Lin Qianyu

media - Young writer discovers the power of the Net

Danwei focuses on the marketing of a new young author Lin Qianyu who got over one million Renminbi (100,000 euro) invested in his launch. That is an interesting story in a country where marketing is still finding its place. But the way how the internet helped this former drop-out to become a celebrity is even more interesting:

- 2004: I start putting my rejected writings online. Turns out there are lots of people who say they are impressed by them. I try to show them my published writings, but people say they are trash. I am puzzled - where's the money in being impressed? Trash has royalties. Are worthless things actually priceless?

internet - The story of the 50 million missing Chinese weblogs

I just talked to Frank Dai of Global Voices at bit longer about the different numbers of weblogs that are coming up from different sources and I probably have to admit I missed about 50 million Chinese weblogs. According to him it all depends on what you call a weblog. One thing is for sure: Analysys International has been much close to the truth than I thought in November, when they came up with an estimate I thought was unrealistic.
Frank Dai has saved a nice chart that originally went along with this article about the Analysis report in the Nanfang Daily. Unlike the stories the popular spindoctors of Bokee.com tell us, they are not the largest host of weblogs but have only have ten percent of the weblog-market and hold the 4th position at the end of 2005. MSN Space holds a 6th place with six percent of the weblog market.
Note that Sina, who is hosting the weblog of Xu Jinglei, the current number one at the top-100 of Technorati is is ranked even lower in this research. But that might have changed by now.
The real winner is Tencent, a Shenzhen-based company with its IM-service QQ, who has a weblog service, Q-zone, connecting its customers to its highly popular IM-service. Frank estimates that QQ now has 150 million accounts, while most people have two, three accounts (although I have talked to people who have eight accounts in the past). One third of them has a QQ-blog, connecting to them over their QQ-software, not over their browsers. That is about 50 million weblogs that have emerged since last year.
Those weblogs are mostly public, but since they have a rather complicated url, mostly only their QQ-buddies would read their weblog, says Frank Dai.
Q-zone had 30 percent of the market, according to the Analysys-report in November 2005. That means I and much of the rest of the world have been missing about 50 million Chinese weblogs. Bokee might of course say they are not real weblogs, while others say that Bokee is not really offering weblogs, but that is a very Chinese way of defining away competitors. We should not get involved into that game.
In the Q-zone people see themselves as bloggers and act as bloggers, says Frank. He says that especially the successful 'celebrity-blogging' has caused the recent hype and has helped QQ a lot. I wonder how Technorati is going to capture this part of the market.

Xiong Chengyu

internet - Not Prof Lessig but Tim Wu meets prof Xiong (revised)

Writer Tim Wu decribes on the weblog of Stanford law professor Larry Lessig a meeting with Tsinghua professor Xiong Chengyu, seen as "a personal advisor to Chinese President Hu Jintao on internet policy". A rather typical West-meets-East gathering. Wu ends up being amazed:

Xiong was of the new breed, and preempting me, he wore jeans with a jacket, like a 60-year old internet hipster. In conversation it turned out he was something of an internet utopian himself. He spoke of a network of great transformative power for China’s economy, culture, and society. A network that would take China out of its present cage, its underdeveloped version of itself. That would create applications to match and compete with U.S. versions, and even interestingly, a content industry that can best Hollywood.

Of course Wu has to bring up the current restraints on the internet in China (he wrote a book about it) and Xiong tries to explain why these restraints are needed to offer an unprecedented freedom. Wu tried to find a way to frame the China story. Will it develop like Singapore, Europe, or more like the US? Of course Xiong does not buy that.
More of these meetings are needed. (Hattip to China Web 2.0 review)

Update I: I'm still looking for prof. Xiong's account of the meeting, but I have not found a weblog he might have. I did find this (slightly outdated) paper he presented in 2002.
Update II: Frank Dai of Global Voices pointed out I made a mistake in the earlier edition of this entry. Not Lessig but another writer, Tim Wu, wrote the entry about his meeting at Lessig's weblog. Thanks, Frank!

Li Yinhe

media - Paying for an interview

The popular sociologist Li Yinhue is stirring controversy by asking money to be interviewed, writes That's Beijing. She asks about 500 Rmb per hour (50 euro). Quite different from the first months as a journalist in China where I had to convince Chinese companies they did not have to pay me.
Different countries have different traditions in dealing with the issue. On my first trips in Northern Ireland I was initially shocked when the boys in the street of Belfast offered to stone some British army vehicles for a fee. For something extra they would actually get some Molotov cocktails out. For a Dutch journalists that was not done, but some British journalists had screwed up the climate by offering payment.
Later they were quite happy to do all those things without payment: in those days it was their way to pass the time.
Compensating people for the costs they make would be ok, even for time they spend while they cannot make money, but accepting a fee, I find it is not done.

internet - Will there be 100 million bloggers next year?

November last year I ridiculed the Beijing-based research company Analysys when they said China has having 33.4 million bloggers. I tend to be the most pathetic optimist myself in this kind of cases and thought they must have made a counting mistake when then translated that figure into English.
Xinhua is doing today a similar thing and expect - based on academic research - that China might have in 2007 (that is next year) 100 million bloggers and 60 million by the end of this year. Are they crazy too or am I losing my marbles?
A Bokee-director, China's largest webhoser, says they add 100,000 blogs per day. About 658 companies provide webhosting services, the report says. Even when they are counting blogs in stead of bloggers, the figures are unsettling. I will go over my own assesments again.

internet - Who is next after Xu Jinglei?

Sam Flemming elaborates a bit on the emergence of the weblog of Xu Jinglei at Technorati's top-100 and wonders what is going to happen to the other popular Chinese websites:

I am confident there are a lot more they are missing due to lack of pinging by Chinese Blog Service Providers like Bokee, Blogbus, and Donews. The fact that bloggers like Massage Milk, Pan Shi Yi and Zheng Yuanjie, all bloggers just as famous as Xu Jing Lei, are not on the list confirms this in my mind. Books of Pan Shi Yi and Xu Jing Lei's blog posts are currently top 10 best sellers in Beijing.

Technorati is not only listening to this conversation, but also messing around with their systems. Since a few days for example this weblog gets picked up by their system when some weblogs, who have me in their blogroll, are updated. That is great for my ranking, but I would prefer a system where I would be notified when somebody is linking directly to me.

internet - Technorati still not counting correctly, bloggers

Yesterday, Technorati gave after a bit of lobbying the top spot on its top-100 to Xu Jinglei and it looks like the discussion is only starting. Danwei points and discusses other reports suggesting that the California-based service is still not giving Xu Jinglei the links she deserves. Technorati is only counting the links to her front page.
The problem is still that webhost providers should cooperate with services like Technorati to improve their rankings, just like is happening in Japan.

internet - Yahoo "wants to do good"

Rebecca MacKinnon of Global Voices challenged a representative of Yahoo today at the "We Media" conference in London. The Yahoo-representative offered a possibility of financial support for internetprojects worldwide, to do good, as he put it. Yahoo has assisted actively in jailing four Chinese journalists and MacKinnon asked companies to "be good" in a more comprehensive way.

tags: wemedia

internet - Xu Jinglei now tops Technorati

Technorati has reacted very fast on last week's critique. Xu Jinglei tops now their top-100. Now the other hundred.

On chaos and creativity in business – the WTO-column

When I attended in March the Google Dance Party in Nanjing I was treated more than one time on illustrations of differences in management style. On display in the hall of the hotel was a movie of happy newly recruited Google-employees. They all had been forced to drop their business suits, were wearing Google t-shirts and learned how to play with each other.

An US company like Google tried to get most out of the creativity of their staff, transforming them into a happy family like we know them from the US soap operas.

Liu Chuanzhi, the founding father of Lenovo – some of us might still remember the company as Legend – has a very different way of creating his happy corporate family, I read in a recent book about his company:

“In the 1990s, [Liu] brought what was essentially a paramilitary management style of highly centralized command into a high-tech industry. On the other side of the Pacific, entrepreneurs like Bill Gates were practicing a kind of free-rein management style in the information industries. In China, Liu Chuanzhi insisted on having the company become a Spartan battle structure with each person and each department taking its proper place as one component of the whole.”

Could things be more different? But Lenovo, now the third largest producer of PC’s in the world, must have done something right here. What management styles try to address is what their leaders perceive as relatively weak points in the organization that need urgently to be strengthened. While Western managers have to learn their people ‘out of the box’ thinking and mobilize their hidden creativity, Liu Chuanzhi obviously thought his fellow citizens were already out of the box enough and did not need any encouragement to use their creativity.

Liu’s management style did emerge, just like Google’s, under very specific conditions. Liu did get his fair share of trouble as Mao Zedong unleashed repeatedly the power of the people on very destructive paths, the last time during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The first years of Legend were equally marred by lack of organization, faction building and conspiracies, creating a company with very Chinese characteristics. So, he wanted a centralized, even paramilitary style to control his managers. When you are familiar with the larger Chinese enterprises, you might understand why in that setting this choice is understandable.

The question is now, what is going to happen when Google uses its management style in China, or when Chinese companies use their style in Europe or the US. The clashes of Huawei, yet another paramilitary style enterprise, with managers in Europe and the US are already well documented. Lenovo, after purchasing the PC-division of IBM, might have bought perhaps not a freewheeling management style like Google, but also not a Chinese military style.

In the end both management style might have to adopt, depending on the situation they are in. Assuming that you can bring in either style into a fully different setting without changes might be a mistake

Fons Tuinstra

PS: I’m reading Ling Zhijun. The Lenovo Affair. The growth of China’s computer giant and its takeover of IBM-PC. A review will follow later.

internet - It is the ping, you stupid

A summery of the case of the culturally biased Technoraty at Tidbits of the Poynter Institute.

internet - It is all about pinging Technorati

I'm following the feed and the chat of We Media in London today. A bit of a familiar sound from the chat, where the vanguard is complaining while the old media are desperately trying to catch up.
Short exchange with Kevin Marks from Technorati who joined from San Francisco on the recent debates on the question why Technorati is doing such a bad job on non-English sites. It all boils down to pinging the Technorati servers. When you cannot be bothered (like many Chinese webhosts), Technorati will not list you. We actually had to explain a participant in India what a ping is.
David Sifry wrote in his latest analysis that Japan was actually overtaking both the English and Chinese weblogs in numbers and speculation has been going around on why that might be the case. Kevin explained they are now working with a Japanese partner who is helping them to get Japanese sites registered. I suggested we should perhaps get some more French, Chinese, Iranian and Swahili partners in to help them, but Kevin referred to David for that discussion. Would be worth to consider.

media - Virtually attending "We Media" in London

Today and tomorrow I will attend the "We Media" conference in London, at least virtually and as long as time allows. The high-end new media is attende by a large number of the usual suspects: Dave Sifry of Technorati, yes, Dan Gillmor, Isaac Mao, Jeff Jarvis, Rebecca MacKinnon and some other names you might have noted on this blog.

Xu Jinglei

internet - Why is Xu Jinglei not on Technorati's top 100?

Sam Flemming continues the debate on how good or how bad Technorati is. In the US it is a very well-known search engine for weblogs, but non-English weblogs complain they are being ignored.
Why is a tremendous popular Chinese site, like that of Xu Jinglei, not in their top-100? Or is ten million page-views per day not a good indication of its popularity? Between thousand and four thousands comments per article is more than I get!
Sam is working for a company that is monitoring the Chinese blogosphere and - although they only started fairly recently - is an expert on these matters. Apart from Bokee.com, they also do not seem to list the weblogs at Sina.com, Sam says.

telecom - Ringtones, the new mobile cash cow

SMS's might be a relatively primitive tool, in China they have been a major source of revenue of many of the telecom providers. Initially the two mobile telecom providers passed on most of that income to the content providers, but since they decided a few years ago to rake in 80 percent of that revenue themselves, SMS has greatly contributed to the bottomline of the telecom providers.
Now, notes Reuters, ringtones have arrived as a way to diversify that income. Launched in 2003, it has become a hit overnight:

China Mobile, the world's biggest wireless operator by subscribers, said in March that "new" businesses, consisting of data and content, grew 59 percent and accounted for a fifth of revenue in 2005, versus 15.5 percent in 2004.
Within that total, ringback tone revenue was one of the fastest-growing segments, quadrupling to 3.42 billion yuan ($427 million) in 2005 from just 848 million yuan the previous year.

The growth figures for China Unicom have even been higher, be it on a lower level.

law - Farmers losing confidence in their future

Chinese farmers show a "decreasing willingness to make long-term investments on their land" is one of a set of troublesome conclusions from a major survey by a group of researchers, says Michigan State University in a press release. The study among 1,700 villages in 17 Chinese provinces is conducted in 2005 by Renmin University in China and supported by MSU and the University of Washington.
Less than 40 percent of the farm households received contracts or certificates detailing their rights, as required by China's 2002 Rural Land Contracting Law, notes the study. From 1999 to 2002 farmers tended to invest more into their land, the study says, but that ended in 2002.
While the number of land takings by local and provincial government has gone up dramatically, 15-times comparing 1995 and 2005, most farmers are not being consulted about the compensation they might get. In one third of the cases where compensation was promised, it was not given. In more than 30 percent reasons to the takings involved private rather than public interests.
The study will be published in full this fall in the New York University Journal of International of International Laws and Politics.

internet - Measuring the Chinese blogosphere

The latest overview of the international blogosphere by language by David Sifry of Technorati (one of the leading weblog search engines in the US) gives some interesting changes. It indicates that English is fast losing its superior position, but not as expected to Chinese but to Japanese. As a percentage of the languages being used according to Sifry Chinese dropped from 25 percent in November 2005 to 15 percent in March 2006. Japanese increases from 31 to 37 percent in the same period.
The dispute on the US-centric service of Technorati is already ranging for some time and many non-English bloggers say their languages are underreported. Ethan Zuckerman summerizes some of those debates. Technorati relies on 'pings' it gets from servers and it misses for example China's largest weblog-service Bokee.com because the company is not really interested in pinging an US-service.
An explanation for the Japanese surge could be their tendency to blog mobile, says Ethan:

Since much blogging in Japan is mobile blogging, posts tend to be shorter and more frequent - since the study considered the number of posts, not the number of blogs, this could partially explain the skew. And it’s possible that some language misidentification is going on as well.

media - How to write about Tiananmen?

I just arrived at an interesting time in the Lenovo-book: the summer of 1989. Because the book was translated and not seriously edited, many events and Chinese ways of dealing with reality show how much the translator has been struggling. The number of quotation marks, of sayings that cannot really be translated, is amazing. The situation becomes embarrassing in 1989.
The paragraph indicating something had happened goes in this way:

"1989 became a watershed in China's modern history. After suffering through a summer of intense heat [sic!] and tremendous anxiety, oppression, and violent resistance, most Chinese seemed immobilized, sunk in a deep fog. Over twenty Western countries united in refusing to invite Chinese leaders to their countries. They obstructed the investments of businessmen who wanted to come to China. The Head of the Foreign Affairs Department ... and her young team had little to do."

In this way the unavoidable framing of a story becomes straightforward propaganda. It is bad enough official publication in China cannot write more open about 1989, when you want to sell a book outside China, you cannot do this.

media - The decline of the traditional media

Traditional media are losing their audiences, as research shows in many countries. In China believable figures are lacking and getting decent information on how fast the official media are losing their grip on audiences is scarse. In the Lenovo book an interesting tidbit:

"In the early Spring of 1989, ad prices of CCTV were still cheap and the content of the ads was uninspiring, but the audience was roughly three times what it is today."

The decline is going fast than I expected.

economy - Enjoying the new Lenovo book

Between many other activities I'm trying to find some time to read the new Lenovo book by the Shanghainese journalist Ling Zhijjun. It is written in a typical Chinese style, so in the beginning it was a bit tough, and might even be tougher for people who have no clue about China. It does help if you know some of the people and places described in the book.
But as I move on, the book wins in pace and is really a fascinating case-story in how early business in China developed. A quote on when the company decides to recruit for the first time to recruit new graduates in stead of from the old computer institute the company came from, one of the first times a company would put an job ad in a paper, in May 1988:

"Out of the 500 people who responded, the company selected 280 to take a written exam. Out of the results, it selected 120 to be interviewed in person. In the end, there were 58 people that the interviewers felt were appropriate: they could not find any way to reduce this number further. The plan had been to hire only 16 people. They handed the issue over to [CEO] Liu Chuanzhi to decide and he hired all 58 young people on the spot."

Tang Wanxin

economy - D'Long's owners gets eight year jail

After lengthy investigations and court procedings, the main owner of the D'Long economic empire got a jail sentence of eight years, Xinhua reports.
The conglomerate started off in the 1990s in the tomato-industry by three Tang-brothers and was already known for its heavy-handed tactics in dealing with suppliers, competitors and others. It enjoyed high level protections despite that despite its troublesome reputation.
After the new government took charge, fortune changed for the D'Long company too.