RConversation

Bloggers, innovation, and China's future

(China's finest ham for the cam
Originally uploaded by Aether Woo)

The second annual Chinese blogger conference in Hangzhou came at a time when Chinese government authorities are feeling threatened by this new grassroots medium and are trying to find ways to control it. The proposed "real name system" policy  (still under discussion, not yet implemented) would require bloggers to register their real names and identities with their blog hosting services and to publish under their real names.  Most seemed to agree that the proposed system would be hard to implement without destroying the business of many blog-hosting companies. More than that - they are bewildered that they should be feared rather than praised for their creativity and initiative. As the A-list tech blogger Keso pointed out in his keynote speech: "Those who think that blogs are violent or threatening only see it that way because they view society as threatening." (I blogged his speech in more detail here.)

(Photo: Isaac Mao speaks 
Originally uploaded by lychen1009.)

Fang Xingdong, head of the blog-hosting service Bokee.com, declared in a presentation that he believes China will drive global innovation in the 21st century.  It was clear that the people in the room would love nothing more than to play a part in making that dream a reality.  Will the authorities allow them to play this role?

Foreign participants could not help but come away being impressed by the creativity, optimism, and idealism of China's Internet generation. The people in this room are not socially disruptive revolutionaries. They are people who would like to get on with the business of finding ways to use the Internet to improve people's lives.  To the extent that politics won't prevent them from doing so, they would prefer not to be involved with politics.  A quick sampling of their values and ideas:

Several speakers spoke about how individuals and companies can build reputation and credibility in ways that have social as well as economic value. A professor from Guangzhou, Cheng Lehua, gave a very interesting talk about the psychology of trust and credibility on the web. Sessions on Chinese wikipedia and Creative Commons led to discussions of how any individual can share their knowledge and creative energies to the benefit of society.

A panel of educators described how they are using blogs to share knowledge in new and exciting ways - to the betterment of China's educational system. (A blog and wiki for geography teachers is helping people pool and improve their teaching materials and methods, for instance.) Teachers have their students use blogs as a way to collaborate on assignments and engage in new kinds of distance learning as well as home schooling.

Members of small non-profit organizations and charities demonstrated how they use blogs not only to raise funds but also to inform donors about how their money is being spent. One panelist, a blind man who leads an organization for the visually impaired, described how blogs combined with voice recognition software is helping China's isolated community of visually impaired people communicate with one another and educate themselves in a society where resources for handicapped education are extremely limited.

(China's e-generation 
Originally uploaded by Aether Woo.)

Bloggers speaking in a mash-up panel and an entrepreneur presenting about microcontent demonstrated how user-centric platforms are being built for content-sharing and creative collaboration. Over and over again, people repeated the importance of respecting the individual user's needs - and the importance of building tools that maximize the user's ability to drive services in directions that the companies themselves might not have imagined. People spoke of the importance of "personal spaces" as well as "public spaces"  online - and the responsibilities that go with creating and maintaining both types of spaces.  One of China's earliest bloggers, Wang Jianshuo said: "keeping things open encourages creativity." At this point, you're not competing on the basis of your content, you're competing on the basis of creativity. 

In the final panel on entrepreneurship, Isaac Mao pointed out that if you really want to sustain your company's success over the long run, your focus should be on the value you create for your users, rather than simply on profits. As Chen Xuer put it, the goal of a Web 2.0 company should be to help "fulfill people's urgent needs and also find ways for people to live their lives more fully."

If one extrapolates China's future from this group of individuals, you see a peace-loving, compassionate, humanistic, globally minded, flexible, hard-working lot who are well poised to drive Chinese innovation.... and to drive it in directions that the entire world should certainly welcome. The Chinese government would be crazy not to embrace them as poster kids for China's future. If the government is not capable of doing so, it will be to the long-term detriment not only of China's economy but also of China's global credibility, which in turn has an impact on China's long-term global influence.

Bokee's Fang Xingdong warned in his speech that while the "invisible hand of the market" may have enabled China's blogosphere to reach its present stage, "from now on the hand of the government will play the biggest role."

If there had been time for me to ask him a follow up question, I would have asked him whether he thinks that the result will be an increasingly unfair playing field for Internet businesses in China. Will that stifle entrepreneurship? Will the growing need for businesses to focus on playing politics with regulators - and scrambling to comply with constantly-shifting, vague regulations -  sap the innovative energies of China's entrepreneurs? If anybody reading this has some thoughts about the answer, please hit the comments section.

links for 2006-10-30

• MediaShift . Digging Deeper::Brian Ross: Foley Story a Watershed for ABC News on the Web | PBS
  Mark Glaser interviews ABC's Brian Ross and examines how blogging played a key role in ABC's investigative reporting on the Foley story.
  (tags: blogs journalism media)
• Jack Ma: Vision, and fears of a bubble
  Danwei's Jeremy Goldkorn summarizes a speech by Alibaba's Jack Ma.
  (tags: alibaba china internet yahoo!)

Chinese Blogger Conference Slideshow and Video

A non-blogger friend of mine who I brought along to this year's Chinese Blogger Conference thought the meeting had a Woodstock-like quality. Above is a slideshow of pictures that attendees took and uploaded to Flickr. I'm behind on my writeups, but will post more later as soon as I get a chance. The pictures tagged cnbloggercon almost say more about the spirit of the meeting, though. Also check out this conference photo feed mashup running on the Chinese Web 2.0 site Yupoo. And here is a video somebody uploaded onto the Chinese video sharing site, Toodou：

Bahraini blogger Mahmood blocked by his government

Mahmood's Den, a prominent Bahraini blog has been blocked. Mahmood, a free speech crusader and anti-corruption proponent writes with great wit about his country's politics, his region, and relationships between the West and the Arab world (among other things). He has posted the government order signed by the minister of information on his blog, under the gleeful title "free publicity about to start!" (and tagged with a "brain farts" category). Then he writes:

Did I mention that these lists of “undesirable” sites are compiled most probably by our illustrious Jamal Dawood, the guy implicated in the bandargate scandal for accepting a kickback of BD2,200. Yes I know he’s cheap, and he’s still running for parliament! The guy has no shame whatsoever!

Mahmood is leader of the "Just Bahraini" campaign to oppose Suni/Shiite sectarianism in Bahraini politics. Here's how he describes the point of the campaign:

"It doesn’t matter if you are a Bahraini, Indian, Sudanese, Saudi, Kuwaiti or Plutonian. Show your support for us Bahrainis who want to live as a SINGLE nation away from sectarianism...Let us tell everyone that we will not stand by idly while some scabs diligently try to destroy our lovely country."

Here's the badge that he has been using to spread the campaign:

Blogging between China and the rest of the world

(photo courtesy Aether Woo) Portnoy Cheng speaks - we listen...

This is a picture from our panel titled "From China to the World, From the World to China."  I introduced the panel by talking about the serious imbalance of global information flows. Multinational media organizations are largely based in the West and for this reason, you have a heavy flow of information going from the West to the rest of the world, countered by a relative trickle going back from the rest of the world to the West. Until recently, if you felt that the global media was misrepresenting your country and your people (or ignoring your country completely), there wasn‘t much to be done unless you had the power to influence a lot of Western journalists and get them to interview you. Now people all around the world are taking matters into their own hands and blogging their own perspectives, in some cases with the express purpose of informing the outside world about their country in ways that the mainstream media fails to do. Global Voices is trying to aggregate many of these blogs. I invited our panelists to talk about the ways in which different projects are trying to improve communication between the Chinese blogosphere and the rest of the world.

Unfortunately I couldnt take detailed notes because I was on stage doing the panel. But here's the basic gist:

Isaac Mao talked about how the international media covers China in a limited way that many Chinese people feel is biased and unfair. Blogs, he believes, are an important way for people to take matters into their own hands and represent themselves. He eloquently explained why it's important for Chinese bloggers to think more globally, and consider their power as media creators to make a difference in the way that the rest of the world understands them.

Frank Dai talked about how the biggest obstacle to communication isnt so much language, it's the difference in perspective. He started blogging in English last year and communicating with people around the world, and he found that they tended to be interested in some of the things he had to say, but not others, which left them still with a skewed picture.

Portnoy, founder of the Global Voices Chinese translation project, talked about why he started translating GV's roundups that summarize and link to blog posts around the world. He said that while Taiwan has a high amount of free speech, speech in Taiwan actually has very low credibility. Taiwan's media reports very little about the outside world. So he decided last year to start translating posts from GV, then it expanded into a group translation project involving bloggers in Taiwan, mainland China and Hong Kong. He welcomes more people to help.

Chow Sze Cheng then introduced the new project, Interlocals.net, a new multilingual blogging platform run out of Hong Kong, with contributors all around the region. He says a major challenge is trying to find ways to make the lives and experiences of individuals in one country relevant to people in other countries - and worth their attention. They are working on different ways to connect conversations about common experiences, like urban renewal and the the social conflicts such policies generate in lots of different countries, to give one example.   

Global Voices' John Kennedy then spoke about how he finds Chinese blogs to translate. It's not an easy job given how many blogs there are in China today. So aside from his Bloglines aggregator, He relies heavily on people sending him interesting links. He also leans heavily on the new，rebel-spirited Chinese blog aggregator www.bullog.cn... which makes a deliberate point of highlighting voices that don't appear on the commercial blog sites like Sina.com, which mainly invite celebrities to blog and then feature those blogs, rather than amplifying interesting new voices from the grassroots.

There wasn't too much time for discussion, but a couple of people raised interesting questions about the ability of any of these projects to be much more objective or balanced about China than the international media currently is. Might they just replace old biases with new kinds of bias? I responded that there is no way that any of these projects will make everybody happy. What has changed is that there is no scacity in terms of media creation. We shouldn't be the only people trying to facilitate communication between the Chinese blogosphere and the rest of the world. The more people are out there trying to create communication bridges between China and the rest of the world, the harder it will be for anybody's bias or perspective to dominate. What has been done so far is really only just a very small start, and much much more needs to be done.

Keso's keynote at the Chinese Blogger Conference

(Photo courtesy Kevin Wen.)

Chinese A-list tech blogger Keso gave the keynote speech at this year's Chinese blogger conference.  He spoke very frankly about a number of things. He talked about how blogging has transformed his life, and put him in touch with a whole network of people he would never have known otherwise. He warned against over-commercialization of Chinese bloggers. He also addressed the latest hurdle to free speech in the Chinese blogosphere: some government authorities here are calling for new regulations that would require Chinese bloggers to use their real names. (See the translation of a blog post he wrote about this issue here. I have posted some other links about the controversy here. Also see Danwei.org's translation of Wang Xiaofeng's sarcastic critique here.)

Keso said that blogs are a technically very simple but socially very complex tool. They are used and viewed in different ways by different people. Some use blogs as a diary, some use them as media, others use them as p.r. vehicles, others view blogs as enemies. Keso said recently some people want to control and limit blogs.  Suddenly, with blogs, people we thought had nothing to say actually have a lot to say. Some people confuse the proliferation of speech with chaos. But blogs are not as scary as some think. Blogs, Keso said, are as varied as people. Those who think that blogs are violent or threatening only see it that way because they view society as threatening. Blogs are not a threat, he said.

Keso also spoke about the issue of "objectivity" and the criticism some people make that blogs are not objective. He said people should stop going on and on about the lack of objectivity. His blog is objective from his point of view, as he speaks honestly about how he sees things. What our society lacks, he said, is not objectivity but honest thought and ideas by individuals. The more people express their perspectives, a more representative objectivity will emerge in the aggregate. Objectivity is not just handed down to you by some authority from on high, he said, the way some people might like to think.

He also talks about the issue of advertising and commercialization of blogs. Keso believes blogs by their nature are fundamentally non-commercial, which is why he stopped putting ads on his blog. If everybody thinks they can make money on their blogs, and if they are using their blogs to get traffic and ad money, then that is dishonest. "Blogging is a way of life, it's not a way of supporting  yourself," ye said. He worries that commercialization is changing the nature of blogging - it's too simple to think you can support yourself just by putting ads on your blog.

He then spoke about the question of trust and credibility. When he interacts with a person's blog he feels he is having a direct dialogue with another person. Blogging has changed his life the same way having a car changes a person's life... the biggest change happens when lots of people start using cars, and it changes the fundamental nature of society. Same with blogs. The critical mass makes a difference.  In the past there was no vehicle for people to know your views and thoughts as an individual.  Now with more than 10 million bloggers in China, people speaking their minds and discussing their ideas, this is a fundamental change.

The nature of trust between blogs and bloggers, Keso believes, is very different than the relationship between a person and a commercial website. When you interact with a commercial website its cold and transactional. "You dont interact with them as you would with a person who you have come to know." But when you conduct a transaction with another blogger, after having developed a trusting relationship with him through interacting with his blog, its like working with a friend. Keso believes that in future everybody can develop their own personal brand through their blogs. Some will be big and some small, but this personal brand is established by  people getting to know you over a long period of time. Social capital and personal trust is built slowly. It takes time to establish. Therefore he believes "the trust and credibility of a blog is far beyond normal media or commercial sites" because those brands are built with money. Credibility of blogs is built with the value of a person's integrity.

2nd Annual Chinese Blogger Conference

I've just arrived in the beautiful city of Hangzhou where the Second Annual Chinese Blogger Conference begins bright and early on Saturday morning.  I'll be moderating a panel at 10am called "From China to the World, From the World to China."  We'll be talking about state of communication between the Chinese blogosphere and the rest of the world - and what some people are doing to foster more dialogue between Chinese bloggers and the West.  Speakers include Isaac Mao, Global Voices' John Kennedy and Frank Dai, Chow Sze Cheng of Interlocals.net, and Portnoy, founder of the Global Voices Chinese translation project.

Last year's conference was fascinating and inspiring. Read my blog posts about it here, here, and here.

Those who can't join in person can join online in various ways. Check out the conference website for full updated instructions.  I will try to do some English translation on the IRC channel.

links for 2006-10-26

• ICE: Internet Censorship Explorer » Iraq, Memory Holes, SmartFilter and a whole lot more
  Cyber-freedom-fighter Nart Villeneuve investigates reports that the U.S. Airforce is censoring political blogs, and finds that at least parts of the U.S. military seem to be filtering content with a U.S. commercial product, SmartFilter. Is the U.S. getti
  (tags: censorship u.s.a. freespeech politics)
• Meanwhile: Russia's last refuge: the blogosphere - Editorials & Commentary - International Herald Tribune
  Journalist Evgeny Morozov comments on LiveJournal's alliance with the Russian company SUP: "What's so pernicious about the deal is that it replicates the very Kremlin model that poisoned the rest of the Russian media."
  (tags: russia freespeech surveillance censorship blogs blogging trust media journalism)

U.S. Military censorship?

Whatever gripes we may have, at the moment most Americans have a lot more freedoms and rights than most Chinese. This is without question. But will it stay that way? Not unless we work to keep it so.

In the past few months I've started predicting to friends and colleagues that if trends continue on their current trajectory, in a few more decades there may be little difference between the U.S. and Chinese governments as far as censorship, surveillance, limits on freedom of expression, use of propaganda, and manipulation of the public are concerned. And if that does happen, it will be because the majority of Americans allowed it to happen in the name of national security, fighting terrorism, and protecting our kids from perverts - which are incidentally the same excuses that the Chinese government gives the Chinese public, and which many people there are inclined to accept as well.

Yesterday, Wonkette and Daily Kos reported that U.S. Airforce personnel have been blocked from accessing their sites - while conservative political sites remain accessible. One reader wrote to Wonkette:

It seems that every non-conservative politics website has been blocked by our firewall guys…including your site. The reason it is blocked is because it is a “personal page.” Which means they don’t have a reason to block it … but they want to block it, so they do. This was done recently, just in time for mid-term elections. As I said, it was not only your website, I have gone through lists of liberal sites and most of them are blocked. I’ve also taken the time to go to some conservative sites….none of which are blocked.

Cyber-activist Nart Villeneuve has investigated the technical side of what's happening here, specifically retracing the cause of one error message received by a person with an army e-mail address who tried to access one blog, The Memory Hole. He found that the error message matched one used by a product developed by the company BlueCoat using a URL database from another commercial filtering product, SmartFilter. Nart does not conclude that the blocking was intentional, however:

The facts indicate that http://www.thememoryhole.org/memoryblog/ is blocked, most likely by a BlueCoat appliance configured with SmartFilter 3.0. But the site is not classified as “Extreme;Politics/Religion” but simply “Politics/Religion”? The most likeley explanation is that the military is filtering the “Extreme” category and not using to the most recent version of the SmartFilter database. At some point the Memory Hole was probably doubly classified as Extreme and Politics/Religion and, if the military has not updated their blocking lists, is blocked by the military as a result.

Innocent error? Honest mistake? Certainly, there is plenty of technical-error-deniability- wiggle-room here. But why did this "error" only just manifest itself recently in the runup to a congressional election where the Republicans might lose their  majority? 

I am reminded of my efforts to transmit politically sensitive TV reports by satellite from Beijing when I was working there for CNN in the 1990's (in the pre-broadband days).  There were often conveniently-timed "technical failures" at the state broadcasting facility that controlled our satellite uplink out of China. Those failures always happened when certain kinds of video appeared, and were more common during certain politically sensitive periods. Always plenty of technical deniability. Nobody ever admitted they were censoring anything...

links for 2006-10-25

• Reporters sans frontières - Annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index - 2006
  North Korea, Turkmenistan, Eritrea the worst violators of press freedom - France, the United States and Japan slip further - Mauritania and Haiti gain much ground
  (tags: nkorea turkmenistan france u.s.a. japan mauritania haiti freespeech humanrights censorship surveillance media journalism press)