About China blogosphere, travel, and entrepreneurship

We learn from @shizhao (one of CnbloggerCon committee members) that Chinese Blogger Conference 2008 is calling for theme suggestion now. The conference is going to held in Guangzhou on Nov. 15-16 this year. The poll is in Chinese and here is the quick translation:

• A 网志创建和谐社会 - Blogs Creat Harmonious Society
• B 多志兴邦 - More Blogs (Wills), More Flourishing the Country
• C 和谐网志 - Harmonious Blogs
• D 和而不同- Harmonious but Diverse
• E 和而不同，多志兴邦- Harmonious but Diverse, More Blogs (Wills), More Flourishing the Country
• F 网志的个性与社会性 - The Personality and Sociality of Blogs
• G Other- ____________________

You can go here and pick or suggest the theme you like together with your blog URL. I (not stand for CN Reviews) picked B. I think Chinese blogosphere want more diverse voices, but they are not necessary to be harmonious.

What’s your choice of the theme?

I don’t often start posts with quotes, but here’s one to kick off with:

In real life, we talk fake stuff with our real names. On the Internet, we talk real stuff with our fake names.

Although yours truly is an advocate of the Real-Name Blogging system (he uses real names on all of his blogs, as well as on other blogs including CN Reviews), he realizes that maybe not everyone wants to use their real names. Even for things as “non-polit” as the time-and-again-delayed opening of Beijing’s new Subway lines, there’s that bit of laoli laodao (唠呖唠叨), or yak yak yak, that is best kept anonymous (one of the recent comments, “the authorities fooled us again!”, is better kept anonymous — China Internet veterans would know why).

This is the funny bit about the Chinese Internet. On forums as diverse in topics as Mac and mass transit, the funniest or most thought-provoking posts are often started by The Mao Zedong Trainset or the Super Rascal Rabbit — yes, people with names that will never make it to the average Chinese ID card. Freeway forums ban people with names named after (pardon the pun) freeway cloverleaves. The heaviest criticisms of The Powers That Be are almost never signed with a true name — the thing coming to the “truest name” is probably a virtual John Hancock by “John Doe”.

Let’s remind ourselves of the fact that the Games are near — and that everyone’s getting on edge. As a result, if the Web gets jittery our side… we’d know why. Getting on edge with a fake name is probably safer than getting on edge with a real name.

Yet this very phenomenon is interesting in its own right. We’re beginning to see uncensored content in Chinese about things that appear closer to “the truth”. The funny thing is, they’re true — but the names of those who wrote the stuff are fake.

On the other hand, the moment a CCTV (or evening Beijing TV) microphone is spotted, many a citizen switch into “satisfy-those-above-us-who-are-watching-us” mode and say the kind of stuff that they know the guys “up there” — well, “want to hear”. Bad commentary is nearly always dumped — at least never shown on the mundane silver screen.

Want to know why this is happening? Go back to the quote at the start of this post.

Interesting.

Fellow bloggers: how do you measure success with your blog?

Bloggers and metrics: I’ll show my stats if you show me yours.

Some of my most fun meetups in China were with passionate bloggers lik38e Aw Guo Qirui (Awflasher (zh), Ifgogo) and Paul Denlinger (China Vortex). Some of those meetings I would characterize as “I’ll show you mine (stats) if you show me yours.” LOL. Apologize in advance for the self-referential 自恋 (narcissism…or is it 自我自恋?) inherent in this post.
Aw and Lisa were nice enough to pick me up at the Beijing Airport. But first thing Aw did when I got to my hotel was crack open his laptop to compare blog stats! Funny. But this turned out to be a blogger bonding moment. When Aw Guo talked about his focus on RSS subscribers as the ultimate stat I felt I had found a kindred soul. With another Ifgogo blogger Lisa Lee, we then talked about readers, traffic, Google, metrics, GFW, the new generation in China, blood types, Myers-Briggs, fortune telling. Here he is in my overpriced room at the Beijing JWMarriott:

Then the next day I had the same conversation about blog stats with Paul Denlinger! Here’s Paul and I going at it at the executive lounge at the JWMarriott:

Photo courtesy of ChristineLu.com

I later met with Paul and he said: “You really like numbers, don’t you? I can tell from your posts.” He called it. So here I am feeding my metrics obsession with another mega-post. How do you measure success with your blog?

First half of 2008 in review

With the close of the second quarter ended June 30, 2008, I thought I’d take the opportunity to look back at the first half of the year and measure some of our progress with CN Reviews. In summary, I’ve been pleased by our progress, but also feel like we need to restructure our blog and our focus to get better success in the future.

One of my favorite posts of all time on blog metrics is from Avinash Kaushik of Occam’s Razor. He met with us in Palo Alto and gave us some great blogging tips (like focus on RSS subscribers). I have followed his six recommendations closely to evaluate our own progress on CN Reviews.

Framework: Six Recommendations for Measuring Blog Success from Avinash Kaushik.

Here’s what Avinash recommends based on your “blog persona”:

CN Reviews is a “business blog” in Avinash’s framework. Below, I have followed his suggestions #1 through #4 and added a #5 which I call “Search Engine Optimization”.

Summary of my self-assessment of CN Reviews

• Raw Author Contribution - We have done a great job since our start on Dec 25, 2007, with 153 posts or 24 posts per month. The team, with David Feng being the #1 poster, has maintained a steady stream of posts for our readers. However, our posts are too long (including this one) and our writing is not accessible enough for non-native English speakers. Post length of 998 words/post needs to go down!
• Audience Growth - We are pleased with our audience growth, with June traffic of 12k visits and May traffic of 31k visits. We created a duplicate content situation which caused Google to start suppressing us in late May and June so we are recovering from that. Because we are a niche blog, we are also focused on quality of audience rather than quantity. So I don’t care so much about overall traffic. However, I do care about RSS subscribers and we have failed to build RSS subscribers at the rate we would like. So we need to focus our coverage and theme the blog more strongly to encourage more people.
• Conversion Rate - I’m pleased with the participation from the blog, with 2.5 comments/trackbacks per post on average.
• Citations/Ripple Index - Right now, our Technorati Rank is 51,951, and our Technorati Authority is 164. Our TA was 2 in January 2008.
• Search Engine Optimization - We are doing a good job with Search Engine Optimization. Google Page Rank = 4. Google Pages Indexed = 286. Yahoo Link Domain 2 = 16,878

And now on to the details…

#1 - Raw Author Contribution

Raw Author Contribution =

(A) Number of Posts / Number of Months Blogging
(B) Number of Words in Post / Number of Posts

I installed the General Stats plugin to measure these stats (on 7/4/2008):

CNReviews Raw Author Contribution is:

(A) 153 posts / 6.33 months (since 12/25/07) = 24
(B) 152,840 words in post / 153 Posts = 998

On average, 24 posts per month and 998 words per post. The frequency has been great, but long posts are not good for non-native speakers of English.

#2 - Holistic Audience Growth

Following Avinash’s methodology, we looked at our first measure of audience growth: Onsite Audience growth.

In June we had 12,082 visits, vs. 31,131 visits in May.

Our May traffic included a large spike due to the May 12 Sichuan earthquake, and then a drop in June due to a duplicate content problem on our site that caused us to be suppressed in Google and seriously damaged our Google traffic.

Here are some comments the Google suppression that we saw:

• May - We had a huge spike of traffic immediately after the China earthquake. May 16, was our peak day, with 4,641 unique visitors that day. But by 5/30, we noticed that we seemed to be suppressed in Google (for example, we couldn’t rank even on keyword query matching our post titles) and we were down to 497 unique visitors on 5/30.

• June - By 6/12, Min found the reason why. Thanks to a bad WordPress plugin, WordPress Contact Form 7, we had duplicate content for almost all of our pages. We found 495 pages in Google with this query: site:cnreviews.com “?wpcf7″. But our total indexed pages in Google was less than 900. We ended the month with 10,394 absolute unique visitors and 12,082 visits.

The second measure of audience growth is our “Offsite” Audience Growth or Feedburner and Feedsky (since Feedburner is blocked in China) subscribers.

We currently have 93 subscribers via Feedburner:

We also have on average 24.4 subscribers via Feedsky:

#3 - Conversion Rate

As Avinash says, blogs are a conversation. And comments are a reflection of how many people want to get into the conversation.

Conversion Rate =

Number of Visitor Comments / Number of Posts

To date, we have 546 total comments and trackbacks. However, many of those comments and trackbacks are our own:

• Self-trackbacks = 11% , or 61

• Self-comments = 19% , or 102

• So visitor comments and trackbacks = 70% of total reported comments, or 382

So our conversion rate is 382 / 153 = 2.5 comments/post

#4 Citations / Ripple Index

How broad is your impact across the blogosphere? Avinash recommends measuring “citations,” or how much people refer to your blog.

Citations / Ripple Index =

(A) Technorati Rank
(B) Technorati Authority

Right now, our Technorati Rank is 51,951, and our Technorati Authority is 164.

#5 Search Engine Optimization

From 1/1/2008 - 6/30/2008, we received 66% of our traffic from Search Engines.

Search Engine friendliness is a key factor for getting high quality blog traffic. We look at the following measures.

Search Engine Optimization =

(A) Google Page Rank
(B) Google Pages Indexed
(C) Yahoo! Link Domain (LD2)

Using a Firefox greasemonkey tool called SEOQuake, we can capture the following measures:

• Google Page Rank = 4

• Google Pages Indexed = 286

• Yahoo Link Domain 2 = 16,878

In summary, I’m pleased with the first six months of CN Reviews. Its a great start. But I would characterize it as a group of passionate people that have written on a number of interesting topics. But this group of people have not yet brought it together into a consistent, easy to understand concept that can get lots of RSS subscribers. That is what I’ll be working on with the CN Reviews blogging team to develop over the next few months. Stay tuned!

Tweeters, bloggers, and Web 2.0-ers in the People’s Republic unite! David Feng’s unannounced disappearance from that Great Big Internet out there was not totally unexpected: beginning from last Thursday, David was meeting blogger after blogger. You got that right: Not a single day without a new blogger (almost) from Thursday through to Monday.

A very 2.0 weekend, then. Here’s an overview plus my two cents about the Chinese blogo/Twittersphere, and whom he met:

• Isaac Mao (@isaac): He’s not a pioneer in the Chinese blogosphere for nothing. Humorous, witty, smart and damn-sharp, I found that it was almost impossible not to befriend Isaac. Open, insightful and always one to hold his own unique viewpoint, the “Chairman Mao of the 21st Century” (to use a 2007 Chinese Blogger Conference slogan) weighs in on issues weighty and obscure, and enjoys a laugh, but is also ready to tackle weighty issues. If there’s a big blogger conference and the Chairman’s missing, the conference would be missing a huge chunk of “something”. Isaac is more than just Twitter feed and his site; the extra something (his humor) makes a face-to-face with Isaac all that more valuable.

• Kaiser Kuo (@kaiserkuo): His Twitter ID puts him as the “Guitar-playing, blog-writing, digital strategizin’ daddy in the ‘Jing”, but this brief intro merely scrapes the surface of the man. Kaiser’s wit, humor and insight made him very much on a league of his own. Niubility, Zhonglish and a host of new hybrid Chinglish was made in no time with Kaiser at the table.

• Shizhao (@shizhao): I knew the name “Shizhao” back in my hidden mission at the Wikipedia in 2004 and 2005. So when I blew the lid off the secret that most Wikipedia articles about Chinese freeways around Beijing were a David Feng thing, both Isaac and Shizhao were like — oh my God! At the dining table, I followed Shizhao almost immediately. (I admit I was tweeting in excess at the table.)

• Christine Lu (@christinelu): My, my, was it great to meet the living legend in real life. Christine’s tweeting was taken offline at the table, as the tweeting came out in real life (as in talking), and she was just as humorous offline as she was online. Christine was an incredible breath of fresh air. Insightful, witty and always in the know are just a few words that come to mind when someone mentions Christine Lu to me.

• Tangos Chan (@Tangos): Tangos is an old friend; we met for the first time at the December 2007 Mobile Monday (shortly before “blognation China” tanked). Humor and knowledge add well to what Tangos co-does (so to speak) with Luyi Chen — which is the China Web 2.0 Review. The site is so good that even our techblog86 checks in quite often, and the mutual linking is the icing on the cake.

Part II comes in a tad later. We just saved you from what must be miles of commentary. In the past few days, I’ve also been fortunate enough to meet @simpsonsparadox (our very own Meg), @fuzheado, @pdenlinger (we’ve met before), @awflasher, @winserzhao, @Chinkerfly, @herock, @DaDing, @frankyu and the rest of the gang.

By the way — if I didn’t mention you — I’m sorry! Please don’t take it personally! If David Feng is indication, you will be mentioned — sooner or later!

Elliott’s note: I’ll be posting separately on my impressions of these meetings as well. Apologize for the redundancy in advance.  But uber blogger David Feng beat me to break the story! 

CNbloggerCon finally announced the conference location for 2008 in a very short notice on May 6 2008 without publishing the poll result:

中国广州市举办 (Guangzhou, China)

时间： 2008年11月15日-16日 (Nov. 15- 16)

It is a fair and nice choice. Guangzhou is the “South Gate” of China, the biggest city in south China. It is also known as “Flower City” (花城) and famous for its food culture. And it is also the only city that report TV/radio news in a dialet Cantonese.

See you there!

During the past few months, Christine Lu and I discovered we shared many of the same interests in bridging and connecting the world with China. So I’m pleased to share (h/t to Christine who already broke the CN Reviews sponsorship story) that CNReviews will be co-sponsoring Christine’s vlogging tour to Beijing and Shanghai from May 21 to May 30.

We will also be co-sponsoring a cocktail party for friends of CN Reviews, China Business Network, and attending the CHINICT conference on May 22 and 23. Aside from the conference, I will plan on carrying Christine’s bags and equipment as a China Business Network fanboy.

China Business Network aims to smash the one-way mirror

I was inspired to start CN Reviews because I observed the one-way mirror effect between America and the world. Chinese people know a lot more about the US than US people know about China. And according to Ethan Zuckerman, co-founder of Global Voices Online, its not because the voices of China and the world are not there. Its because the developed world is not interested. China Business Network is doing its part to smash the one-way mirror to make China visible to the World.

In the next few weeks, we’ll be planning our specific objectives for the trip. One goal is to reach out the China bloggers and the grassroots organizers of the CNBloggerCon to create a shared vision for bringing a select group of international bloggers to meet up with bloggers in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou.

Bringing together bloggers and young leaders could solve for global peace and understanding (crazy thinking, but yes I mean it!)

Our current vision is to bring international bloggers (and other young leaders) to meetups in Beijing and Shanghai, then culminating in an event to be held at a time and location very close to the CNBloggerCon, perhaps 1 day before or after. We don’t think bringing non-fluent international bloggers to CNBloggerCon, which is mostly in Chinese, is the right model. But by collocating with CNBloggerCon, we hope to create the opportunity for people to make connections with China bloggers.

Why am I spending my time trying to make this happen? My theory of change is as follows:

• People adept at the use of social media (like bloggers) have a disproportionate share of voice.
• Grassroots media is less subject to the economic and political pressures of mainstream media.
• Only a small number of American/European bloggers have strong connections with Chinese bloggers.
• Bringing bloggers and young leaders together will help then gain shared understanding and equip them to teach their audience and readers to become true “world citizens”

CN Reviews and China Business Network invite you to partner with us!

This is not a money-making or fame-generating exercise, so we would love to find other fellow travelers who share this vision and will work to make it happen. Our dream team would be Danwei, Global Voices Online, and other people who have been bridging the East and West for quite some time.

What do you think? A little too wide-eyed and optimistic for you?

Christine Lu (of China Business Network) compiled a great list of the (primarily English-language) China Twitterati on Twitter. If you’re on Twitter and am interested in China, go follow the Twitterati on the ChinaList!

Over the weekend, Louis Gray posted on the Twitter Noise Ratio — defined as the ratio of Updates to Followers — to contrast the “Listeners” (low Noise Ratio) from the “Megaphones” (high Noise Ratio). Naturally there was a bit of controversy about this measure! But it inspired me to measure up the ChinaList and see what I could find.

So what about the China Twitterati? Is this Twitter With Chinese Characteristics?

Here’s what I found about the ChinaList.

• The Super Twitterati. As measured by either Updates, Followers, or both, there are a few Super Twitter users: @thecarol, @isaac, @christinelu, @flypig, @webleon, @bbluesman! Wow. I am not worthy.
• In General, there is a wide variation of usage of Twitter among the ChinaList. Clearly there is no one best way to use Twitter. It is entirely between you, yourself, and your Followers!
• The Top Updaters. Some but not all of these Super Twitterati are among the prolific Top Updaters among the China Twitterati. The top 10 are @flypig, @webleon, @bbluesman, @christinelu, @DavidFeng, @isaac, @marcvanderchijs, @dimi3, @ericgonzalez, and @shanghaiist.
• The Top “Megaphones” among us (to use Louis’ controversial measure of Updates per Followers) are: @kevinkoo, @dimi3, @DavidFeng, @flypig, @siumuimui, @webleon, @bbluesman, @shanghaiist, @expatacular, and @Guerel. This group has a ratio of 15.6 Updates per Follower, vs. the median of 3.2 Updates per Follower! This is nearly five times the median! As my co-blogger DavidFeng says to his new Followers, “Get ready for your arrival!”
• The “Listeners” among us are: @kriadam, @ionchina, @djsircharles, @ThomasCrampton, @nicolasz, @ChinaTechToday, @chinapolarbear @JakeNewby, @anguslau, @Agraylin, @Neocha
• The “Moderates”, who have a Noise Ratio of near the median of 3.2 Updates/Follower include: @thehumanaught, @dedlam, @papajohn, @ajschokora, @jputman. @pandapassport, @msittig, @samflemming, @PhilipJohnson8, @ChinaMatt

The rest of this post has 2 cool charts and 4 leaderboards, including the entire ChinaList ranked by Followers at the end.

Chart 1: Updates vs. Followers - The Super China Twitterati of the ChinaList

This chart plots each member of the ChinaList with total Updates on the Y axis and total Followers on the X axis. All data is of 4/27/2008. This chart shows the emergence of Six Super Twitter users: @thecarol, @isaac, @christinelu, @flypig, @webleon, @bbluesman.

What’s the yellow shaded area? The majority of the 92 ChinaList Twitterati are in the shaded yellow area and I’ve created a separate chart for that area.

This data that produced this graph can be critiqued as not considering the length of time that people have been on Twitter. So for example, @thecarol may have joined 2 months ago and may be tweeting more rapidly than @flypig but he may have been on Twitter for a much longer time. What would be more interesting would be to graph Updates/Month vs. Follower Growth/Month. But the data are not available to do this.

Chart 2: Updates vs. Followers - The Rest of Us China Twitterati (the shaded yellow section in the above chart).

Because the Super Twitterati are such outliers, I expanded the chart to include only the mainstream China Twitterati.

Some of the more prolific Twitterati include @DavidFeng, @Marcvanderchijs, @shanghaiist, @dimi3, @ericgonzalez, @sioksiok, @zjjtrans, @kevinkoo, @shanghaiist, and @FonsTuinstra.

Leaderboard 1: Top 10 with Most Followers

He who ends up with the most followers does not win!

Most people might think “most followers” is the goal of Twitter, but Robert Scoble convincingly argues that its not about how many followers you have, but how many people you follow. That’s why he is following 21,000 people and tweets roll about 1 tweet/second on his GTalk screen! In fact, some of us (here, here, and here) wonder if he is a Cylon. If you worried about not having enough followers, please read his post and focus on following the right people, not about trying to win a popularity contest. Especially if you’re a Cylon.

In my own experience, I feel Followers is a function of the time that you have been on Twitter and how much you interact with other people who happen to have lots of Followers. I’m sure @ChristineLu retweeting my tweets and posts have resulted in a ton of new Followers for me, for example. Thanks Christine!

Leaderboard 2: Top 10 with Most Updates

Is there Life outside of Twitter? Ask these prolific Tweeters. Again, this metric is not entirely meaningful because it doesn’t capture the rate of increase of tweets. Either these folks have been on Twitter for a long time, OR they are prolific updaters, so be forewarned if you follow them! My dirty non-harmonious secret: I have actually unfollowed 1 of these people because they are too “noisy” for me, because they use TwitterFeed to feed all of their blog posts on Twitter! (But I follow the rest!)

Leaderboard 3: Top 10 Updates/Follower (aka Twitter Noise! according to LouisGray)

There is a lot of criticism of the Twitter Noise Ratio measure on FriendFeed and at Louis Gray’s post. Updates include the @ messages that you might send to a specific Follower or Twitterer. So as you get into more conversations, Louis’ measure would condemn you as “noisy!” Stowe Boyd has a different measure called Conversation Index that may be better but is not possible to measure easily. This Conversational Index is expressed like this:

Boyd’s Twitterized Conversational Index = (number of replies made by followers / number of tweets)

This is similar to measuring the number comments a blogger gets on a post. The more comments, the more reader engagement. Boyd is suggesting that the more @replies, the more your Followers are engaged and interested by your Tweets.

Also, I suggested that “Total Updates/Month” or “General Updates/Month” might be a better measure, but there are no historical Twitter stats to my knowledge.

What Twitter Metrics Matter? What’s interesting about how you or your fellow China Twitterati use Twitter? What might you change about how you use Twitter?

Karl Marx, in his famous Theses on Feuerbach, said, “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it.” I hope that this interpretation of the world will allow you to change it in your small way. On Twitter.

Finally, here is the entire list ordered by Followers:

Leaderboard 4: Entire China Twitterati List on ChinaList, sorted by Followers

Here is the Source Spreadsheet for ChinaList Twitterati 20080427 with all this data in case you are interested in it. Use it under Creative Commons license, by-sa-nc 3.0 with attribution to Elliott Ng, CNReviews.com.

UPDATE 4/28:  From the bully pulpit of Ogilvy Digital Watch, Kaiser Kuo wrote an excellent post discussing the trend of blogging about Twitter as dangerous self-referential narcissism and the risks of “excitable dorkitude,”:

Each to his own, of course. But am I wrong in thinking that there’s something not quite healthy and weirdly solipsistic about this? Mind you, I do find Twitter useful, as I made clear in a post of mine last week - a post which, as if to prove the point it made, rode a wave of Twitter-distribution to become one of my most widely-read posts to date. But if we all start looking like a bunch of excitable dorks (which many clearly are) we’ll scare away people who actually might make truly useful contributions - links to great stories, life hacks, great recommendations on apps or software or books or eats, real insights into the things that matter: things predicated on actually having a life.

Guilty as charged.  Kaiser earlier post about the myriad uses of Twitter notwithstanding, I concur with his latest view that indeed there is life outside of Twitter.

1kg More (多背一公斤）was four years old on April 18, 2008.

Happy Birthday, 1kg More! And congratulations on the great progress in the past year, Andrew!

I chatted with 1kg More founder/blogger/travel enthusiast Andrew Yu (my previous interview with Andrew is here) a few days ago and got the latest updates on 1kg More:

1. 1kg More is in Shanghai taxis: If you are taking any taxi that is running Touch Media, who recently announced to receive RBM 1000 million VC funding on Mar. 28, 2008, advertising, you will see 1kg on the screen. As I know, Touch Media is currently running in Qiang Sheng Taxi (强生出租车, the brown/deep yellow color cab).

2. 1kg More has a new website: With this new version, a user now can:

• Search schools that need help by typing in the destination name .(I gave a try and found 10 schools in Guilin (桂林) area, and 26 schools in Lijiang Yuman (云南丽江) area, very nice!)
• Upload the school information online. 1kg volunteers will then contact the school to make sure the information are accurate.
• Share photos with other members.
• Join any other 1kg activities.

Volunteer Suave Su is using various open-sourced technologies to build the website, and the 1kg.org site is open to any volunteers to contribute. You can email Suave (suave.su at gmail.com) if you want to help. It is not a rocket-science project, but I am very impressed by what Suave has done by himself.

3. 1kg More has more schools: In the past 3 months in 2008, there are 120+ added into the search-able database (the number for the year 2007 is 98).

4. 1kg More is now a registered entity: As a grassroots NGO in China, Andrew told me it is impossible for 1kg More to get a non-profit organization registration. And the only way to have a legitimated identity is to register 1kg as a commercial entity. Andrew and I have chatted about this before, and the reality is that there is hardly a way for a grassroots NGO to get an official recognition from the government at present due to a serial complicated concerns. I am looking forward to 1kg More’s Chinese characterized NGO model.

Read 1kg More annual summary from Andrew Yu in Chinese here.

UPDATE 5/5:  CNBloggerCon 2008 Location and date has been decided!

Fellow CN Reviews blogger Min Guo (@grigo) tweeted me the poll for 2008’s CNBloggerCon location via @webleon (webleon.org) and @shizhao (talk.blogbus.com).

The tinyurl just goes to a Google Docs form:

What you see after you press the Submit button:

As you many know, I would love to attend part of the CNBloggerCon 2008. That’s why I blogged about CNBlogger 2007 here, here, and here.

The form also asks “Whom do you want to see on 4th CNBloggerCon?” I felt I needed to put something down so I wouldn’t be dismissed as a ‘bot. So I listed:

• Aether
• Isaac Mao
• Keso
• Carol: @thecarol
• Tangos and Luyi Chen
• Awflasher (covered in our post about the new generation of tech bloggers)
• Bruce Wang
• Wangjianshuo (the first commenter on this blog!)
• Rebecca MacKinnon
• Oiwen Lam
• Jeremy Goldkorn
• David Feng
• Christine Lu
• Livid (CN reviews Livid interview, and about the V23X shutdown)
• Xu Jinglei (why not?)
• Acosta
• Andrew, founder of 1kg.
• Feng37 (and his incredible liveblogging translation which I will rely on)

After all, Min had blogged about the top China bloggers (probably) and also who’s who in the CNBloggerCon-connected blogosphere. And Robert Scoble had also expressed interest in China. So I am already prepared with my list of who I want to see.

I know the intent is to rotate around all the major cities in China. That’s probably the right thing to do. But Shanghai and Beijing are always the most convenient for foreigners like me, even though I have a nice, available family apartment in Guangzhou should the CNBloggerCon be in GZ.

I went ahead and voted even though I’m not really part of the CNBloggerCon club! But its a pretty grassroots even so I hope they will be laid back about a foreigner crashing the party!

Who wants to go to CNBloggerCon? Who would you want to meet and talk with? Where should the conference be?

Here’s an inspiring slide show to get you excited:

| View | Upload your own

Excited and a bit humbled to be on the same page with all these China A-listers!

I was excited to hear that CN Reviews was featured on the new China.Alltop.com, a new blog aggregator created by Guy Kawasaki. Thanks to Guy Kawasaki, Christine Lu, and the Alltop editors.

So now we are on the same page as many of our blogosphere idols. This will force the humble CN Reviews blogging crew to continue to raise our game!

Six other China blogs that we recommend for your personal Alltop

It was hard to find blogs in my Google reader not already on Alltop. Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, we wanted to share the love by mentioning six diverse blogs for you to consider on your own version of Alltop:

China Financial Markets

I’ve been increasing on edge about the global economy since the Bear Stearns meltdown, and Michael Pettis’ excellent blog has helped me make sense of it from China’s perspective. Michael is a professor at Peking University’s Guanghua school of Management. If you like Seeking Alpha, where Michael often posts, you’ll like China Financial Markets.

IfGoGo

IfGoGo was started by Aw Guo (郭启睿 Guo Qirui) who mainly blogs in Chinese at Awflasher. We first posted on Aw Guo and the new generation of Chinese blogosphere in December 2007. IfGoGo is a group blog by Chinese who choose to blog in English. Some of my favorite writers include Cat Chen, Lisa, Aw Guo himself, Gijo, and Chris Ding. The blog frequency is too low for my tastes, but I love connecting with “real” Chinese blogging in English. If you like Wangjianshuo, you’ll love IfGoGo.

Sinosplice

Sinosplice is written by John Pasden, who works at ChinesePod. It is lifestyle blog that covers interesting topics around language learning, linguistic and cultural differences, and travel. Having looked at other people’s blogrolls, it is no exaggeration to say that All Roads Lead to Sinosplice where the China expat blogosphere is concerned. If you like China but have “This is China moments”, you’ll love Sinosplice.

Thomas Crampton

Thomas covers technology, politics, media, and startups. He often has great video interviews of executives and entrepreneurs. His posts are more journalistic than personal. Based in Hong Kong, Thomas was a journalist for International Herald Tribune and New York Times. If you like Ogilvy Digital Watch, RConversation, and China Business Network shaken, not stirred, then help yourself to Thomas Crampton.

TechBlog86

Our own David Feng has his own technology centric blog, that takes over where CN.Blognation.com left off. David is a consummate blogger and journalist, who covers news fast and furious on both his Twitter stream and his various blogging projects. If you like China Web 2.0 Reviewand Pacific Epochbut at Twitterlike speed and brevity, you’ll like TechBlog86.

Violet Eclipse

Finally, one of my favorite expat bloggers is Meg Stivison, who also is a guest blogger here at CN Reviews. She first started blogging when she was at Yantai as a student, and now resides in Beijing with her boyfriend Stick. She writes about Beijing life, her work, and has a keen eye for cultural differences as a foreigner in China. In addition to our common interest in China, we also share a common interest in Azeroth! If you like Sinosplice, you’ll like Violet Eclipse.

There you have it. Elliott’s picks for his own china.alltop.com. What are some of your favorite undiscovered China bloggers?

Updated 4/11:  Dan Harris at China Law Blog offered the following four suggestions:

1. Absurdity, Allegory and China
2. China Bystander
3. Mutant Palm
4. The China Game

Thanks Dan!