China 2.0 Blogger Tour Visits Summer Palace + Internet Briefing – Day 1

Were we ready for our arrival at the inaugural @china20 tour? Ready or not, we dived head first into Day One with @wolfgroupasia hosting the show. David Wolf, here in the Jing for a great many years, made Day One all that more special.

With the Jing still very much just “a recent thing” for the great majority of us (especially those that don’t live in the capital, unlike your prolific tweeter), we were on our way to making more sense of the capital. Off the driver went through the avenues that made up the capital of China.

The minivan started off with a trip just south of Tian’anmen Square, passing next to the Great Hall of the People and just missing the Xinhua News Agency. The Beijing West Railway Station was next as we were reminded that this was a sub-optimally designed station that kept on submerging, even if just slightly. We next went past the CCTV transmission tower before floating (so to speak) just next to the Kunyu River before arriving at the Summer Palace.

In fact, just before we got to the Summer Palace, @shelisrael got into a lengthy conversation with David Wolf. David more than knew his stuff and was a total expert. The minivan nearly went mute, with everyone totally hooked into David Wolf’s insights.

Right immediately, we were captivated into the magic that was the Summer Palace. Or as I put it…

Obviously, this was Summer Palace 2.0. Tweets included.

@christinelu already noted that I was a tad too tall. But this time, @wolfgroupasia took top honors.

Sadly, even with three tall guys, we still didn’t remain together as a whole. Some of us were attracted to people painting Chinese characters on the streets (@shelisrael’s writing was more Chinese than you thought it to be!), while others were addicted to even more history with @wolfgroupasia. As a result, the crowd spread out like peanut better — to the extent that some of us got lost.

Things turned out really bad at the end. I was in the Long Corridor with @girk (Melissa Sconyers), winner of the Mashable contest, along with a few others. We kept looking all the way back for folks like @mbites and @SheilaS. No luck.

Oh well. We just kept on going straight ahead. In the end, we spread out too far apart. It was breathtaking — as in the gaps that split us. I was wondering where the rest of the crowd were.

Never mind @christinelu. She’s probably mass tweeting the whole thing — she’s just like me, I guess, except for she’s at the tail end when I’m tweeting up front.

We came to a halt right in front of the entrance to the temple inside the Summer Palace. Time wasn’t precisely on our side, though, so all of us shifted into reverse gear and went back. I had a nice chat with Christine on the way back, and she told us why @china20 came into being. A very noble, realistic and above all just outright good plan it was. Before long, I was with @girk again, with each one of us outdoing the other in terms of how many languages we could speak. Incredibly enough, she was walking with this moving telephone pole (clocking in at 1.91 m), so we dumped the rest of the crew in no time. Oh well.

The minivan eventually took us to lunch with @kaiserkuo, @fuzheado (Andrew Lih), and the rest of the gang.

Yunnan food it was. Spicy at times, but the thing was more than worthwhile, as the group split into two tables, each with its own resident Chinese expert. This was fitting as we were in Zhongguancun, Beijing’s best attempt at Silicon Valley. @kaiserkuo did the show from his table, while I joined @fuzheado in decrypting the Chinese Net for the rest of us.

Of note were:

• Media and game startups are bigger in Shanghai, but Beijing is more universally-centered
• Sina and Sohu are big portal players — they’re like the Yahoo! of China
• Andrew had a book about Wikipedia ready, out March 17, 2009
• Numbers play a part in Chinese domains as they sound like Chinese characters. An example would be 51jobs, where 51 sounded like “wo yao”, or “I Want” in Chinese
• Baidu is the big search engine in China; they grew as the government “helped them out a bit” (by censoring or even redirecting Google to Baidu)
• The average Chinese Netizen in the street will use Baidu, but the educated masses will do Google, so there exist different audiences
• Sina is so big that even government officers have emails at sina.com (on the vip.sina.com subdomain)
• QQ rules the IM world in China; MSN is in second. Everything else is nearly unheard-of or unused
• Only 30% of Chinese netizens do email on a daily basis; the vast majority IM via QQ or MSN

Lunch came, but not without a quick primer into Chinese business practises. All of this was relevant as in the afternoon we’d be in our first biz meeting — with Victor Koo, the guy in charge of Youku (think of it as the Chinese YouTube if you must).