A team of 14 intrepid Outblaze members took part in the ORBIS-BUPA Moonwalkers (Chinese version here) charity event on the night of November 17, 2007, braving chilly temperatures to aid the preventably blind. Starting at the Wanchai Sports Ground and ending at Repulse Bay Beach, participants walked 20 kilometres from dusk to dawn, finishing at approximately 6 AM the next day.

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Yet one more interview from my visit to the 3rd Chinese Blogger Conference in Beijing November 3-4, 2007. BlogBus launched in late 2002 and was one of the first blog service providers (BSP) in China. BlogBus offers free blog hosting and charges premium service fees of less than $15 a year. According to the Baidu Blog Development Report China has 52,300,000 blogs and 1460 BSPs. BlogBus is one of the top 20 BSPs in China. The interesting thing is that the company is only a couple dozen people, but competes against organizations with hundreds of employees.
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It’s time for another Chinese Blogger Conference update. I met Ms Ying Xue in Beijing at the 3rd Chinese Blogger conference. Tangos Chan (see his interview) introduced us and told me that I absolutely must interview her.

Ying Xue is an investment analyst who provides research and analysis to overseas Venture Capital firms. She is one of the volunteers behind CnBloggerCon, and since she speaks fluent English Isaac Mao (see his interview) asked her to provide simultaneous interpretation for the foreign media who didn’t speak Mandarin.

Hong Kong has had more and more IT startups these past few years, but obviously compared with China the scale is completely different. China has a very highly active and diverse community of IT startups (see “China Web2.0 Review” by Tangos Chan), and because of the huge market size (and other factors), they obtain VC funding much more easily than Hong Kong’s IT startups. So I was really interested to know what Ying Xue thinks of the situation.

Ying said she is not representing her company, but just sharing her own personal thoughts with us - thanks Ying!

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Bo Yang earned his B.Sc. from Tsinghua University, and a Ph.D in physics from University of California. He Joined IBM (San Jose) in 1998 as an advisory scientist. From 2000 to 2004 he was the CTO and a co-founder of egistics Corporation in Beijing, a startup in supply chain management solutions. In late 2004 he started working on douban.com and in 2005 founded Douban Inc.

Bo Yang was guest speaker at the 3rd Chinese Blogger Conference, speaking on the subject of Music 2.0: Conflicts and Value. His company, Douban, launched in 2005 and compiles user-generated reviews and recommendations of books, movies, and music.

I am one of the earliest users of Douban, having formed a group called “Hong Kong Book Worms” in 2005, just after the launch. I wrote several blog posts about Douban, which brought hundreds of Hong Kong bloggers to Douban’s membership, and they generated thousands of books reviews. That impressed Bo Yang quite a bit.

Douban.com has an English version which operates in partnership with Amazon.Com for sales and data use.

To learn more about Douban and its founder, check out Bo Yang’s interview at the 3rd Chinese Blogger Conference:

cnbloggercon, outblaze, cbc2007, douban

It’s a marketing term.

That was the reply of Outblaze founder and CEO Yat Siu when asked what he thought of “Web 2.0″, a term that is over-used, over-hyped, and often associated with obscure companies. The idea behind Web 2.0 - interlinked platforms, social software, and online services that encourage user contribution - is one of the most powerful, promising, and appealing aspects of the evolving Internet, but surely we must retain some perspective. Let us not forget the late ’90s bubble heyday of the prefix “e-”.

Yat was being interviewed at the sixth Web Wednesday, held at Lotus on Pottinger Street in Hong Kong on Wednesday November 7, 2007, for an audience of 130 or so hailing from diverse technology and marketing backgrounds.

The podcast of the interview will be available shortly on the Web Wednesday web site. We’ll update with a direct link as soon as possible.

More material from the 3rd Chinese Blogger Conference that I attended last week-end! Today we have Tangos Chan, I know him from his Chinese blog 未完成 - Incomplete, and first met him at the 1st Chinese Blogger Conference, in Shanghai.

Tangos also has an English blog called China Web 2.0 Review, which tracks web 2.0 development, and reviews and profiles web2.0 applications, businesses and services in China. He wants foreigners to pay more attention to new IT start ups, and not just at the famous portal sites.

Besides English (as you see in the interview) and Mandarin, Tangos also speak Cantonese which made me feel more at home. He took good care of me at the Blogger Conference, helping me to find more people to interview. Tangos, thank you very much!

Next up we have Jeremy Goldkorn, founder and editor of Danwei.org, a hugely popular site that covers Chinese media, marketing, advertising and urban life. Jeremy has been in Beijing for 12 years, and speaks fluent Mandarin. He just wrote a blog post called ” Chinese Blogger Conference 2007 - some thoughts. Here is the video interview with Jeremy Goldkorn:

cnbloggercon, outblaze, cbc2007, denwei

From the wikipedia entry:

Isaac Mao is one of the pioneers of blogs in the People’s Republic of China. He is co-founder of CNBlog.org and a researcher in social learning…
As one of the earliest bloggers in the Chinese community, Isaac is not only co-founder of CNBlog.org which is the earliest evangelizing site in China on grassroots publishing, but also the co-organizer of Chinese Blogger Conference (2005 in Shanghai, 2006 in Hangzhou).

Isaac Mao is the co-organizer of the 3rd Chinese Blogger Conference in Beijing that I attended this past week-end on November 3-4. I was lucky enough to be able to do a video interview of him.

I have known Isaac Mao for over 3 years. When I started blogging, I found CNBlog.org and meet a lot of Chinese bloggers there, including Isaac, and I began to learn more about China’s issues through blogging, in addition to newspapers and magazines and similar media.

In the interview Isaac introduces the concept of CnBloggerCon; this is a good chance to understand why Isaac and other volunteers worked so hard to form and maintain the conference the last 3 years. I admire them very much for it.

Note: people referred tongue-in-cheek to Isaac Mao, as “Chairman Mao.” (via Rebecca McKinnon), so I named this post “The interview with Chairman Mao”.

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Outblaze is proud to be a major sponsor of the 3rd annual Chinese Blogger Conference, which was held in Beijing on November 3-4 2007.

Fon Hong Kong and Outblaze’s new service Blogarate are major sponsors.

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