01/25/2005
10 Places of My City - Chinese Blogging social movement
Post @ 02:27 in Blogging - Chinese Blogosphere - Social Software
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.
Combining the matching capabilities of online dating and the detailed profiles of social networking sites,