China 2.0 Tour profile: Ernst-Jan Pfauth

1.  Please introduce yourself in a few brief sentences.  Who are you, what do you do, and what are you passionate about?

I’m a Dutch Problogger!  Preaching [and evangelizing] blogging is basically what I do all day. I do this not just by blogging for The Next Web, Spotlight Effect, or Dutchproblogger.com – but also by organizing BLOG08 (an international blog conference in Amsterdam with Pete Cashmore, Loren Feldman and Hugh MacLeod). I’m 22 years old, and live in Amsterdam with my girlfriend. In 2007 I covered news at the United Nations HQ in New York. Yet the one-way medium [nature of mainstream media] didn’t satisfy me.

Ernst-Jan on the far left of this picture:

Photo courtesy of CN Reviews.  Feel free to use.  Credit as shown.

Links:

• Twitter:  http://twitter.com/dutchproblogger
• http://dutchproblogger.com/
• http://thenextweb.org/
• http://www.spotlighteffect.nl/
• http://www.linkedin.com/in/ernstjanpfauth

2.  Why did you decide to join the China 2.0 Tour?

I’ve written quite a bit about China and its internet market. I’m not alone in this.  It seems like the whole world is focused on the success of China and how it’s different from the western world. So I figured the best thing to is to see it with my own eyes. Then the guys from Web2Asia mailed me about China 2.0, and it all came together perfectly.

3.  What do you hope to learn?  What are the questions you want to ask, or topics you want to discuss?

I’ve written a post entitled “Facebook is doomed to die and other East Asian misunderstandings” which is about the cultural differences between China and the western world in March. I’d love to see them with my own eyes and think of ways to benefit from them.

(By the way, this post is really good and includes insights from Markus Fuhrmann, of Web2Asia.)

4.  What people are you most interested in meeting with?

Alone from the other participants I’d also love to meet Thijs Jacobs (http://twitter.com/thijsjacobs), a Dutch entrepreneur who now makes a career in China. I also want to meet Chinese bloggers and talk about how we both report and what challenges we face.