About China blogosphere, travel, and entrepreneurship

Back in November, I had the same sentiment that Robert Scoble and Wang JianShuo had: I wish I was at Chinese Bloggercon. Fortunately, Min was able to go, shot some photos on the way there, and wrote up a summary (in English and Chinese) on what was most interesting at the conference. This is first part of a multi post series. (Yes, I know the event was two months ago!) On a separate post (because it is breaking my template for some reason) is a nice slideshare I found on the Cnbloggercon blog itself.

Getting Oriented
Four posts helped me get oriented, including Min’s Cnbloggercon summary. Jeremy Goldkorn of Danwei provides a great overview of the event, characterizing the conference of 400+ as “an eclectic gathering of geeks, Internet entrepreneurs, bloggers, social activists and NGO bloggers, teachers and educators, medium people and free speech advocates.” The collaborative and open attitude of the attendees is also complemented by “a continually-updated series of messages sent by mobile phone and IM via the servers of local Twitter clone Jiwai. This screen soon started resembling the comments section of a particularly anarchic blog…” Another journalist, Joshua Chin, decried this community aspect contributing to a attention deficit disorder conference, “I feel so 2.0, my attention so divided I’m incapable of sustaining a single thought for longer than it takes to say ‘wireless’.”Isaac Mao, one of the organizers, also reflects back to his goals of creating a highly participatory conference reflective of his ideas of Sharism and the emergent Social Brain. I’m not sure how I would feel about the twitterstream (or more correctly, the jiwaidestream).Rebecca MacKinnon expresses well her excitement for this “egalitarian” and completely volunteer run conference:

“The best conferences naturally have interesting speakers and panels, but they also serve as catalyst and focal point for community…Cnbloggercon is definitely that kind of conference.”

Photos from Min (aka Grigo) and the Flickr Cnbloggercon group tag also helped me get a better sense of the event.

Rebecca’s follow on coverage also contrasted two other conferences, the Orange Labs sponsored Web 2.0 conference and China Foo Camp. Despite the valiant efforts of the sponsors, Foo Camp was less well run than the volunteer driven CNBloggerCon and she “was surprised by the 1.0-ness of the main Saturday conference.” Tim O’Reilly’s own post entitled “On the Outside, Looking In” was insightful both in highlighting the difficulty of bridging between the Western blogosphere and Chinese blogosphere, as well as his own feelings of not being the consummate connector that he is in the US. But despite the difficulties, more efforts like this are needed. Rebecca: “But with the Chinese-language Internet soon to become the largest part of the global Internet, we badly need more bridges, more collaboration, more dialogue, and better understanding.”

There are so many interesting themes here. First, there is a lot of discussion about what it means to be “2.0″ vs. “1.0″. Second, there is also the sense of a community that is egalitarian, diverse, and grassroots. Third, that established multinationals like IBM and US kingmakers like O’Reilly can’t just expect to replicate their model and leverage their US contacts to be successful in China. I’ll summarize the rest of the conference in more parts. I hope this is a useful resource but more than anything else its helpful for me to get my head around what is going on in the Chinese blogosphere.