Chinese Blogger Conference 2007 Opens; The Crowd’s All There

File this under “Meeting of the ‘Bigs’”: The Chinese Blogger Conference opened up today (November 3, 2007) in Beijing, China. To remind us that this is the People’s Republic of China, the “Chairman Mao of the 21st Century” — Chinese pioneer blogger Isaac Mao — called the meeting to order just around 10 AM. Also amongst the “bigs” were Rebecca MacKinnon, Shizhao and Mountain from the Chinese Wikipedia, Jeremy Goldkorn from Danwei, Gang Lu from Netvibes, Pan Haidong from Hoodong Wiki, the people behind yeeyan.com, eeMap and City8.com and Flypig from AntiWave.net, just name a few of the bigwigs in the Chinese Web 2.0 scene.

After a quick intro game and a few self-introductions (including a protest by Bullog, a big blogger in China, not to “harmonize” (ie place behind the Great Firewall — named after the “harmonious society” official catchphrase of late) his blogs for the fourth time), the two hosts on stage first got the meeting started with a discussion on microblogging. With the panel was the Taiwanese Twitter Queen of fame, Carol Lin, as well as other microbloggers. From the panel, it was discovered that:

• Mainland China does, indeed, have its “own” Twitter: Jiwai.de (with that “de” suffix part of the Chinese language, much as a “domain word” as “del.icio.us”), along with Fanfou and Zuosha, while Taiwan has Buboo as the biggest player.

• There are 250 Twitter-ers in Beijing. (Yours truly included, most likely.)

• The Taiwanese Twitter Queen of Fame has up to 800 followers. (She confessed that “it can get scary”.)

The chatter off-stage got pretty lively: Jiwai.de enabled users to MSN, GTalk and text in their feelings on an electronic display. (Messages kept flowing in throughout the day with nary a hitch.) The twopence from the IMs (known for short in today’s live-tweet as “IM feed 2ps”) was a bit mixed regarding microblogging; some regarded it as sapping away all the useful information (unless you happened to be a big follower of someone), while others said that blogging is both sharing and recording history. Yet someone else stated that “microblogging is for those who are dead bored!”.

Following that, Luyi Chen and a new panel were onstage talking about SNS (Social Networking Sites). In the panel was an English-speaking panelist, who stated that China copying SNS sites such a Facebook was not the way to go. The panelist also went over SNS demographics, noting that SNS users in China tend to be older, and that the Chinese tend to be more conservative. However, while the Western world trusts strangers, the Chinese, though not confident of trusting others, do have the tendency to meddle with others. Oddly enough, OpenSocial was not mentioned in the panel.

Following the SNS panel, the head of YouKu (”YouTube in China, if you must”) went on stage. His idea: paike, or video-blogging, will be big in the years to come and pointed out a new Web 2.0 phenomenon in store for 2008 and 2009. When asked about APIs and collaboration with other TV channels, YouKu said that they were meeting the challenge.

Following a one-hour lunch break, Flypig from Antiwave.net next went on stage. His brilliant Keynote and video materials helped tell the story of one extremely popular — and successful — Chinese-language podcast.

“All radios go to hell!” was the all-too-blunt slogan of Antiwave.net, which launched in 2005, and was featured on the BBC in March 2007. Flypig and Pingke are the people behind Antiwave.net, a podcast which makes pokes fun at some names in Chinese (its talk show, People Talk, is actually 人民大会谈 (renmin dahui tan), very close to the name of the Chinese Congress building — 人民大会堂 (renmin dahui tang)).

Antiwave.net experienced explosive success and growth immediately after its launch. Through a massive and successful word-of-mouth campaign at the start, they were bombarded with over 10,000 clicks on Day One. When they parodied Chinese TV’s Spring Festival Gala (a show locals love to deride), 50,000 tuned in. Some of its content deals with the downright controversial: Hard to Say is one such show. At this point, the IM feed fed the audience this message: “We want lady presenters in Antiwave!” (The Antiwave gang is apparently male-only right now, or at least the Antiwave gang at the conference were.)

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 emotional, 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!

Following the ideologically charged war of words, eeMaps and City8.com attempted to restore some order by showing the audience maps and street view images on the Internet. City8.com, in particular, turned to be ahead of Google Street View — City8.com started first with Shanghai in summer 2008, and now has real-life maps for Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Suzhou, Jinan and Wenzhou, with a total of 20 cities mapped and photographed by the end of 2007.

Zhang Lei of yeeyan.com went onstage next, talking about a translation/language site and the problem of the language barrier. Yeeyan.com was launched in December 2006, and features nearly 3,000 articles translated by a team of 500 and a user base of 10,000. Two questions were also answered at the end of the talk.

Pan Haidong from Hoodong Wiki next went onstage, introducing Hoodong Wiki to the masses. He noted that there is discrimination towards Hoodong Wiki from Wikipedians, noting that Hoodong Wiki has more “entertainment” content than Wikipedia. The reason behind this, he noted, was actually pretty simple: the Chinese Internet populace “grew up” with the more “entertainment-based” QQ IM service and are only now maturing into less “entertainment-based” IM services, such as Skype and MSN (Windows Live Messenger). Finally, he frankly confessed: “We didn’t put the Wikipedia behind the Great Firewall!”. His speech finished with the catchphrase slogan: Veni, vidi, wiki: Hoodong!.

Finally, Shizhao and Mountain, Chinese Wikipedia admins, as well as KJ from Taiwan and Andrew Lih, presided over the Wikipedia in China discussion panel. The panel, however, didn’t forget to mention the Wekipedia, which (if you didn’t blink a few days ago here on blognation China) is actually bread made in China. Following the tribute to the Wekipedia, however, a show of hands established that nearly 80% of the audience present have used the Wikipedia.

At this point, however, the Chinese Wikipedia was clearly visible on the big screen! However, it was quickly found out that a proxy was in use. Meanwhile, the chatter off-stage started comparing the wall around Wikipedia with the Berlin Wall.

The Wikipedia folks continued, declaring that they thought Baidu Baiku as merely a copy of Wikipedia, and that Wikipedia is a user of QR codes. Also, images form meetups in both Taipei (Wikimania) and Hong Kong (Chinese Wikimania) were shown.

Wikipedia, though, is experiencing a new stage in its development, with growth somewhat slowing down. The slowdown is partially caused by a quality optimization effort underway. Also, wiki code was singled out as an impediment, and it was noted that no more than 20,000 contributors worldwide on the Wikipedia were considered active editors. The panel said that Wikipedia itself probably constituted the biggest threat (and not copycats such as Baidu Baike), as many Chinese didn’t really want to write, and that errors are sometimes present. A talk about the differences between blogs and wikis rounded out the panel’s discussion.

The first day of the conference ended just before 18:00 (6 PM), with some staying for socials that would continue into the night.

Tags: blognation, China, blognation China, Mainland China, Internet in China, Bloggers in China, Chinese Bloggers Conference, Web 2.0 in China