Scenario:  Let’s say you are a foreign multinational (or startup) considering market entry into China.  You’ve seen how companies like Ebay have failed spectacularly in China.  So you network like crazy to get insight into your specific market opportunity.  But frankly, your friends are not representative of the market…since they all make tons of money at multinationals, eat at the best restaurants, work in nice highrise office buildings in Shanghai Pudong

Blogger Insight is a new concept that can help you break out of this affluent bubble in China and get real insight, from a hand-picked panel of bloggers that follow your specific market.  I first learned a little about Blogger Insight when I saw co-founder Ying Xue at the Web2Asia office prior to CNBloggerCon, and then heard CEO Lucas Englehardt speak about it at a CNBloggerCon panel on blog monetization. Web2Asia, Profy, and TheNextWeb also posted on this announcement.

I first met Ying Xue in January this year when she was still an associate at BVCapital, and then later met her in May to discuss ways to get involved with CNBloggerCon.  I’ve been impressed with her business acumen and passion for the Chinese blogosphere.  Congratulations Ying and Lucas!

Photo credit: CN Reviews

How it works

A client hires Blogger Insight to work on a “case study”.  A Blogger Insight consultant shapes the study into a form that can be distributed throughout the Blogger Insight expert network of bloggers.  In theory (I have not used the service), Blogger Insight’s value-add is as follows:

• They presumably know who the experts are in your topic
• They have already recruited these experts
• They know how to structure your research query in a way that yields the insights you need to make a decision.
• They manage the process of getting responses from all the bloggers that contribute to your research
• They then present those responses in a form that allows you to make a decision.

Why not do this on you own?  Any one company could not assemble the expert network required as cost-efficiently as Blogger Insight nor could it provide enough business to maintain that network on an ongoing basis.

Pricing

Pricing starts from RMB5000 to RMB12500 and up, depending on the nature of the work.  See BloggerInsight for more details.

How bloggers participate

Bloggers participate with other bloggers to provide opinions and advice to the company.  They also refine their ideas by engaging and debating with other participants in the case study.  This process should sound familiar:  it is exactly what bloggers do on their blog every day!

The research deliverable

Lucas Englehardt sent me a sample of a research study on Chinese Social Networking Sites (SNS).  Here are some screen grabs to show you the kind of information you can get.

Expert Responses

Comparison Chart

Screen Shots

All screenshots copyright BloggerInsight

Key Challenges

I see the key challenges as follows:

• Cost-efficient sales and marketing.  Selling market research projects to foreign companies could involve significant marketing and sales costs.
• Attracting and retaining high-quality client-service staff.  At the center of the operation is a strategic market research professional that fields the research project and synthesizes the data into a useful report.  It could be hard to keep high quality people who can do this work.
• Cost of blogger recruitment.  In theory, all bloggers should be interested Blogger Insight.  But if every project is different, Blogger Insight might need to recruit different bloggers for different projects.  A Web 2.0 startup might be served by the same bloggers as an SNS site client.  But an automotive or cosmetics client might need completely different bloggers.

These issues can be overcome, and I’m already impressed by the team involved.  I’m enthusiastic about their prospects, and think that they can expand beyond the blogosphere to deliver scalable expert network services in other areas, perhaps patterned after the Gerson Lehrman Group Councils that have served hedge funds via Strategic Advisor Councils of senior executives in target industries, with minimum fees probably around USD$250,000 per year.

Michael Butcher

Michael Butcher dispels a few misconceptions.  He speaks of needing to understand the historical context and the shadow of this tumultuous recent past on the psyche of the government and the Chinese people.  He strikes against the misguided a-historicism carried by most Western critics of China today.  He also talks of the sense of freedom and opportunity, to contrast the popular view that the Chinese people are under the tight control of a repressive regime.  Learning:  Some understanding of modern Chinese history is helpful to understanding why China is the way it is.

Robert Scoble

Robert Scoble highlights a few other wrong and dated ideas on China.  First, according to Scoble, the idea that China is just a country of copiers/cloners is over.  Second, “Americans are being fed only the negative stories about China and that is lulling them into complacency.”  This point of view is in stark contrast to the firestorm of criticism that Robert unleashed on FriendFeed on the 3 day mourning period after the Sichuan Earthquake.  Robert’s attendance at CNBloggerCon was well received and I was impressed by his desire to learn.  Learning:  China is rapidly becoming an innovator.  Western media’s focus on attention-grabbing negative stories about China is dangerous to our economic health in the West.

Shel Israel

Shel Israel addressed the issue of censorship in China and concluded that “censorship can be a major hemorrhoid to the China tech community, but it is not the Orwellian horror that so many Westerners seem to think it is.”  Shel concludes that the scale of social media in China is too large for a low-tech government bureaucracy to repress.  This is not to say that house arrests don’t happen, servers don’t get unplugged, and blogs don’t get blocked. (See Rebecca MacKinnon’s post on “Getting Beyond Iron Curtain 2.0″ for a richer view on Internet censorship in China)  Shel also highlights what I’ve heard from many Chinese people over and over again.  Things are getting better.  The government, despite its corruption and obsession with control, has delivered growth and opportunity to millions of people.  Learning:  The world has got to get beyond the view of China as a totalitarian state with complete information control.  It is instead (in Ted Koppel’s words) an authoritarian state barely in control of its people.

Ernst-Jan Pfauth

Ernst-Jan Pfauth of The Next Web captured perfectly the frustrations of those who have a foot in both China and the West–that most Western observers paint a black and white picture of China that lacks the nuanced grays required to truly explain the dynamics in China.  He then applies this toward helping the Western Web 2.0 audience know that portals and bulletin boards (BBS) are alive and well in China.  Learning:  Nuance is the enemy of a easily packaged story that satisfies editors, advertisers, and the Western public back home.  Good journalists will fight hard to get across this nuance in an attempt to better equip us for the complex world we live in.

I hope we transformed a few people’s thoughts on China, and that for at least a few, there is interest in digging deeper.  That was our original goal. It is vitally important, especially in rough times, that the Western public gain a richer and more three-dimensional view of China.  We need this view to influence our political leaders and the policies they adopt.  We need this view to remain economically competitive and to be successful in the face of globalization.  And we need this deeper understanding to share our best values and virtues with the world, in an effective way that helps us to jointly, and collaboratively, build the future that we want to live in.

George and Christine, we did a good thing.  And my appreciation also goes to the extended team of Brian Eng, Markus Gruber, and Min Guo.

I’m also grateful to the bridge bloggers who helped engage in great dialogue for this tour.  I confess I was a bit tired of the China 101 discussion myself toward the end of the tour and wanted to get away to dig a little deeper myself!  All the more reason why I’m appreciative of the service of the tireless bridge bloggers/analysts who contributed (and I’m sure I missed people):  Richard Burger, Tangos Chan, Paul Denlinger, David Feng, Benjamin Joffe, Kaiser Kuo, Andrew Lih, Gang Lu, Ryan MacLaughlin, William Moss, Adam Schokora, Kenneth Tan, David Wolf, Frank Yu.  CN Reviews Edict:  Add these blogs to you RSS reader right now!!

The first video hit critical mass in early July, appearing on various forums and blogs. In the video, a naked and withdrawn teenage girl is commanded to do ludicrous things such as marching in place while enduring beatings by other youths, some classmates, seven girls and four boys in total. It is also suggested that the girl was raped before the video begins.

• Tianya BBS: 女生遭轮奸后又被同学凌辱 并被拍视频放上网 (Chinese)
• ChinaRen BBS: 女生被轮 奸遭凌辱视频引网友热议 (Chinese)
• chinaSMACK: Naked Chinese Girl Attacked By Cantonese Teens [NSFW] (English)
• Sankaku Complex:Girls Preside Over Classmate’s Gang Violation (English)

The second video hit critical mass this past week, again appearing on various forums and blogs. The accompanying story suggests that this girl was being punished by classmates seeking retribution for her stealing from them at least three times. Within the video, the girl offers to appease her enemies by taking off her clothes for the camera rather than being beaten up.

• Mop BBS: 广东女中学生偷东西被威胁脱衣凌辱拍视频 (Chinese)
• chinaSMACK: Naked Schoolgirl Video, Punishment For Stealing [NSFW] (English)

Reactions to both videos can best be described as “expected,” with the overwhelming majority of people all outraged by teenagers ganging up on an girl, beating, exploiting, and humiliating her…all on film. Also expected are the implicit and explicit multitudes of people, both men and women, further spreading or seeking these videos, and the people who lecture them for doing so.

Yet, within the public discourse surrounding these videos, there seems to be two major camps of apoplectic rage:

• Those more outraged by the content of the video, who tend to spread the video to draw more outrage to the video.
• Those more outraged by the video being spread, who insist that the spread of the video is categorically contemptible.

We bare witness to a profound social phenomenon…and conundrum.

1. Are these videos “viral?” Or are these videos a “virus?”
2. Is the rapid spread of these videos natural, illustrating some human social mechanism at work? Or is it unhealthy, revealing something deeply wrong with society? Something else?
3. Should these videos be suppressed, whether to protect the identity or dignity of the participants or to prevent a portion of the population from deriving a socially unacceptable voyeuristic pleasure from it?
4. In the internet age, can these videos realistically be suppressed at all? What ramifications for the “victims”, the “aggressors”, and society at large are there for suppressing or not suppressing? What is “better” or “right” for society?
5. If these videos cannot entirely be suppressed, then how should society react? How should society respond both to the spread of the video and to incident evidenced by the video? Again, what is “better” or “right” for society?
6. What do our responses say about our own worldview, about where we draw the lines separating the individual and society, the private and the public?
7. Is there a difference between the reactions of the average Chinese netizen and the average “Western” netizen? Would your answers above change based upon what society you are in, whether “Chinese” or “Western?”

Speaker: Christopher Adams

Taslima Nasrin’s photo on flickr found by Japanese magazine. How did they find the photo? I used a Creative Common license on the photo. By having the tag it allowed the Japanese magazine to find my photo and publish it.

This is what I like to call the triangularization of benefits, or win-win-win.

Who are the winners here? The Japanese magazine got the free photograph, Nasrin got a high quality photo of her in the magazine, and I got published as a photographer which has never happened before.

Isaac Mao: “Whenever you have the intention to creat, you will find it easier and have more critical ideas when you have the sharing process firmly in mind.”

Charles Dickens. He visited US and was upset that a lot of his books were pirated in the States, he went back to UK and wrote a book called American Notes and criticized piracy in the States. Then Americans pirated this book and sold 50,000 copies in one day.

Mark Twain: He spent a lot of time working on intellectual copyright. He was upset because Canadians were ripping off his books. He wanted to keep control of what he wrote so he would go to Canada to register his books. 1874, wrote a book called “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word As I Heard It”. In this story he really repeated word for word the lifestory of a slave. Mark Twain was not the creator of the story but he became the owner because he wrote it down.

Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons.

Remix Culture: One person creates something and another person remixes. Call and response.

Joi Ito. A book of his photographs. Freesouls.cc

Yiyantang translated essays in the photobook into Chinese. Chinese translations available on the web, even though the book is yet to be published. Ito tols me to go check out slideshare where the book was already available.

But instead of being angry, we are very happy about this. It helps us spread our message. We are creating the community around the idea, so that when the real book comes out people will already be familiar with what we are doing.

Lessig’s Hybrid Model of Creative Enterprise:
Models – Second Life, Flickr.

Swoon. Street artist. Compiling flickr photos taken by different photosgraphers of her work.

Four photographers documented each stage of Swoon’s work. How to catalogue this and publish this.

Second Life – Cao Fei’s RMB City. Using seconlife as a platform for her work, made a documentary using second life.

Old school BBS: The Chinese Social Networking Phenomenon
China’s Facebook Clones

Research and Development – Jboss and J2EE
Business Development – netvibes Asia

Why Open Web Asia?
In US/Europe Web, becoming an international company is relatively much easier!
And language is not a huge barrier, eg. Le web 3. In Asia, is there any cross country web company or service?

What is really happening in asia?
Korea - naver.com still dominating the market, online gaming is conquering the world, eg. Nexon, CMUNE, CyWorld is operating in the US, StoryBlender won TechCrunch 40, Wisia.us, just look at the design.

Japan – mobile market is probably 5 years ahead of the rest of the world. eg. FelicaNetworks; always the entry market for western service, eg. Youtube, facebook, twitter etc; also clones, but with more innovations, Nicovideo.jp

Hong Kong – small market. Not many startups, but they focus on global market, eg.  AliveNotDead; Some companies have their office set up in GZ/BJ/SH, eg. CityIN, Moochi etc.

India – is not really in Web2.0, but they don’t have the language barrier and very active in western market, eg. SlideShare.net. Startups are getting hot, eg. Buurp, Picsquare etc.

Singapore – small market but its government is very supportive and keeps track on the trend of the web.

Israel – many startups actually are founded by Israeli entrepreneurs, eg. Snapfish

Vietnma - The battle place when those big names decide to go abroad.

China – The most active market in Asia! SNS, Video-sharing, Open platform, P2P, B2B, C2C etc. the market is so promising, Those startups founded by foreigners who live in China, eg. Qifang, Neocha, Chinesepod, etc. are doing great work. Mobile market is much larger than wired web market and more mature; web market is still young and still entertainment-centric.

The OpenWeb.Asia Workgroup ‘08
Pepared for 3 months,

Mission
Build an efficient channel connecting the Western and Eastern and web. Bring more Asian countries and regions into openwebasia and bridges Asia local markets. Build an ecosystem that recognizes great startups, individuals in Asia.

OWA is working with netexplorateur to reward 100 innovative companies of the year

speaker contact info:

• uklugang@hotmail.com
• www.mobinode.com

Speaker: Lu Fei

The Use of Online Information Platform for NGO Relief Work During Wenchuan Earthquake

The reaction from NGOCN during Wenchuan earthquake:
May 12, start BBS about the earthquake
May 13 set up NGO alliance office in Chengdu for earthquake relief work
Nay 14 Kunming, Xiamen, Shenzhen sends relief supplies
Etc.

Observations:
- QQ groups, BBS, blogs are useful for relief work.
- A lot of netizens used the internet to find out about and to participate in relief work
- In one day we got 1000 volunteers
- NGOs can use the internet to find volunteers
- NGOs can use the internet to send out information about relief work, but still need more strength (development and resources) in this area
- Internet companies and the media increasingly use internet to dissemination and collect information for NGOs

Problems:
- Limited information. No one has accurate information during natural disaster relief work. Too many channels of communication, thus information becomes confusing.
- NGOs cooperate with many different industries, but NGOs do not carry much weight, have no influence over and no persuasive power over industries.
- NGO internal communication is inefficient. Problematic for information platform to drive meaningful communication.

Challenges:
What is the definition of the internet as a platform for information sharing? Is it merely for information dissemination? Should it edit and organise information? What tasks should it execute?

NGO lacks IT expertise. How can we encourage IT industry to participate in NGO and in civil society in general?

——————————————————————–

Other successful cases of internet use facilitating NGO relief work:
Liubing xiong renwen zhuanxiang jijinhui 廖冰兄人文专项基 and xintuofeng xingdong 新驼峰行动

From xintuofeng xingdong:
Using sns and blogs during earthquake and snowstorm relief work was very effective.

Bloggers found out about us on the web then they passed on our information amongst themselves. Bloggers who are familiar with each other, trust each other. They disseminated our information very rapidly online. We received a lot of phone calls from people who wanted to donate to us. Thanks to web 2.0, we received tens of thousands of yuan in donations from people (bloggers) who have never met us in person, yet who came to trust us.

We also use the internet to continuously update what is needed on the frontlines and also to communicate with suppliers of relief goods.

Speaker: Ping Ke (平客, aka. buchimifan)

Has anybody used anonymous names to make posts that support yourself? I think many people have.

I have had many big arguments with people online. One case was about the Olympics. I didn’t like the opening ceremony. Of course, the show was great, but it was such a waste of money (applause from the audience).

Dongdongqiang, a blogger, wrote about the opening ceremony, praising it. I commented on his post. I said that of course you enjoyed watching the ceremony in your air conditioned room. I’m glad for you. But think about the poor coal miners down in the mines who can’t watch it.
He replied to me the next day. He said: I didn’t invite you, how come you are on my blog and commenting? Well, I thought: blogs are an open space for people to have conversations, aren’t they? Dongdongqiang said many bad things about me, he used profanity, he called me shabi (“fucking idiot” or “stupid cunt”), shit for brains, and other things.

I think I replied in quite a calm way, saying that we’re all pretty much on the same intelligence level, that I’m not anymore of an idiot than he is, or that anyone else is.

In retrospect, it was a waste of time. Most arguments on the web are meaningless, waste of time.

How many people write blogs? How do bloggers feel about comments? How do you feel when you see a comment from someone who disagrees with you?

I have friend who can’t stand radical comments. I also have friends who don’t give a damn what kind of crazy comments you leave on their blog.

I think when you first start to write blog, you feel that you hold truth in your hands, that you know best. But how can you be so sure?

We need rational debates, whether in person or online.
On the day US election results came out, I happened to be sitting with a couple of Americans. They were discussing who they support. One said he supports Obama, but the other supports McCain. They started to debate who would be a better president … it was calm and rational debate.

In china we can’t even vote, just discussing whether we should vote can get people riled up.

In Taiwan, politics can split up a family. Husbands and wives who disagree politically can argue until they divorce – is it really worth it?

Example of rational debaters online:
Hanhan. Go read his blog, he has high quality writing, and can criticize people without resorting to profanity.

Wangshuo. He always gets nasty comments from young people about how he is a has-been, that guys like him from the 60s have no place on the web. I remember his classic reply was: we were all young once, but have you been old before?

We should talk more with good debaters, we can learn a lot from them.

Many people like to tag me as a liberal. I don’t care, time is so precious, especially for us middle aged, I’m about 40 years old. I’m not going to argue with you, unless you give me a visa to the US.

One question from the audience: Why are you called buchimifan (meaning “I don’t eat rice”)? Because I really don’t eat rice, my stomach can’t digest it. I only eat congee.

• A11 - 9:00 - Keynote: Human & Social Media - Shel Israel
• A12 - 10:15 - An Analysis of Authenticity in Online Content - He Caitou
• A13 - 10:45 - Idealism, Debate and Blogging - Ping Ke
• A14 - 11:20 Social Communications 2.0 - Moderator: Vim Zhang; Panelists: Zafka Zhang, Donnie Dong, Bingo Wang
• A15 - 13:30 NPO 2.0:  Internet and the Growth of China’s Civil Society - Gao Tian, Zhang Lina, Peng Weifeng, etc.
• A16 - 14:50 TBA - Roland Soong said he cannot come for some reason.
• A17 - 15:20 - Publishing Autonomy in the New Economy - Christopher Adam
• A18 - 15:50 - Case Studies of How Games Leverage Social Community
• A19 - 16:10 - Asia Open Web - Gang LU
  
• A20 - 16:35 - International Chinese 2.0
• A21 - 16:55 - We Chinese: Look, the Future!
• 17:35 The End

Right now, we finishing up the panel on Social Comunications.  Zoe Li is translating, blogging, and editing on her first liveblogging assignment!

Speaker: Hecaitou 和菜头

I really like the web. This year, a lot of weird things happened to me on the web, I realized the web today is no longer what it was originally. I like to use the web to search for information, to find critiques of products, films, books, or to find news and analysis.

I recently bought a book. I chose this book because I saw the positive feedback about the book on douban.com and also from rss feeds from blogs discussing this book. So I was really disappointed when I actually read the book and it was crap.

I realized that the information I received from the web about the book was just like soft ads.

This is one of the biggest changes on the internet this year: businesses realized the low-cost and high-efficiency of marketing on the web. Information I get from the web is no longer raw feedback from actual users and consumers, but rather a lot of information has been polluted by profit-seekers

Seeking “true information” on the internet:

I read about an incident – 6 police officers killed 1 university student. I reacted strongly to the news, I was angry to find out about it and felt it was really wrong of the police.

More information about the student began to appear on the web. I found out that he wasn’t a university student, but rather he had graduated from university two years ago. Later, I found out that he wasn’t really a graduate at all.

Twenty-four hours later, Heilongjiang news station reported that the student had attacked police officers on three three different occasions previously.

Another twenty-four hours later, youtube video appeared giving names to faces, then netizens posted more details of the people involved, more background of students, mostly negative.

Eventually, my impression of the event completely flipped, before sympathy for student, now police are heroes.

Who put the video on youtube? Its not on tudou.com. There were 40,000 views overnight.

Web is powerful, everyone wants to control it.

Information you receive on the web, may not be “truth”. It is what a certain party wants you to see, it has been filtered.

How can we screen fake information given by profit-seekers and from government?
I don’t have very good remedies.

I keep rss feeds from people, pages, blogs that I trust. I take all other information with a heavy grain of salt.

Personalize my search engine.

Also, to look at the time line of information coming in to see where and when information originated from.

Finally, you have to be willing to spend time to look for information that is “true”.

Introduction:

Son of Jewish immigrants who at the time they came to America were not that welcome, and they were a working class family.  So to have come this far and to be in China is an incredible experience.  Thanks to Edelman China, China 2.0 (Web2Asia, CNReviews, The China Business Network), and CNBloggerCon, and Isaac Mao for the opportunity to come speak to this audience

Naked conversations:  how Shel got started with Social Media.

Shel wrote a book with Robert Scoble.  Book was named “Naked conversations” in English but not Chinese.  I wish it were because it really is about conversations without barriers. A free exchange between people.  Now it is called Global Neighbourhoods and has

Global Neighbourhoods

Social media is about conversation like 2 friends talking

Maybe they travel on the same bus together, maybe they live nearby each other, and slowly over time they get to know each other and each other’s tastes.  For example, after a while I know that my friend [Robert] Scoble is very good at advising me on technology but in my opinion he has terrible tastes in movies or books.

Geography less relevant

We can speak with each other, and where we speak you cannot touch it.  But the friendships we built there are very real.  Build neighborhoods on interest.  Since Naked Conversations, I have followed social media.  I follow it wherever it goes.  I have done 115 interviews for 34 countries, 5 continents.

8 Stories of the Social Media Global Survey

1. Isaac Mao

Have talked about Isaac in 20 different countries.  Am not going into detail with Isaac because the CNBloggerCon community all know him already.  What is important is that 1 person on the Internet opened my eyes to the reality of what was happening in social media in China.

2.  Michael Dell, Dell Computer

2 billion people online by 2011.  conversations more valuable than ads.  Social Media is cost effective.  He was a son of a doctor and going to medical school, but instead of doing that he started selling computers because he was a geek.  Today he runs #3 computer company.  Despite the fact that the company has problems right now, he told me that social media and blogging is a strategic component.  When his business comes around, social media will be a higher priority than advertising, bcause conversations are more effective and less costly than advertising.

3.  Laurel Papworth, Silkcharm

Australian. On Twitter she is Silkcharm.  She is a professor at a university where she has a Ph.D in emerging culture.  A while ago she was invited to go to Saudi Arabia where she helped a group of Saudi women start a social network.  She went there with a certain sense that this was a suppressed culture and that she needed to be very careful.  And she discovered that under the Arab/Muslim garments, the women were wearing lipstick, perfume, tight blue jeans, and western clothes.  And in the social network she discovered that many Muslim women were on Facebook.  Like women all over the world, they flirted with people.  But always anonymously.  It has to be anonymous because for a Muslim woman to flirt on the internet is very serious.  a few weeks after she was there, a teenage girl was discovered to be flirting on Facebook by her father and 2 brothers who dragged her into the street and stoned her to death.  But before that I know through that one incident about Muslim women, there is more to the story. As I have learned in China, the story always goes a lot deeper.

Queen Rania posts on YouTube quite often talking about Western misconceptions about Muslim people overall.  But particularly young women, but particularly in Jordan we don’t have fathers stoning their daughters.  But instead they drink too much in bars and come home and do violence.

When you learn a bad story about one place, you cannot assume that that thing happens all the time in that place.

4. Francois Gossieaux, Beeline Labs

Lives in the US.  He is a Belgian citizen.  He interviewed 140 enterprise companies that host online communities. He discovered many many things that I can’t tell you all of them now.   But he discovered that people online are tribal.  They try to find people like themselves.  Which is of course part of my theme in Global Neighborhoods.  People are tribal.  Companies start a community for a business purpose and then people come and do whatever they want.  It cannot be controlled.

5.  Father Roderick, Amsterdam

Catholic priest who also is one of the world’s mpodcaster ost popular podcasters.  He never talks about Catholicism itself.  When he is asked why he is doing this, he explained that it was time for the Catholic church to become more modern and more human.  He also explained that many people are different but they are also alike.

6.  Wael Abbas Egypt Citzen-Journalist

He is a journalist in Egypt but he doesn’t have much work to do because the government does not like what he writes. So it has become unwise to hire him in his professional.  The laws in Egypt say that it can be considered treason even if you are telling the truth.  Wael gets hidden camera videos of police brutality.  And government corruption.  A popular one is of a government person stuffing a ballot box during an election. He has millions of people who see these clips on YouTube of government corruption and policy brutality.  One day YouTube mysteriously took them all down.  And then when bloggers started to complain about it and NYT learned from the bloggers what had happened, they mysteriously reappeared.

7.  Ethan Bodnar, US student.

He is a student in the US.  “Why would I work for a company that won’t let me blog?” he said.  I interviewed him when he was a Junior in High School.  What he told me that was most significant was that he would never work for a company that wouldn’t allow him to blog.  why would he work for a company that would not allow him to use the tools he uses for conversation?  It is a lesson that I’ve learned time and time again in country after country that the young people are making blogging happen and making social media happen.  Youth is the killer application.

8.  Erik Hersman, Kenya

In Kenya, a missionary son called Erik Hersman was concerned about violence in Kenya where he was raised.  So he and Kenyan friends created a mobile wiki and citizens could upload where violence was so that most of the Kenyans could go somewhere else.

Basic lessons - in summary

So out of all of these experiences there are few experiences that are important.

1. Youth is the killer app.
2. Tools change.  People stay the same
3. Conversations are revolutionary
4. Generosity wins

When the hunters came back from hunting in prehistoric times, they would draw stories in the dirt.  Before we had language, they grunted.  And over time they took berries and blood and they drew pictures in the wall.  I’m told that over the centuries the little pictures of people, the hunters, stayed the same size.  But the things they killed kept getting bigger.  In my country fisherman do this today.

What changes is the tools.  they get bigger, better and faster.  And the tools today are social media.

Another lesson I learned is that generosity wins.  When you are a consumer you get shouted at.  Companies want to get more than their competitors.  In my country, this doesn’t work anymore.  We got tired of getting shouted at.  But today, through social media, the ones that are giving the most and getting the most.

China in Social Media

I”ll skip this slide because you know china’s social media.

• 1.2 > 25 mm bloggers in 4 yrs
• meteoric Facebook growth
• Twitter growing
• joining Global Neighborhoods

Social media starts social. Goes everywhere.  It goes to games.  It goes to education.  It gets into business.

In our country in our wonderful election, it began to play a role in changing who our officials are.  And I for one like the results.

A bit about the barriers between people.  First, Language is a terrible barrier.  In Chinese I can only say 谢谢.  If I could only speak your language with you we could communicate so much better.  I have a great deal of faith in technology.  And someday I can type or speak into this computer, and you will be able to see or hear what I said in your language.

Second barrier is that while the world is getting smaller it is still a big space.  Very few of the people in my country get the opportunity as I have to meet face to face. And until somehow we can transcend that, there will be a mutual misunderstanding between people in the two places.  Social media is the best way for people to speak to people across many miles.

Where I’ve gone, I’ve learned one simple, ultimate lesson: people are all alike.

Q & A

Q: How did you choose the interviews from so many social media users?

A:  I’m always interested in an interested story.  I’m always interested in learning something new.  It was hard in the beginning.  Because I’m pretty well known worldwide, stories are coming to me.