Via Techmeme, I saw a post by Louis Gray entitled Mashable Uses A-list power to Steal B-list buzz alleging that Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins of Mashable stole a quote without attribution.
Aside from getting me a bit indignant about the plight of the little guy, the post reminded me of a Mashable post from Mark bashing the tech blogosphere for being obsessed with Robert Scoble’s Facebook erasure versus the violence and disputed election in Kenya. Which then spun out-of-control into criticism of Robert Scoble himself. Which then resulted in Scoble defending himself and explaining why he doesn’t blog about Kenya. Via RConversation, I also read Global Voices co-founder Ethan Zuckerman’s defense of Scoble that also does a great job explicating the “known bug” of the blogosphere that people write and read about what they know about, and they often don’t know and don’t care about international issues like the Kenyan post-election events. If you read this, please take the time to read Ethan’s post now!
In fact, Robert Scoble is already global, and his post on wanting to go to CNbloggercon was one reason why we opened this blog. He has also repeatedly tried to share his blogger fame and fortune generously with Global Voices’ founders Ethan and Rebecca MacKinnon. He is already a globalist. So we emailed Scoble late last year and asked him what he wanted to learn about China. This is what he had to say:
- Who are the best tech bloggers in China and how do they differ from bloggers elsewhere in the world?
- What is being a blogger in China like? What perceptions do you have of bloggers elsewhere in the world?
- Take us around your local technology store and give us a tour.
- How do you perceive American companies like Microsoft/Yahoo/Google/Sun Microsystems and how are they behaving in China?
- What are the big topics in China? News we should pay attention to?
(I didn’t get advance blogging permission on sharing this so I hope its ok Robert that I share this!)
These are the issues that we intend to cover at CNReviews. We want to create greater awareness and cultural understanding. We are not sure what the dividends are but it will be surely goodness.
At the same time, we want what we do to have reach and to generate profits, and agree with Ethan’s view that the problem is on the demand side, not the supply side. I also engaged in a great dialog about this subject with Kai Pan at Tripdingo.com (disclosure: I work at Kango and Tripdingo.com is a Kango sponsored blog) where he shared some similar insights about what people really gravitate toward and some tough questions about who our target audience is. In Beijing, I also had one of the best chocolate croissants in my recent life in Chaoyang (contact me if you want to find out where!) with Kaiser Kuo where he shared a data point that one very respected China blog is only getting about 1000 unique visitors/day, and only has about 1000 RSS subscribers. That was a bit depressing because I really viewed this blog as a giant in the field. There is clearly a demand problem.
So I’m excited about 2008 and the journey that we are on with CNReviews. I know we can make a contribution, and I know we can engage with some great blogs and some great bloggers. I hope we can get some people to read the blog too! In the meantime, we’ve got some great feedback from Robert Scoble and hope to tackle some of these issues in the months ahead!
Photos with CC license for commercial reuse: DEMOSH from Kenya; Kai Hendry from China
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Shel Israel: 8 Stories of Global Social Media – CNBloggerCon 2008 
Interesting: a photo credit to a “Kai” and a reference to Ogilvy’s “Kaiser Kuo.” Interestingly, my name is both Kai and Kaiser too. How freaky.
As for the list of Scoble demands, here are my initial thoughs:
1. Not enough of them can blog reasonably in English so unless you can read or communicate in Chinese, it will be difficult to scrape anything meaningful out of them.
2. It would be easy enough to get and throw together some interviews to investigate this.
3. Easy enough, though you need a certain amount of local familiarity to really know the fun nitty gritty stuff that might actually interest people. This would be a combination of prices, offerings, and “alternatives.”
4. In general, the vast majority of people don’t really know much about these companies short of a few hardcore tech-heads (like anywhere else in the world really). Maybe that’s what the question is aiming at, though.
5. This is easy but tricky stuff. For one, there are always big headlines but foreigners can fall into the trap of focusing on issues that most Chinese either don’t care about or don’t feel like they have the power to do something about (and hence don’t care about). Human rights issues are one obvious example. The vast majority of people (especially on the net and like most places) generally care about entertainment-related frivolities. That said, there still are issues that become significant in China and as usual, that’d require keeping your ear to the ground at popular forums, reliable bloggers, and a well rounded circle of friends.
@Kai (of Tripdingo.com),
Thanks for the input. Agree that most Chinese bloggers don’t blog in English, so we would need to translate some of their posts in addition to translating the interview. Agree that local familiarity of the computer stores is critical. Also people might not be that pleased with us carrying a videocamera around, worried we are from the police or something! I TOTALLY agree with your point 5. There is such a huge feedback loop in mainstream media. Some story gets going (e.g. lead-based paint in children’s toys from China) and then it just goes through the repeater over and over again until it is the loudest signal coming out of China. Grassroots media and censorship the same, although clearly there is important news to be told on this topic and maybe not enough detailed understanding of the situation. Hard to discover the cool new “memes” that is out there that is truly interesting as per our conversation. Thanks again for being a thought partner on this. I’m all for making more well-rounded friends and trying to keep an ear to the ground, that’s the whole point isn’t it? :) Thanks Kai!