RConversation

My Web2.0 Week in Beijing

The photo at left was taken by tech blogger Keso on Friday night at the opening evening of China Foo Camp, held in an old military factory compound in Eastern Beijing (with Maoist slogans still on the ceilings) which has recently been converted into an array of trendy-arty spaces.

Tim O'Reilly's first foray into China was my third Web2.0-related conference in Beijing in the span of one week. Which says something about how much is going on here. It's really great to see O'Reilly and his team finally getting serious about China and making a serious effort to engage with the Chinese tech community. Naturally they will need some time to sort out who are the best people to work with in China, and how best to nurture greater dialogue and cross-fertilization between the English-speaking web world and the Chinese-speaking web world. 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. The O'Reilly brand is one of many non-governmental, non-political platforms that can potentially help bridge these two worlds in ways that I hope will help the global internet evolve in a healthy and open direction that should be in the interest of the world's people - not just the world's most powerful governments.

On Saturday many attendees, especially those of us who had been at the Chinese Blogger Con the previous weekend, were surprised by the 1.0-ness of the the main Saturday conference. Don't get me wrong, the local IBM team - who the O'Reilly folks chose as their local partner for this event - worked extremely hard, spent a shocking amount of money (or so people were claiming on Twitter), and deserve a lot of points for effort. They just seem to be more accustomed to interfacing with other big companies, government ministries, and state-owned enterprises than with the open source community, independent entrepreneurs, digital culture people, and techie grassroots. Still, the gathering brought a lot of interesting people together, a lot of great conversations were had and connections were made that may not otherwise have happened - which is apparently the main point of Foo camps anyway.

Another thing that the conference showed was just how hard it is to hold a truly bilingual English-Chinese conference in which the Chinese and English speakers feel equally comfortable participating. Despite the hiring of interpreters and setup of a simultaneous translation booth with headsets for people to listen to translations in the main hall, non-English speakers still reported feeling like they weren't able to participate fully or understand fully what was going on, and many left early. As some people pointed out, it's not just about language - it's also about communication style, and whether you set up a gathering to favor people who are comfortable communicating in an American way or in a Chinese way.  So if the O'Reilly conferences intend to be a successful bridge between the two worlds they will definitely need to pioneer new models for English-Chinese bicultural interactive meetings.

MONDAY MORNING UPDATE: Stephen Walli, who was invited but couldn't attend, posted a video and summary of the lightning talk he would have given. He summarizes his main points as follows:

• Free and open source software is important to China's future growth. (开放代码软件对中国未来的发展很重要)
• It will allow China to deliver better software faster.
• It will allow China to build better companies more quickly.

BUT ...

• Language defines culture.  (语言创造文化)
• Our community cultures are different, and we need to understand each other's cultures to build the relationships to allow us to build a bigger community.

Amen.

 

Earlier in the week I attended another Web2.0 conference organized by France Telecom's Orange Labs. Orange Labs is obviously a different kind of business than O'Reilly but they're not doing a bad job at burrowing themselves into the local web community. A number of bloggers have praised the way they helped organize Beijing Barcamp, saying it was better and more interactive than Foo. I don't know because I wasn't there. This week's conference was a bit more corporate/academic and less grassroots than CNBloggercon, but it still brought together some interesting people. I griped a bit about some speakers who seemed to equate human beings with dollar signs a bit more than I can tolerate, but interesting things came up. A few highlights:

• Isaac Mao gave a talk about how people are using Web2.0 and "micro-content" to create a living "social brain" which grows smarter over time as we contribute to and interact with it. He has some blog posts related to these ideas here (Chinese) and here (English); also see a couple of his recent presentations on Slideshare here and here.
• Tangos Chan of China Web2.0 Review had some interesting perspectives on Chinese Web2.0 innovations  to keep an eye on (i.e., going beyond copying American models): A growing number of Chinese Internet users, especially newcomers to the Chinese Internet, prefer to do as much of their online business in their chat client, and thus chat clients - as well as applications that feed content into both your chat client as well as into your mobile SMS mailbox - are an interesting thing to watch. Two variations on that theme are Anothr and Jiwai.
• Benjamin Joffe of Plus Eight Star who works closely with Orange Labs gave a very useful overview of Web2.0 and "information arbitrage" across Japan, Korea, and China.
• Orange's Nicholas DuCray described his research on "how community services and web 2.0 applications converge with the traditional media and mobile industry to offer a new generation of interactive services." The difficulty in measuring audiences in China also makes it hard to "monetize" traffic and grow businesses. Nonetheless, as he wrote in his talk summary: "We have had the opportunity to observe significant changes in behaviors, and the appearance of a new generation of internet users, whose primary objective is to communicate with their peers, express and showcase themselves, by any means. This need for interactivity, enabled and catalyzed by the economic growth and the development of the internet and mobile markets, has created a "hot pot" of convergent services, which could possibly draw the image of what the telecom services and the business models of the future could be."
• He wasn't the only one to emphasize mobile. Which I guess isn't surprising since he works for Orange/France Telecom, but then again, it's a fact that increasingly Chinese people will be interacting with the web via mobile devices and not via PC.
• A number of speakers pointed out that regulation and control on content, combined with lack of open API's are both obstacles to innovation.
• I was also fascinated by a presentation by Luo Qing of the Communication University of China (and former TV personality) in which she explained how user-generated audio-visual content is regulated increasingly via the State Administration of Radio Film and Television (SARFT). She described a process of web-driven media transformation
• Yao Yonghe of 51.com (a social networking site popular in smaller towns but which more urbane geeks seem to turn their nose up at) reminded us all that compared to 10 years ago, white collar elites are no longer the majority of Internet users in China and thus the tastes and needs of more rural, less globally-connected Chinese will increasingly be driving the market.

Having gone over my notes from that conference, I am reminded of Tim O'Reilly's remarks at Foo Camp about future trends. He predicted we will see a slowdown in what people would define as "Web2.0 innovation" as the big players consolidate. Meanwhile, "innovation will break out in some very unexpected places."  Despite the fact that he expects this innovation to be unexpected, he pointed to some possible directions he thinks this innovation might come from. They include what he calls "open mobile...a kind of ambient computing where we break out of PC computing completely." The next phase of computing, he believes "is re-engaging with the physical world." This could happen in China in an interesting way, and perhaps differently than in the West.

Meanwhile, I wonder: is the next phase of the Internet going to make the world even flatter or will we see the geographical, cultural, political, and linguistic boundaries getting stronger?  Will we start seeing substantially different media forms and communication norms emerging in different countries depending on their economic, cultural, political, and linguistic conditions? Possibly. We're certainly finding that the big multinational Internet players are struggling to capture the Chinese market, and while politics and regulatory hurdles don't help, perhaps we're also getting to a point where one-size-fits all is increasingly untenable and homegrown services will increasingly have an edge over transplants. But as co-founder of Global Voices and a strong - perhaps overly idealistic - believer in the need for a freer, more open conversation amongst the citizens of our entire planet, I also hope that the developers and engineers of the world will continue to work hard to make a global conversation possible.

I started this post talking about the urgent need to build better bridges of conversation and collaboration between the Chinese language Internet and the English language internet. Which brings me back to the Chinese blogger conference and Zhang Lei, founder of Yeeyan, a peer-translation community website. I am so excited about what Yeeyan is trying to do that I'm happy to plug it. The idea is to "crowdsource" the translation of articles and blog posts back and forth between English and Chinese so that people who don't read both languages can gain better insight into the ideas coming from each community. (It's kind of a for-profit cousin to what the Global Voices Lingua projects are doing: recruiting volunteers to translate Global Voices English-language content into a variety of languages.) So far Yeeyan has been doing well with English-to-Chinese but have had less success getting people to translate from Chinese to English. I hope they find a way to make it work. Maybe the folks behind the Chinese Content Project, which generated a great deal of enthusiasm at the beginning of this year before it ran out of steam and kind of died, may be interested in trying out Yeeyan's community translation framework to see if it can support a more sustainable peer-translation model.

Finally, for those who missed the Chinese Blogger Conference and/or who might not have understood much of the Chinese-language proceedings anyway, you can get a feeling for the community by watching some of the videos that participants have uploaded to YouTube:

...and here's the video shown at the start of the conference, showing highlights from the past two conferences:

Chinese Blogger Conference: Nurturing "grassroots" in a tough climate

(Photo by Josh Chin)

The thing I love most about the annual Chinese blogger conferences is the chance to make friends and have candid conversations with many people - offline, and offstage. 

The best conferences naturally have interesting speakers and panels, but they also serve as catalyst and focal point for community － people you enjoy talking to for hours after the meeting ends over beers and sunflower seeds (a classic Beijing combination). As you can see from these pictures taken late on Saturday night, CNbloggercon is definitely that kind of conference.

Now in its third year, CNBloggercon has evolved into a community platform - an exciting community of independent online  writers, digital artists, media techies, entrepreneurs, educators, intellectuals, etc. Tangos at China Web2.0 Review describes it as the "biggest annual grassroot party of China’s web 2.0 startups."

Even if you don't speak Chinese, you can see the energy of this community through things like the CNBloggercon Flickr tag.  You can also read John Kennedy's heroic live-blogging here.

Coming on the heels of the 17th Party Congress, called "shi qi da" ("the 17th big meeting") in Chinese, people jokingly called this "san da" (the "third big meeting"). People even referred tongue-in-cheek to one of the conference organizers, Issac Mao, as "Chairman Mao."

I was especially thrilled to have finally met "Laohumiao" (the guy smoking in the picture at right) whose pen name means "tiger temple". He is a Beijing-based blogger who I first linked to in 2004 when he blogged about a murder that he eye-witnessed on the street in Beijing. "Laohumiao" has just returned from a 5-province blogging trip, on which he documented the lives of the ordinary people he encountered along the way. He was also one of five people on a panel I moderated, titled "Grassroots Media and Professional Media," which ended up being the most controversial panel of Day 1.

(Photo by Josh Chin) 
 

They're all pictured here, from left to right: Zhai Minglei, former Southern Weekend reporter and founder of grassroots publication, Minjian; outspoken blogger "Guo Daxia;" Laohumiao, described above; BeiFeng of the recently banned Bullog (click here for more background on Bullog's launch last year, courtesy of John K. at Globalvoices); and last but not least Zhou Shuguang, aka Zola, the blogger who shot to fame for covering the Chongqing nailhouse story earlier this year. John live-blogged the session here, and you can read his transcript for the gritty details.  "Rose" Luqiu Luwei, blogger and journalist at Phoenix TV (a Mandarin-language TV station based in Hong Kong) was originally scheduled to be on the panel, but due to work conflicts she was not able to attend. She is founder of an interesting "pro-am" experiment (combining work of professionals and amateurs) called My 1510. I've spoken to her in the past about the relationship between amateur and professional media and it would have been very interesting to have her perpective on the panel. Last winter she wrote a very thoughtful article titled "Blogging News in China" for Nieman Reports. Maybe she'll come next year, if her bosses let her... given that a couple of my panelists this year required no provoking on my part to start discussing questions of free speech that made some people in the audience uncomfortable.

"Daxia" got people squirming when he complained about how his blogs have been shut down multiple times, and reminded us that Article 35 of the Chinese Constitution is supposed to guarantee freedom of speech for the Chinese people. (More of his views on the illegal behavior of government and party in Chinese here.)

Here's how David Feng at Blognation described the panel:

Rebecca MacKinnon next moderated a panel on citizen journalism, which also saw Beifeng, Zuola Zhou, Zhai Mingfei and Laohumiao take part. IN particular, the man behind Yibao (literally “one person’s newspaper) went onstage and gave his views on grassroots media. 

The panel started touching some very sensitive aspects of citizen journalism, namely whether or not the Chinese Constitution protected their rights to freedom of speech, publication and press. The talk got very emotion, with panelists declaring out loud that “you can lock someone in jail, but you will never lock a spirit in jail”.

At this point, views were sharply split between the Western point of view — a guarantee of freedom of speech for everyone — and a more local point of view — feeding the farmers (the vox populi in the audience went along the lines of “China has 800-900 million farmers; do they care more about freedom of speech or that they don’t go hungry?”). Meanwhile, the IM feed, seeing the panel little short of taking those who feed the population with the 7 o’clock news to task, declared that “this conference is full of ideologists or people who believe in a perfect society”, and that with the “20% active, 80% powerless” audience, the talk dealt with matters that cannot be solved at this time. In fact, the chatter at one point said that people got more mileage buying toilets in Beijing than discussing freedom of speech!

Blogger "lonson" points out (in Chinese) that the panel's real issues - once you went beyond the larger free speech problems many people in the room found too headache-making to confront - were about journalistic ethics and the financial bottom line. The relationship between professional media  and amateur or "grassroots" media is plenty contentious even when you're not in an authoritarian country - but the politics here make efforts to shape a new, socially beneficial relationship between grassroots and professional media all the more difficult.

Beijing-based freelance journalist Josh Chin whose blog is called "Ch-Infamous" has another take:

Of the events I’ve actually managed to concentrate on, so far the most noteworthy panel (for foreigners at least) has been a debate, moderated by Rebecca MacKinnon, on the relationship between blogging and traditional media. An old topic, yes. But still relevant in China, where blogs count as virtually the only independent source of news. Talk quickly turned from whether bloggers are journalists to blogs as guardians of free speech arrayed against a soul-snuffing government, whereupon the Jiwai.de message board lit up: “Why get talk about such sensitive things?” “Chaos on the stage!” “Is bloggers’ responsibility really so grand?” Most interesting bit came when someone in the audience questioned whether bloggers, who use pen names, don’t manage to evade responsibility for what they write. The answer came from Bei Feng (北风 ) , a former TV journalist from Guangzhou: “Actually, a regular journalist makes a mistake, his newspaper or TV station usually takes most of the heat, or makes the problem disappear. A blogger takes the heat himself. The law makes it possible to hold people responsible for what they write online. For that reason, you’re even more careful about what you publish, you’re standards are even higher. Bloggers have more of a sense of responsibility than regular journalists.”

A bit simplified as arguments go, but not without its merits. It’s common knowledge the Chinese news industry is nearly as corrupt as the government officials it purports to cover. Paid articles and hong bao bribes (explained away as “transportation fees”) are standard salary supplements for regular journalists. Chinese bloggers, at least at this point, don’t seem to be in it for the money.

One issue we did not get enough time to explore in our five-person panel in 40 minutes was the controversy surrounding Zhou Shuguang, aka "Zola," the blogger who played an instrumental role in publicizing the Chongqing "nailhouse" story - the the dramatic story of ordinary citizens fighting real estate developers, on which online citizen media beat mainstream media hands down. Since catapulting to fame with his coverage of one hot story, Zola has taken a great deal of flak for his behavior - in particular, taking payments from other interviewees in exchange for writing about them. He seemed tired and emotionally worn down by all the criticism and by trying to defend his behavior, arguing that he's not a journalist and wasn't ever trying to be. He says he now plans to return to his home in Hunan and go back to his vegetable selling business that he abruptly abandoned when inspired to go and cover the story that changed his life. Zola's problem is a common one for bloggers who shoot to fame after covering a particular issue they happen to be passionate about or an event that they happen to have witnessed: in all his subsequent work, as he searched for interesting things to write about and to live up to inflated expectations, a lot of his readers were disappointed by his lack of professionalism.

Both Zhai Minglei and Laohumiao talked about the importance of grassroots media as a personal action that is different from professional media because it represents the unadulterated voices of individuals. People can now use online publishing tools to document what they see and encounter- as well as their personal perspective on it. The result will inevitably be something different than what comes out of news organizations. Quite often "personal media," which collectively adds up to become "grassroots media," will bring to light events and problems that traditional media simply isn't going to mention - and has a different kind of perspective than that of professionals. The panelists all seemed to agree that if you stifle these voices in the name of professionalism (which Josh points out is rather dubious in much of the Chinese mainstream media anyway), nobody is left to speak out for the interests of ordinary people.

I should emphasize,  however, that politics and journalism-related topics were the exception not the rule at CNBloggercon.  The focus, as it has always been, was on people's accomplishments in using the web to build commnities in education, charity, free software, commercial collaboration, social marketing, gaming, and many other things. Thomas Crampton, who attended portions of the event blogged some impressions here.  Ben at the 8Asians blog writes:

What’s interesting about this event is that it’s much more than about blogging itself. Blogging is great, but in China where speech is censored and there are people that are trying to speak out on this, that, or another thing, this event is really about how the technology has empowered regular people the ability to move forward. Just take a look at the technology in itself. This event even showcases the talent behind China’s equivalents to our Internet fads.

The only other "risky" panel was the final session on day two: Telecommunications Services and Internet Law, which included the blogger "Yetaai" who is suing China Telecom for blocking his website, and Liu Xiaoyuan, the Beijing-based lawyer who tried to sue the blog hosting company Sohu for breach of contract after it censored several of his blog posts. Both of them were given a chance to describe their cases, and Yetaai called for a mass class-action lawsuit of users against the ISP's blocking sites which cannot be shown to be violating any law. Then the moderator quickly moved the discussion on to other topics such as intellectual property and libel. Still, it was gutsy for organizers to give these two men a public platform here in Beijing to make their cases better known - especially since domestic Chinese media has not reported a thing about these lawsuits and very few Chinese Internet users know about them.

Third Annual Chinese Blogger Conference Begins in Beijing

Check out the official Chinese Blogger Con blog to find out how to follow the conference remotely.

John Kennedy is live-blogging the proceedings in English.

Click here for my posts from the past two Chinese bloggercons.

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.

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：

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.

Chinese Bloggers: "Everybody is Somebody"

(Screengrabs courtesy of tsalon.)

People outside China were able to watch this weekend’s Chinese Blogger Conference through the live webcast provided by videoblogger “Seehaha”. The conference was in Chinese of course, so I helped provide live (very imperfect & incomplete) English-language running notes on IRC. Then the amazing Bahrain-based blogger Angelo Embuldeniya took my English IRC notes, combined them with screen grabs from the live video webcasts, and posted it all on a blog. Check it out for detailed session-by session notes on what was discussed.

I came away from this conference with a lot more than just a t-shirt.

I’m also leaving Shanghai with a realization: Web2.0 is potentially a very Chinese thing. One of the most important words in the Chinese language is “guanxi.”  It means “relationship.” Whatever you think about the term “Web2.0”, the point is that social networking and relationship-building are at the core of today’s most exciting web innovations.  The Chinese happen to be the most natural and skilled social networkers on earth.

The Chinese economy functions today (to the extent that it does) thanks largely to personal relationship networks: networks that enable people to get stuff done despite bone-headed regulations, politics, logistical obstacles, and everything else. You are nothing in China – and can accomplish very little – without a good “guanxi” network. Expect Chinese internet users to seize upon Web 2.0 tools as a way to expand and deepen their human relationships, enhancing both personal lives and businesses. Expect Chinese users build new tools that suit their own preferred ways of communication. The Chinese are likely to have a growing impact on the evolution of web applications.

Individual empowerment with Chinese characteristics.  Isaac Mao in his opening keynote talked about the power of many small voices. On the web, “everybody is somebody.” What’s more, Chinese web users are increasingly reacting to events taking place in their lives, in real time, online. “We are all grassroots. We are all small voices,” he says. “The combination of all these small voices will make our society smarter.” He spoke about his Social Brain Foundation, based on the idea that the web enables people to plug their brains directly into an open network.

A key theme of the whole conference was how the semantic web empowers and amplifies individual voices. On Sunday afternoon, Blogger “zuola” described how his blog is his personal platform for his own ideas. Blogging, he believes, helps us understand our lives better. Chen Xuer, one of the bloggers who volunteered to work on the conference, said he started blogging and reading blogs because he wanted “to hear the truth and speak the truth.” Sound familiar?

The Chinese bloggers have adopted the language of the semantic web, made it theirs, and are inventing some of their own terms to help describe what’s happening. In the session on tagging, Zhang Yang spoke of “microfunction”: a term he uses to describe the way we connect pieces of micro-content together through tagging, RSS and search. Blogger “Topku Chan” on Saturday afternoon spoke of  “keyvoice” – as opposed to “keyword” as the essence of what people should be paying attention to and tracking when it comes to conversations on the web. 

This group of bloggers, by the way, have enthusiastically embraced tagging. Check out the CNBloggercon Technorati tag – and also the flickr photo feed.

I was particularly impressed with Shanghai educator Zhuang Xiuli, who believes passionately that blogs and social media tools like RSS and tagging can potentially play a big role in reforming China’s ossified educational system. She spoke of the need to move from rote learning to individual discovery and creativity, and the way in which blogging encourages new more creative and individual-centric ways of learning. She spoke of how blogs and RSS can help teachers share information with students better. She also believes that student blogs and RSS aggregation of those blogs can help teachers get to know students better than would be physically possible in large classes of 40–plus kids. 

Then there’s the hitch, censorship, and the Chinese way of dealing with it. There was much bemoaning of the fact that Wikipedia – both English and Chinese – has recently been blocked here. Some wikipedians advocated that Chinese wikipedia should stay away from politically sensitive topics for the time being and focus on more scientific, practical and historical material so that it will get unblocked.  Offline and in the halls there was some whispering about how the government may release some regulations at the end of the year specifically aimed to deal with blogs and blog content. One of the participants was emailing around a proposal for bloggers to organize self-control and regulation committees as a way to respond to top-down efforts (I don’t think it was greeted with much enthusiasm). There was some annoyance expressed in the session I moderated about “blogging beyond borders” about the fact that censorship prevents mainland Chinese bloggers from communicating freely with bloggers in Hong Kong and Taiwan. But this was not the time and place to discuss how to circumvent censorship. Addressing that huge elephant in the room directly would have flagged the gathering as subversive, and would have killed all the good stuff that came out of the meeting. People did talk a bit, however, about how to work with censorship. In the podcasting session, there was a surprisingly frank exchange about the way in which service providers have to police user content and kill everything political. All blog hosting and service providing companies must police their users’ content. This is a fact of life which web businesses as well as users accept as part of being Chinese in China. They must naturally bake censorship functions into their software and into their business models.

I am not saying that this situation justifies censorship in any way. But if you’re Chinese, you’re not going to get anywhere by openly defying or opposing it. Instead, people are creatively making the best of the situation. And many of the people at this conference are doing so to an impressive degree. This is how I would characterize the view of most people here: The majority of Chinese users and pretty much all web entrepreneurs believe that the Chinese Web 2.0 must remain as un-political as possible in order to develop, spread, and innovate. Since people in China have never been free to express their political views in public, not being able to do so in cyberspace isn’t actually viewed as a sacrifice. People don’t feel like they’re giving anything up. On the contrary, they feel that blogs and other forms of online social media have given them a great deal more freedom of expression than they ever had before. Most feel they’ve got plenty to say and do within the limits they’ve been given. Of course some chafe at the limitations, but most users don’t even recognize what they’re missing because they’ve never had it. So they’re a bit bewildered that the Western media focuses mainly on that portion of speech that remains forbidden, while from the Chinese perspective the story is a very positive one about how they’re saying and doing more than ever before. They’d like more appreciation and recognition for all the cool things they are managing to say and do.

What this means is that Web 2.0, just like Web 1.0, is not going spark a democratic revolution in Chinese politics any time soon. People here find it annoying that the Western media keeps framing the Chinese internet story within the question of whether the internet will or won’t bring down the communist party. The real story is about the cultural and social implications of the semantic web as it continues to spread among China’s fast-growing pool of internet users. In the very long run, cultural and social change may have political implications, but to people here any attempt to speculate on that is counter-productive.

Another thing about this story: it’s not so much about what the internet is “bringing” to the Chinese, or how the internet is coming in as an outside force and “changing China.” The real story is about how Chinese users are taking the connectivity, tools and applications, internalizing them, and making them their own.

Chinese blogger con - day 1 winds down

Thanks to blogger Angelo Embuldeniya who took my English IRC notes from the Chinese-language sessions, combined them with screen grabs from the live video webcasts, and put it all on a special blog. I will write about the whole thing more extensively when it's all over, since I'm running off to a blogger dinner. A few takeaways:

• Isaac Mao, the mastermind of this conference, is even more amazing than I already knew he was. Key quote (among many): "the combination of all these small voices will make our society smarter."
• There is interest in doing more to communicate with the outside world. Language is a barrier, but people are open to distributed volunteer translation networks and other means of getting Chinese voices heard outside of the Chinese language blogosphere.
• Censorship is an issue. But people are determined to maximize what they can do within the realities of the system, and to push the boundaries as much as possible.
• Multimedia non-text blogging: video, podcasting, and mobile blogging - are taking off fast. The Chinese may quickly to lead the world when it comes to innovations in audio-visual social media.
• Some Chinese educators see blogging as an exciting way to reform China's rigid educational system based on rote-learning. Because blogs are all about individual inquiry, exploration and growth.  A number of government officials in the education sector are blogging.