the event ended yesterday with a lot of things for people to chew. update 11/8: edward has some photo slides of the meeting. a blogger named Angelo Embuldeniya developed chronicle-style posts to keep the key notes of each speech (via: rconversation). micah described what the conference was like from a participants' perspective, and rebecca had a more stimulating post on the social implications of blogging in china.
i was a little disappointed by the fact that the focus of the conference was very much on the technical side, and issues related to blogging's social sides were not tackled or were talked in a shallow way. i might be wrong because i was only able to watch the event online the second day and read some incomplete slides afterwards.
update 11/8: eswn has translated anti's take on this:
I feel that the Shanghai meeting was mainly discussing about the concept of Web 2.0, so this is more like a meeting of IT people. At a time when the world is treating bloggers as the new media, the Shanghai meeting is actually missing media specialists to discuss the significant trends. Could China be really splitting into those who favor media-like bloggers and those who favor IT-like blogs?
anyway, here are a few interesting points i was thinking about today:
in rebecca's post, she praised the so-called web 2.0 as a way to enhance the social networking:
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.
although chinese are known for their "guanxi", they don't have much social organizations besides family, schoolmate and colleague ties, so the online communities do extend their borders of meeting others and building relationship with many whom they won't know offline.
having said this, i think we need to see the other side of the coin. wang jianshuo said in his latest post:
One of the topics on the China Blogger Conference was very interesting. It talked about eliminating the gap between two conflicting culture/countries/regions by sharing ideas with blogging. Bloggers in India and Pakistan already did it. Bloggers from China and Japan are doing so, based on what I heard. Bloggers from both sides of the Taiwan Strait are joining hand to analyze the gap of understanding.
is this what we see in today's chinese blogsphere? or does blogging enhance the information exchanges between china and other countries? i don't think so. as i remember, simon once had an interesting post about how bloggers of similar viewpoints read and comment with each other but seldom visit bloggers of opposite view points.
to some extents, blogs in china build up walls that seperate people and jail them into small groups that further strengthen their shared view points, interests and values. exchanges between different groups are not norm but exception.
if you ever follow the public opinions formed online in china, you will find that "tyranny of the majority" becomes most likely with the help of internet. online communities, which are supposed to offer a platform for different views to confront, are usually dominated by one voice and categorized by the dominating voice. nationalistic chinese go to "anti-japan" forums and pro-western chinese have their own sites to visit and forums to chat.
blog/technology is neutral, the way people use it makes real difference. maybe next year we could talk more about the way we use blogs, rather than spend all the time on the technology.
andrew is the only blogger in this event that i know for many years. i was always impressed by him, not only because of his dedication to helping others but also because of his wit in using the latest technology for his undertaking.
at the earlist stage of his charity program, he actively talked about his program in an online community of a travel site and attracted many supporters. later on he set up a club dedicated to his charity program and then his own blog, at the same time he maintains a personal web site that helps others know himself better. these tools supplement each other and the combination of them has the best effect for his charity program. it is unbelievable that blog could do all these things or bring its power into full play without the help of other tools.
it seems to me that blogs need to be integrated into a bigger system that include other applications in order to overcome the current drewbacks. i am not a geek and don't know how, but my gut feeling is that blog can not stand alone to make users happy in the future.
update 11/8: and talking about censorship, a topic not quite touched in the meeting but raised (as always) by rebecca, i can't agree more with her this time:
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.
truely accurate observations and smart remarks. before chinese bloggers reach the treshold of a breakthrough, instead to complain, they have a lot of things to do to either to make their personal life more convenient or, to expand the borders of limits for free expression of ideas.
influenced by confucianism, chinese society still regards information of some fields as a privilege enjoyed by certain levels of the hierarchy. however, internet especially blogging is changing this very quickly. blogs and other online communities are great tools for chinese to share the information once monopolized by only a small number of people and enable them to exchange views on public concerns. the potential is very big but not brought into full play, most chinese blogs are the type of personal diary and although some start to talk about public issues, we need to find ways to get new momentum, like celebrity blogging maybe?