Chinese Blogger Conference 2008 and China 2.0 Tour: A Look Back

It took quite a while for the dust to settle — quite a number of us jabbed the pause button on our “regular lives” as we spent seven full days going through all of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou for the more 2.0 bits of the city. A meeting with the virtual Forbidden City instantly came on the heels of an inspirational breakfast with Kai-Fu Lee, and afternoons were filled with meetings with YouKu, DHgate and Kaixin001. Then there was the overnight train to Shanghai, where early morning meetups came immediately after breakfast, and the flight to Guangzhou gave some of us less than 5 hours ZZZ time before the Chinese Blogger Conference started.

What a trip.

Some of us didn’t have time to post on the whole event. Elliott, Zoe and I pulled off some work at the Blogger Conference, but some of us had to wait until the flight out of China to get any decent work done. But now that we’re all relaxed and “stuff like that” (as I say)…

A Look Back At China 2.0

China 2.0 was a very brave, and at that a very successful event that not only made a lot of incoming “foreign devils” (if you must in Chinese lingo) aware of PRC 2.0, so to speak, but also opened their minds (and even expanded my horizons as a “local expert” in the field). I knew this was the case when I started talking to Shel just before he touched down at Beijing Airport. To him, meeting me at the Airport Starbucks felt like never leaving home, and he must have been treated to the often breathtaking sights and sounds of Beijing by both the group and by @kaiserkuo.

The companies we met with sounded like a veritable Who’s Who. With the notable exception of Baidu, we got to meet just about all the big guys in the biz. Meetings with Youku, Tudou, and even Google, were part of the program, as were meetings with Web2Asia, Kaixin001, and Alibaba, just to get us started.

I’m sort of like an explorer, so I like to experience cities unplugged. Those short but sweet “hours off” where I got to (remember this is “me”) ride each city’s Subway systems were unique and unplugged me (for a chance) from the otherwise 2.0 parts of each city. (To that, of course, I count Beijing’s Lines 1, 2 and 13, as well as Shanghai’s Line 8 and Guangzhou’s Line 3.) Having a bit more exploration time would have been the icing on the cake, so to speak, but China 2.0 alone as it was turned out to be one delicious Cake 2.0.

A Look Back At Chinese Blogger Conference 2008

The Chinese Blogger Conference was easily the big thing this time round. After Beijing’s and Shanghai’s fair share of corporate encounters, the stage was set for a hundred flowers to bloom in the City of Five Rams — Guangzhou.

Michael Anti started things on a good note for Day 1, when he talked about media, and a preference for US media or media that strove for the truth versus Taiwanese media, which can get quite colorized at times. We also had informative prezos from Fenng (or “the other” David Feng, which this David Feng recognizes by name), as well as a highly educational talk by Goldred from Taiwan. The evening of the first day belonged to Carol Lin, Taiwan’s Twitter Queen, as China got its first-ever Punch Party.

Day Two of the Blogger Conference started out with me making sense of Shel’s keynote to the audience by translating the whole thing into Chinese. The sound system at times made translation hiccup a little, but the encouragement I got later on proved that it turned out pretty good. Right before and after the keynote, I got to take some great shots with the Scobleizer himself and his entourage. (It was pretty interesting how the Scobleizer came to know of the Blogger Conference; it looked like I tuned quite an audience (the Scobleizer included) into 2007′s conference through the then-blognation China tweetcast. Needless to say, it was refreshing and a great pleasure to meet the real Scobleizer in person — just as every bit as witty and insightful as his tweets and his blog proved him to be.)

The afternoon featured prezos from many more people, but most notably a progress report about Asia’s Web 2.0 landscape from Gang Lu. I went next with a 20-minuter detailling the International Chinese, and the author of River Crab Coming Ashore, Mr Yang, ended the whole conference on a very powerful note: don’t take what’s not yours..

In between, I got to meet up with a great number of fellow bloggers, tweeters — a good number of people that, with any attempt to produce a detailled A-Z name list, will eternally glue your hands to your mouse (or trackpad). This was a very vibrant and diverse 2.0 community in the PRC — even with “harmonization” already underway.

(You can’t harmonize individuality, it seems.)

A Look Back In General

The last week was a week that I had been waiting for — for quite a while. And when it ended as I made myself in semi-asleep mood onto a taxi headed for Guangzhou Baiyun Airport, I wish it hadn’t ended that quick.

Right off the top of my head, the sheer number of people I got to meet was just — way out there. As I joked on the trip, I had collected a veritable Mount St Helens of namecards — nearly 70 at last count. Facebook contacts exploded as did the number of fellow tweeters (nearly 100 in a full week, including those who “dropped out” due to mass tweeting), and my LinkedIn network grew beyond imagination.

Even with the online growth, what was most magical, so to speak, were the offline interactions. I got to meet some truly amazing people, including those that I had seen on Twitter for a long time, but only just met. Right off is the amazing meetup with @thecarol, Taiwan’s undisputed Twitter Queen, as well as with @kenworker. Meetings with other people of note included with noted citizen journalist @zuola, as well as the old gang — @isaac, @Tangos, and @ganglu, just to mention a few!

Offline with China 2.0, I had also met some people that left me with a deep impression. Nothing left a deeper impression than the “donut-ready” (I think @christinelu loved it the most) @marcvanderchijs, as well as a very inspiring Kai-Fu Lee. And, of course, no mention would be complete without the @Scobleizer and @rocmanusa, just to mention some folks.

Of course, those in the China 2.0 gang had some of the most memorable and unforgettable people in the whole crowd. These were people that basically stuck with us through the whole thing. @shelisrael tops the list, as I was fortunate to drive him to the Marriott City Wall in the Jing. Accent-wise, @mbites talked pretty much the same talk and was always ready for a laugh — even when my legs (and feet) were being near-threatened by the foot masseuse. And if I could name just one other China 2.0 folk (apart from Elliott and Christine) that I shared some really good time with, it was with a fellow traveller (very much a traveller at that) — @SheilaS.