Archives - Chinese Blogosphere
08/10/2005
A Reuters article about Bokee.com and China’s blogging market went online this morning, Many thanks to Sophie Taylor, Reporter from Reuters and the author of this article.
Bokee, which was set up in 2002, claims the biggest share of China’s blogging market with about 2 million registered users, and said it is adding 6,000-10,000 daily.
Since blogging services are usually free, companies make most of their revenue from advertising.
Bokee’s Wen said he might begin to charge for blogging services at the end of this year, but still saw most of the company’s revenue coming from advertising and wireless charges.
Bokee’s site carries ads from the likes of Dell, Nokia, Hewlett-Packard and IBM, although the firm declined to say how much revenue it generates.
I’ve exchanged some emails with Sophie in the last two weeks. She had done a phone interview with me and Fang. Since Bokee had some mis-leading report before due to the bad news translation, we are carefully dealing with the numbers and figures this time, especially the funding amount, IPO plans and amount other issues.
Tags: blogging, bokee, china
209 Comments
05/13/2005
Kantianxia.com, China’s first web-based RSS news aggregator and RSS consulting company had relaunched their service.
Kantianxia first launched their service on last April, which provided a web-based RSS news aggregator and RSS news reader software in Chinese language. It had been ordered to shut down by Chinese officials on this February. The company, urPOS Technology didn’t declare the shut down related to official’s censorship but it was widely believed that the closure is due to some sensitive content had been aggregated in their service.
The new presence of Kantianxia.com was impressive, They are not only had better design of the outcome, but also enriched their service functionalities such as RSS search-engine, RSS knowledge-base and RSS feeds index. They have three kind of RSS products: a RSS reader software, a Outlook edition of RSS reader and a web-based RSS aggregator. I’ve been noticed that kantianxia had officially partnered with popular RSS aggregation company NewsGator, and the Outlook edition of RSS reader and online RSS reader service are developed based on Newsgator’s product.
Good luck Kantianxia.
Tags: blogging, china, rss
93 Comments
04/22/2005
David Jackson, the former Morgan Stanley telecommunications analyst also is my favorite Blogger who was running China stock Blog. He had a post about the latest interview of BlogChina.com's Founder Mr. Fang XinDong with Pacific Epoch. He gave out the summary from the interview transcriptions. So, as I'm working with Fang and BlogChina in Product and Business development right now, I'd like to add some comments from my own.
Mr. Fang was a passionate person and had some optimistic perspectives on the future of BlogChina. But as David point out that the lack of a clear revenue generating model was the most consideration of to be a sustainable business for BlogChina. Actually it is also the major task for the Team to work out a the health business model after raising the funding. I would like to give out some of my personal perspectives, hope it would help people know more about BlogChina.
First, I want to point out that currently BlogChina's revenue generated from advertising and research consulting covered "big" part of company's routine expense. Hopefully the cash flow will become positive at the end of this year. Now, the company have almost 160 employees with 5 divisions. The series A funding from Softbank was certainly becomes to our operating capital for the business expending. The company's structure was reformed by new management team and secure the money from investor will be put on the right place, make surewon't expend too crazy. The former VP of Legend Capital Tan Yongquan recently joined BlogChina as a new COO. I can say that Mr. Tan was a outstanding man with motivation and good communication skills.
Since BlogChina acquired Blogdriver.com (the previous startup) earlier this year, the combination of two services had over 1 mln register users/Bloggers, over 70% of total are active user (three updates per month will be count as active user). Blogdriver.com will be remained as independent blog services provider. we differentiated the two services to target different user activities and communities.
Blogdriver.com will be develped as a blog hosting service provider, the service used by avid bloggers who want a more flexible and powerful tools. And BlogChina's blog service which we called "Boke Community" will combine with communities components to let individuals to interact with friends, alumni, families and communities. In short, Blogdriver's service for avid bloggers, professionals and "Boke Community" for community and younger users.
As you see that BlogChina's front page is a media portal with high frequently updates. BlogChina.com was widely known as the influential Technology media portal in China. Over 10,000 industry insiders, experts and columnists regularly contribute to BlogChina.com, provide the valuable and profound industrial perspective, breaking news coverage, feature articles, and special reports covering technology, culture, society, economy. The open-source media model was founded by Mr. Fang and his colleagues who had strong background in IT media industry at earlier stage. The portal was attracting a lot of corporation and IT company's advertisements.
Next, we are going to build up a ranking system inside the service. User's content may have chance to show up on the front page if they agree to join the affiliate program. Through the ranking system, the service will evaluate the content base on our algorithm (traffic, comments, trackback and more) and if the post get enough points, the editor will send the title of content to the portal under appropriate category. Also, we are developing a tool which offerring auto-clustering functionality to automatic the process.
Certainly, BlogChina won't become to a web portal compete with other big Chinese portal site such as Sina, Sohu, Netesae. The strategy was clear that BlogChina going to be a professional blog services company and will be an industry leader in terms of service. Let's say in short, We are not a portal, media or technology company, we are a personalize services company. The coming trend of web 2.0 comes from the needs of personalized web, and the major goal of BlogChina is to provide various of niche services to our user such as RSS reader, Social Bookmarking, PodCasting and more, improve user's online interaction, communication and experiences. The social networking will be our necessary components, but without the content, the social network still lacks on relativity. The combination of Social network and Blogging lead the Road to Personal Portal.
Back to the business model, there are lots of market spaces for us to explore for a sustainable business model. We will explore in different approaches to get our goal. In advertising, BlogChina will use various methods to make advertisements target more specific audience. the company already cooperated with Narrowad.com to have the contextual advertisements, and we are going to experiment RSS advertising and tagvertising in the future. In services side, we will provide value added services and applications for bloggers, improve our user experience and service reliability, build up the trustful relationship with our user and makes them comfortable, implement Word of month strategy to strive for user's loyalty, and will differentiate our services and functionality for certain paid services to user.
Tags: blogchina, blogging, business
1968 Comments
01/25/2005
These days, blogosphere talks about Folksonomy, Technorati tags and social software services all the time, it's really sparkle. and it makes me started writing of these trends on my Chinese blog. I had spent some time thinking of using a creative way to implement this terrific tag system in our real life!
Technorati's tag system aggregate contents from three sources, individual blog posts come from over 5M blogs which technorati are tracking at. del.icio.us - a social bookmarking system and Flickr - a photo sharing community.
Then I got the idea when I was standing behind the Starbucks with holding a cup of coffee: "10 Places of My City". By using Technorati tag system to encourage bloggers to showcase the top 10 places of their own city (Thanks Andrea first defined this movement in english for me).
Everyone lives in their own city have some favorite places, these kind of places maybe not a famous sight, likely a coffee shop, a library, a park or even a grocery store (I know someone really enjoyed grocery shopping). The idea was really simple: share your 10 favorite places in your blog, embed Technorati tags "10placesofmycity", if there are any pictures show up these places, upload them to flickr by tagging as "10placesofmycity", and even more, any links related to your favorite places, collect them to "10placesofmycity" in del.icio.us.
Actually the idea continues from the weciti concpt, a Chinese group/community blog focus on writing the best of localities which we launched a year ago. Blog in China is not very popular at that time, a few of pioneer Chinese bloggers joined this community to share their localities and activities. All of us are really enjoyed this blogging experience, we had initialed the first 2003 Chinese blog award base on this community, cooperate with other blog communities, such as Cnblog.org, Living in China and other major Chinese Blog service providers.
Everything is going smoothly, more and more bloggers joined with great blogging posts. The community had some interviews with media, newspaper, even create a column on a Local City Magazine. But the community suffered a serious disaster, the web hosting server had a hard-drive fail, that most of our works and posts were gone. we were keep sending our requests for their backup, but no answers, couple weeks later, the hosting company run a way out of business and we lost everything. Sounds really sucks, right! Like some old stories, we had start over again, invite people, create new sites, but even ourself were getting lost our passions. then the community somehow never back again.
Review of this story, I figure out some points why our first attempt to build up a community blog was failured. First, there's not enough devoted people constantly working and tracking on the project, Bloggers who has been invited to author group more intent to write on their own blog rather than a community blog, most of time, it's a copy-paste reactions. also we were sufferring the loose of organize, this kind of interacctive style works fine with individual bloggers but not for a community. Again, there few tools can be used at that time, for some bloggers with technical backgrounds, MovableType is powerful enough to get things well done. but for most of common bloggers, who even thinks that set up a single web page is tough works may not interest to learn how to use MT or HTML. More important, most of the help guide and information and English, not Chinese.
After year of tremendous progress on Blogosphere and Social Software, Web services like del.icio.us, flickr, TypePad is providing diversify functions which makes Blogger's online social experience becomes more easier and user-friendly. Users can share photos by flickr, exchange links by del.icio.us, build and publish blogs by powerful platform or Blog service providers. and then, Technorati tags with folksonomy trends makes thing even more sweet.
All of these above makes "10 Places of My city" to be easy adopted by individual bloggers. Three days after initialed this idea, over 20 Chinese blogger from all over the world joined and blogged "10 places of my city". It's really interesting to see that some of them are living in the same city, sharing their favorite places with intersections. Look at the 10placesofmycity on Technorati, bloggers come from different major cities in China such as Beijng, Shanghai, Chengdu, Xi'an, Wuhan, Xiamen etc, were sharing local experiences. Some of them wrote as a love story with emotional sense, reviewed most sweet places in their memory. I saw a blogger's post marked his 10 places with growing history, from childhood playground to modern office. I'm sure that more interesting post will keep coming in the next couple days.
I invited Carol who is a popular female blogger in taiwan to help me separate the idea to Taiwan blogosphere, huge reactions were breeding on her blog, Certainly, I got the right connectors! I joked with her that whether we could collect all of these local information to print out a Taipei traveler guide for bloggers. quawn who is a talent web designer, and host a blog community oui-blog.com was kindly design a LOGO for this movement.
Also, there's another thing makes me so excited, watch out the collection of "10 places of my city", it seems that Chinese bloggers from all over the world are getting involved. they are locate in different countries, from Asia to North America. Two of my favorite bloggers in Japan had blogged Tokyo and Kagoshima. and I discovered more in United States, Boston, Bay Area, Ann Arbor and Milwaukee. Surprisingly, I received a comment from Gloria today, She is a blogger also lived in Dallas, Texas and even point out that my favorite coffee shop it's really close to her house. What a amazing blogging experience!
I still remember last Nov, Dan Gillmore visit Shanghai, after meet with Isaac and other Chinese Bloggers, he said that China Blogger's Emerge, But Not Too Loudly. I believes that things are going to be changed and more and more China blogger voices will come up to the stage. Last Dec in Harvard Beckman Center, through the Internet and Society Conference, Attendees create a project called "Globe Voice", the collaborative project focused on Globe free speech and communications. I'd think It's the good way to use Technorati Tag system separate the idea of Globe Voice.
Sorry for English readers that most of Bloggers blogged their "10 Places of My City" in Chinese. Sigh! no matter how big the voice is, the language barrier still exists.
Technorati Tags: China, 10placesofmycity
1623 Comments
10/10/2004
On Web 2.0 conference, Mary Meeker had 11 minutes talk about internet in China:
...that in 1850, China was 33% of the world's GDP. Today they are only back up to 4% but they are the fastest growing. 59 million Chinese Internet users 24 million Chinese broadband subscribers 15 million online gamers The economic picture is enormously different in China -- GDP per capita -- $619 China $37,000 for US [Quote via tedshelton]
Also see Jeremy's section notes:
Tons of data pointing at Internet services already big and growing in China. Interestingly, most are US companies (Yahoo, eBay, Google). 70% of Chinese users are younger than 30 years old. Wireless messaging is already big there--207 million phones. 200 billion messages in 2003. China needs help in eCommerce for many reasons. And China doesn't breed many great Internet companies yet. But there are folks there now who get it. Labor surplus in China. Mary thinks it's like the mid-1990s in the US was. This stuff will make life better in China ultimately.
Jason's blog had record mary's talk to a mp3 file. According to People's daily online article on August 2004, China's Internet users exceed 87 million. In the early time this year Morgan Stanley had released a China internet report which collect whole bunch of data analysis。I think some of Mary’s data comes from that report. On the other hand, according to our unofficial Chinese blogger counter, the existing blogger in China had exceed half million. Base on internal data from Blogdriver.com (one of most popular blog service in China), by the end of this month, the user of the service had exceed 100 thousand, and host more than 80 thousand individual blogs (some are multi-author blogs)..
768 Comments
06/ 8/2004
A lot of confirms from Chinese Bloggers confirmed that Chinese Wikipedia was blocked in China. Through my refer system, I saw a dutch weblog "wikipeida benutzer" quote my previous post. Although I couldn't understand what he/she was talking about, I find a good link from his blog: Chinese Build Free Net Encyclopedia. After some of interviews with active contributors in Chinese wikipedia, the article point out why wikipedia was not blocked in China at that time, and predicted potential risks of blocking by Chinese censors.
One reason why Chinese Wikipedia has not been blocked by Chinese censors may be the site's insistence that all entries reflect a neutral point of view, a policy that defines all Wikipedia versions in other languages. The neutral point of view is intended to avoid editing wars between contributors competing to impose their interpretation of various subjects on other readers.
As Andrew Lih said:
"The site is not blocked en masse at the site level because its not obviously pro or against anything because of the neutral point of view policy,"
Another reason Chinese Wikipedia has not been blocked by Chinese censors may be its low profile and relatively small group of regular contributors. As the site gets more attention and attracts more contributors, Chinese censors may decide to block access to the site, giving an indication of how much exposure censors are willing to tolerate for a site like this,
I saw plenty of debates on
shizhao's
comment page (who is a pioneer Chinese wikipedian and a administrator of Chinese wikipedia), Some Taiwan contributors complained his arbitrary deletion on their works, most of them are caused by sensitive topics such as:
definition of Republic of China,
Taiwan's WHO bid etc. Actually here is a big culture conflict between Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. There just only one version of Chinese wikipedia called "zhongwen" wikipeida, its include both two kinds of Chinese characters. So it's mean no major Chinese character was preferred on site. The problem is mainland Chinese and Taiwan Chinese have different practice to write in Chinese. It's kinda of complicate.
Another debate wave is on the political issue, These topics easily drive contributors lost their patients. Obviously, at this point, contributors (even visitors) were missing one of most important principle in wikipedia: Reflect neutral point of view.
Wikipedia is a very attractive project, I do appreciate they efforts on thousands of Chinese entries. I hope to see that more and more contributors join this project to represent professional information, But if people are focusing on debates to define what kind of major Chinese should be used in Chinese wikipeida, The project couldn't widely participate by others.
23 Comments
05/24/2004
Since Mena has post on Sixlog asking "How are you using the tool?" Tons of trackback pings answer this question. As I'm a Chinese Blogger, I'm going to answer this question in my point of view from Chinese Blogosphere.
A conservative estimate of more than 300,000 Bloggers exists in China. There are two main types of Bloggers which is the common Blogger and the devoted Blogger. Most of Blogger are common Blogger who are using Blog service to maintain their blogs. Devoted Bloggers are professionals who have technical backgrounds and prefer to build up blog by themselves. They use popular Blog publish systems such as MovableType and WordPrss. Also this group of Bloggers is the most active Bloggers in China. At least 3000 of Chinese Bloggers are using MT system to setup their own site.
So, how are they using the tool? I made myself for an Example. I hosting two major Blog site, one is English, the other one is Chinese. I setup a sidebar blog which I use to collect favorite links from internet (Since I realized that del.icio.us is even better, I removed my sidebar blog). There also two blogs I create in my MT, one is Photoblog and the other one is moblog (I had moved my moblog to TypePad already). The totally of 5 blogs I owned at first and two set of MT installed in different web hosting services point to different domain names. Some of my Blogger friends have the same situation like me to keep update two blog in different languages.
Averagely, there are three blogs were created in MT per Blogger. Include main blog, dairy blog and testing blog. It's very interesting because a lot of guys want to split their post to two blogs, one is for dairy that means more informal, the other one is more serious post to indicate a personal branding or foucs on some professional field. Most of Chinese Bloggers incline to invite their friends or families to join their blog world, that's Chinese culture means "keep open doors" for everybody. So that most likely the total of three blogs and 3 authors in average. It seems that MT3.0 free version is not filling their needs.
In addition, Web Hosting industry in China is not developed as good as in States. Lacking service providers with limited service function and control power, this is a barrier to restrict the MT getting more popular. That's why a lot of devoted Bloggers who had setup their own MT would like to provide individual blogs to their friends and families. Actually I had created some blogs to my close friends too.
In my recent Chinese post, I point out that the free MT service provider is a potential threat to the profit of Typepad hosted by SixApart. (I will translate this Analysis on the MT pricing strategy later). I'd think that is one of major concern for SixApart to change their market strategy. But if they use this kind of price to Chinese market, I'd conclude that SixApart will lose Chinese market. The basic personal edition for $69.95 is too high to Chinese users. I quoted Dave winner's post here:
Yesterday we saw people complain about spending $60 for a big useful piece of software like Movable Type. I paid $60 for a cab ride in Geneva. A good dinner is $100. A hotel room $150...
I do agree this in US, but in China, $150 for a hotel room won't happen in normally. In some small town, $150 means one year of works.
In personal, I will totally support SixApart because of their great works and great people. I was very enjoyed to talk with Joi and Anil in Austin conference. But I also have to say that if MT keeps the price or even the Typepad Keeps the price to current Chinese Bloggers, absolutely they will lose a lot of loyal MT user in China.
482 Comments
04/ 6/2004
KanTianxia.com is a web-based RSS news aggregator. Powered by urPOS Technology. The website classified the news to diversiform categories, based on RSS and XML. Support RSS feed in each category. They also provide a RSS aggregator named "KanTianXia", like most RSS tools do, KanTianXia RSS aggregator support different RSS versions. And support a tree structure catalog in menu-bar. Screenshot (1, 2 ).
Main Function:
1> RSS 0.91, 1.0, 2.0
2> RSS Feed management
3> RSS content management
4> Web Browser
5> Update frequency setting
This is the first Chinese language RSS aggregator tool. obviously, supporting Chinese character with no problem. Actually Feeddemon support Chinese character not very well, SharpReader either. The developer said he will shift this project to an Open Source project on proper time. KanTianXia's catchword: Let's bring content to presence.
14 Comments
"Blog On Blog"; is a new project organized by CNblog.org Team. This is a brand-new information portal all about Chinese blogosphere, Blogger and Blogging activities. No doubt, all contents are made in China.
As we all know, CNblog.org is one of the most famous community weblog in China. It‘s focusing on promoting, sharing, transferring, and connecting information and Bloggers. There are lots of intelligent people getting involved in it; providing most trendy and valuable information. CNblog has a wise team with plenty of creativity and vitality. CNblog is leading some great project: Blogging Knowledge Blog, Chinese Weblog ring, Grassland RSS search engine, Social Software Wiki and Weblog encyclopedia etc.
So far, more than 3000 blogs have registered in CNblog weblog ring. The community grew very fast. More and more grassroot voices were released from here. We synchronized information from world wide blogosphere, to bring the most emerging news and trend to Chinese bloggers. Now, we would like to present our thoughts and movements to the world wide blogosphere. We are beginning this project to communicate most recent changes and movements in Chinese blogosphere in English to let other people know more about us.
We encourage Bloggers to join us. If you have basic English writing skill and know or interested in Blogging, please feel free to send us an Email and become a collaborative Author in this Blog.
Contact:
owen, email: wen-xin (at) msn dot net
Zheng, email: xeenet (at) hotmail dot com
This post dupe from my original post in CNblog.
61 Comments
03/30/2004
I got an Email from Isaac Mao, he invited to me join a new project: Translate Lawrence Lessig's new book "Free Culture" to Chinese Edition. Isaac created a wiki page in SocialBrain.org website which is a non-profit research lab focus on social technology and activities in China. The first reaction pops up in my mind is the permission issue from the author, so I checked Lessig's weblog and saw his comment reply to Isaac's request.
A noncommercial translation is as permitted as an audio version.
Just few days after Larry announced that the book goes an online version licensed under CreativeCommons. There huge echoes were breeding over the internet, especially in blogosphere. Also there is collaborative audio version project launched by AKMA ( I first saw this on joi's).
AKMA has had the best idea of the significant interval: Since Larry Lessig allows anyone to record the audio of his book, Free Culture, for non-commercial purposes...
Project Abstract:
Free Culture - Chinese Edition
As the books sparked us a free digital culture trend, we attempted to implement this idea by using wiki, wiki is a symbol of free culture social software which could mostly collect social energy, we are expecting this collaborative project to let us translate and publish this book to a Chinese Edition, rapidly and effectively. Before our work, there are some points have to be nail down:
1> must follow author's authorization of this book: Licensed under CreativeCommons
2> all works are non-commercial purposes.
3> allow translate and public publish works.
I 'm not sure I translate exactly, so I will take totally responsibility if any misunderstanding caused by my translation. Anyway, actually I didn't have a chance to download this book yet, but I 'm so excited to join this project, Hopefully I could promote this on my blog to let more people know it. Free culture will brings me a brand-new experience I never had before.
8 Comments