Prominent IT Blogger Keso Suspended By Twitter

UPDATE – 9/1 ~00:30 am Beijing time:  I received a tweet from Keso that showed that he was unblocked.  He wrote:

感谢所有对我的Twitter帐号被挂起表示关心、支持和帮助的朋友，谢谢你们！特别感谢CNReviews的 @elliottng.

Yesterday morning, I saw in Twitter (via @msittig) that famous tech blogger Keso had been blocked–not by the Chinese government–but by Silicon Valley startup company, Twitter.   As one of the most prominent IT bloggers in China, you would think that his suspension would be quickly investigated by Twitter and then reversed.  But as of the time of this post, his account is still suspended, nearly 48 hours later.

Consider this:  Twitter blocks China’s equivalent of Robert Scoble (a popular, pioneering tech blogger).  Forty-eight hours go by and nothing happens.  Do you think that would happen if it were actually Robert Scoble?

I conducted an email interview with Keso to get his thoughts on this matter.   Chinese bloggers are so used to inconvenience and outages, he answered my questions in a calm, cool, and collected way.  (We’re still working on the translation, this is very rough).

1.  When did your account get Suspended by Twitter?

我发现我的Twitter帐号被suspended，是在北京时间8月27日凌晨2点钟左右。在我的帐号被suspend之前几个小时，我刚刚启用了一个第三方应用——Twitter Gadget for Gmail。你知道，Twitter在中国已经被屏蔽将近3个月，中国大陆用户访问Twitter非常困难，他们不得不通过一些第三方应用，以及Tor、VPN等方式，间接访问Twitter。我怀疑——仅仅是怀疑——我的帐号suspended可能跟Twitter Gadget for Gmail有关系。

2.  How many followers did you have?  how many updates?  how long have you been using Twitter?

Until my account was suspended, I had 8000+ followers, 498 tweets. I opened my Twitter account on Jan 30, 2007.

3.  Most people in the US may not have heard of you.  Who are you?  What do you blog about?  How many readers do you have (e.g. monthly visitors/page views, RSS subscribers, etc)?

First and foremost, I am a blogger.  I am also an Internect consultant/advisor with a number of Internet startups.   The number of my blog readers is not able to be measured accuratly,  because many articles are reproduced/reposted onto many different sites, such as Sina News.   In addition, many portals have set up mirror sites of my blog.  As long as I update my blog,  editors from portals will manaully update the “mirrored” blogs on the portals.  According to FeedBurner statistics, my feed subscription number 171,526. But this number does not include the subscription via some sites such as Douban 9 O’clock (9.douban.com) because  they are using another feed which is not able to be measured.

我首先是一名blogger，其次我是一名互联网咨询顾问，为一些互联网startups提供咨询服务。我的blog无法统计具体的读者数量，因为很多文章会被转载到不同的网站，比如新浪新闻，另外，很多门户网站也开设了我的blog镜像，只要我有更新，这些网站的编辑就会人工更新我的镜像blog。根据FeedBurner的统计，我的feed订阅数为171,526。不过这个数字并不包括通过豆瓣九点（9.douban.com）等网站上的订阅，因为这些网站使用的是无法被统计的另一个feed。

4. Your blog content is copied to BBS and also at mirror blogs at the major portals.  Is this done with your permission?  What do you think is the difference between how blog content is reused in China vs. the English-speaking world?

Some of the mirror blogs are set up with my agreement, while others are set up without my permission.  I can only sigh, but can’t do anything about it. A few years ago I wrote an article about this situation : Why not Link other than Repost.  But simply copying blogs without links back is still the most common kind of behavior in China, as each site wants to build its own private garden.  Here, there are a lot of people claim to be “open”, but their “open” may be often false or very limited.   As long as being a closed, private garden can bring greater benefit, these sites will refuse to open up. In China, the big Internet companies, such as Tencent, Sina, Baidu, etc. have generally been building up private gardens.  They are typically bad [at link attribution & being open.]

有些镜像blog是经过我同意的，有些则是他们自己擅自开设的，对此我只能叹气，却无能为力。几年前我曾经写过一篇文章《与其转载，不如链接》（http://blog.donews.com/keso/archive/2005/11/15/627033.aspx）， 不过看上去转载仍然是中国互联网上最常见的一种行为，每个网站都想构建自己的私家花园。在这里，也有很多人说“开放”，但这里的开放，常常是虚假的，或者 非常有限的，只要封闭能够带来更大的利益，他们就会拒绝开放。在中国，那些大的互联网公司，比如腾讯、新浪、百度等，一直都在构建私家花园，他们都是很坏 的典型。

5.  Someone on Twitter (@msittig) read that you were moving over to Sina’s microblogging service.  Is that true?  What is that service?

Sina Micro-Blog is a service similar to Twitter, and is currently in internal testing phase.  Sina has successfully invited China’s celebrity bloggers to set up on their blog platform, and I expect that Sina Micro-Blog will adopt the same operating strategy, focused on the development of the relationship between celebrities and fans. I was invited to try the product by Sina.  As long as my Twitter account restored, I will still use Twitter, because Twitter has become an important channel for me to access more information.

新浪微博是一个类似Twitter的服务，目前还处于内部测试阶段。新浪曾经成功地邀请中国的名人开设blog，我估计新浪微博也会采取相同的运营策略，着重发展名人与fans的关系。我是受新浪邀请试用该产品，谈不上moving。只要我的Twitter帐号恢复，我仍然会用Twitter，因为Twitter已经成为我获取信息的一个重要渠道.

6.  Ironically, you just blogged about Twitter and microblogging before getting suspended. Do you think the microblogging model will be successful in China?  It seems that there have been Twitter clones for year (Zuosa, Fanfou) and none have been that successful.  Does QQ satisfy most people’s need for “microblogging” in some way?  Who else besides Sina might want to launch a microblogging service?