my older son’s former classmates. We miss them!

YALP Talent Show - Chinese YoYo

Another elective is called Chinese YoYo. I don’t get it because I didn’t really see anything that looked like an Western YoYo. And the Google But it was a very elegant dance by the girls in YALP.

Here is my wife and younger son at the gala. We both had to work hard to keep him entertained! He enjoyed all the dancing and music, but started getting restless!

YCIS-SV Parents Organization (YCIS-PO) volunteers

So these were the 6-9 people who gave up 3 months of their life to organize this event! There was an incredible attention to detail and it was a great event. This is a huge turnaround from 2-3 years ago when there was a massive problem with teaching staff turnover and low morale. These parents are some of the ones who made the turnaround happen!

Live Auction begins

The Auctioneer is a parent, Enoch Choi, who did a great job coaxing money out of the parents pockets for hand crafted products and other awards. People can get out of hand in these kinds of auction situations, which can help theg school raise more money. People like to win and to be recognized for their generosity. On the other hand, I think Chinese people in general also have a value of being frugal, or even cheap! So I was interested to see how this would play out at the auction. We ended up leaving early because my toddler had to get to sleep! But not before willing a gift basket of toys and books, and 3DVD set of Doraemon!

What we won - a 3 DVD set of Doraemon

Right now, we plan to send our #2 son to YCIS as well for pre-school and maybe Kindergarten as well. So we will have many more of these galas to drop some more cash in the school’s bank account! But I think bilingual education here in Silicon Valley is a worthy cause, and I’m thankful for all these parent volunteers who have continued to move this forward!

UPDATE:   some additional photos of the event here.

I love learning about the differences between North and South among the Chinese. Then factor in the differences between East and West, and you have a two-by-two matrix! (sorry, ex-consultant humor)

In the West, Chinese New Year is quiet. But I got to vicariously enjoy about 0:50 seconds of the constant shelling in Shanghai via YouTube via Marc van der Chijs. Then I saw both Kaiser Kuo’s facebook status and David Feng’s twitter to STOP THE SHELLING ALREADY. That was enough for me. So for Chinese New Year, West = peace, East = simulated war zone.

Then, you have to factor in North vs. South. One of my colleagues is from Tianjin, and another from Sichuan. For most northerners, Chinese New Year = dumplings. My colleague from Tianjin happily ate the dumplings that his wife made. And my other colleague, who grew up in Beijing but is originally from Sichuan, also ushered in the New Year with dumplings.

But for Guangdong and Hong Kong people, dumplings are less central to the tradition. For the last dinner of the old year, we ate chicken–which represents a celebration of the past year’s prosperity. Chicken = prosperity. For the first dinner of the new year, our nanny from Hong Kong prepared a set of “lucky” food. For example, fish, or yue in Cantonese, represents sufficient wealth or plenty. If you eat fish, you are likely to have enough wealth and savings for the year. We also ate vegetables, su cai, a mix of vermicelli, tofu, and green vegetables. This represents frugality–starting the year right by not using up your wealth up front. Finally, we ate some pork (ideally BBQ pork), which also represented some other aspect of prosperity. So for some Southerners, Chinese New Year = “lucky” food.

My son, after reading a book about nian gao, was inspired to make a Southern style of nian gao that my nanny then fried up. I forgot to take pictures of it, but it looked sort of like this:

(By the way, most Chinese would agree that the Yangtze (Changjiang) River is the dividing line between North and South. But for my Guangdong mother-in-law, the Fujianese are decided North! And for someone from Heilongjiang, even Beijing people are decidedly South even though the word North is in the name of the city!)

Many Westerners think of China as a single, unified culture, but in reality there are many rich differences between people from different backgrounds–North vs. South, mainland vs. Hong Kong vs. Taiwan, East vs. West.

I also enjoyed a great episode of Sexy Beijing where our heroine Su Fei travels to Hong Kong for the holidays, and considers Beijing vs. Hong Kong. Notice that most Hong Kong people would rather speak English rather than Mandarin to Su Fei.

Anyone else observe the differences between regions of China in celebrating Chinese New Year?

Photos: courtesy of avlxyz, sheilaz413