Well,  I still remember the first time AW talked me about the IfGoGo project. He talked with me via Gtalk, and from a long period, I don't even know why I would accept to join this project.  Perhaps AW is good at persuading? No, I was persuaded by him because I‘m curious about what will happen here.

But once I calmed down to think about what is the role I should play in this project, I get totally confused. It's not like a personally blog. In that way, you could say anything about yourself because you know your readers are your close friends (well, at least you know them well) and you are supposed to tell them some of your own business. But it's not! Most of your readers here are not familiar with you. You don't even know them well. So,  why should I put some trivial stuff everyday here to bother people have no relation with you? Definitely not. So what am I gonna do? I did not get the answer..

Actually, I did not pay too much attention about it since I got confused. I was not that kind of person that has great passion on writing blog at that time. Because I treated blog as trivial stuff in my life... It's like.. a diary or what else could it be??

I hold this opinion for quite a long time. This is why I did not write anything here before. Until one day, I happened to know a blogs called TechCrunch. Yes, Michael Arrington runs that blog for several years. And now it gains about 200, 000 U.S dollars a month.

Wait... What? Is this true? How can a blog make so much money?

Since then, I started to pay attention to these blogs. They are full of technique news( lots of them are provided by insiders). They have lots of loyal readers who are willing to subscribe to their RSS feeds(4093k readers till recently). And they put advertisements on the pages to earn money. And it's very normal in the United States, here, to make money by writing blogs. Usually, several writers could group a team( probably got the similar background and are all interested in some fields) and write down their opinions on something. Something could be Technology, politics, food etc. These writers often got columnist background and good at organizing sentences. Some of them are good at digging news from startups (like techcrunch). Some of them are good at opinions (ReadWriteWeb, maybe). But they are all good blogs.

Even, when some day, when I surfed on the internet and happened to visit some professor's front page. When he introduced his resarch areas, he simply wrote: please visitor my blogs... What? It seems everybody that understands English are writing blogs here!

But why I got totally different feeling in China?

1. the blogger writers are few... People don't have custom to write their opinions down to share with others. There are some, but not many.

2. In China, Yes, I happened to know some one to write self-blogs ( like AW). But I can hardly find out anybody could run a blog very successfully to gain lots of money.

3. The quality of the contents are low.  Maybe it's beyond my horizon, I know very few self-blogs that always contains deep thoughts in their post.like kenengba.com. But most of independent blogs here are simply translators: they are willing to translate 10 pieces of news from Google blog, TechCrunch or AppleInsider in one day simply illustrating one single points that Nexus one is  out instead of posting one long articles to analyze what will happen since it comes out. I don't like these blogs because they don't have thoughts! And I totally agree with Mr. Arrington's opinion that the quality of contents of blogs should be taken care not only by search engines but by bloggers themselves.

4. The blog readers in China are not that many. From my perspective, Chinese tends to like some funny stuff in their blogs like amusing videos, pictures or jokes. Articles containing this kind of stuff often get very high attention. I believe, in China, the proportion of people that likes to read articles with thoughts are far less than that in the U.S. Believe it or not. In this way, blogs seem to become a amusement in our daily lives instead of a place to  talk about opinions or ideas.

Why would this happen in China?

I like reading AW's blog. And in this post, he illustrates what I talked here more deep :-) but only in Chinese.  I agree with what he said. Ｉ think the main reasons is, we don't have such atmosphere and we lack commercial opportunities.

1. As everybody knows, in China, not everybody could get every information they want freely. Usually, we can't get the information from outside of the world. We are so afraid to express our own ideas to this society that maybe someday either of us will become Hu Jia or some one like him.  No, we don't even know what could say.  Besides, majority still holds such opinions that blogs are not trustworthy. blogs represent personal opinions. Compared to major media like CCTV, they tend to trust the latter.

2. Another points held by AW is that, in China, Advertisers don't believe that they could gain benefit by putting ads on personal blogs.  They trust big website like Sina or 163.com.  Even with Google's help (Adsense) Chinese bloggers could earn far less than Americans. AW reported that he only gained 3,000 yuan that is 439.37 U.S. dollars for a whole year! Can you believe that? Aw's blog is one of the most successful personal independent blogs in China and this is what he earned.

Now I decide to get back to my track to restart this service.  My opinion towards blogs has changed and I think I should start to write something——something fun or something interesting here. As long as somebody is willing to read or to share them!

Actually, the "www.technorati.com"(with the www-prefix) had been blocked inside China for years, but the technorati.com was always working. But this time, when I try to access the "technorati.com", it shows "This page is not available".

Well, seems blogging in China is really a hard job :)

Blogging in English is very interesting but really hard for me. Anyway, English is not my mother language. Even weird, writing English posts in my personal blog also makes some my Chinese readers feel strange. (I proudly got some daily traffic in 2005)

However, as the internationalization(i18n) was introduced to more and more people over the world, I think it would be rather interesting to share our ideas about China, Chinese with people from all over the world who might be interested in such stories. In the late summer of 2007, I asked some of my friends: You, Lisa, Cat and many other friends about the idea. Many of them were interested and then we started up this team blog in October, named "ifgogo.com", just make it easy to remember.

I know it's really a hard task and it's a long way to go. Anyway, just enjoy blogging.

(Photo by LemonED)

It was really a happy day. Good weather and great bloggers from all over China. The more exciting thing is that Automattic sent Matt Mullenweg and Hailin Wu to us. WordPress is really a great platform that makes almost everyone (who uses it) benefits from it. I've been a WordPress user since Feb, 2007 and the ifgogo blog is also built using WordPress from the very beginning.

Like a lot of other "WPers", I've been contributing to some themes and plugins of WordPress as well. And fortunately that I got a chance to contribute to the upcoming Video feature of WordPress.com service. That's really a great experience to contribute to such a big community.

As the idea of WordPress is everyone contributes and everyone benefits, I hope the ifgogo project would follow the same way. We don't blog for money and fame, we just blog for the readers especially those who leave sweet or critical feedbacks to our interesting (or even bored) stories ;) - Though the ifgogo blog is currently still very young and simple, I am sure it will bring you happiness and friends every author blogs.

However, for some infamous and ridiculous reasons, people in China seldom express themselves to the public but the WordPress system really give everyone a chance to do, or at least to try, and finally becomes a blogger :) The WordCamp then gathers the great bloggers together to meet, and share.

To share, to contribute and also to get the friends, responses and sometimes benefits, that's why we blog for today, and tomorrow.

Before I talk more about Facebook, I want to say something about Xiaonei.com. That site looks near the same as Facebook The concept is the same, so is the style, and even the user interface. No doubt, that is a site copying everything from Facebook. Anyway, I liked there very much, especially in the last few months before graduation. I was attracted by such kind of site for first time.

About three months ago, I tried to take a deep look at Facebook and consider whether to sign up. I shadowed my friend for a while and found it was really dizzy. I did not mean the color, but the uncountable gadgets and links scared me. I did not feel ready to get involved in this complex ecosystem.

Now, I feel I have changed a bit. And I made a real progress that I finally join Facebook now. Hey friends, I am new and open here. Please feel free to share your good or bad emotions with me. :)

P.S. Is there any plug-in for Facebook that enables user to post blog items to a WordPress hosted site like this? I think it could be a good idea to write blogs in Facebook and post here, then use RSS to integrate items in Facebook. It is a win-win solution, as I do not want to write English blog on two sites. :P

Anyway, I started writing blog posts after woke up. I logged my Tencent paper test yesterday, and wrote an argument on Linq to Sql, then marked down my thoughts on solid feed subscribers, and finally expressed my hatred of filling out online job application forms a little. I have never experienced writing so many blog posts in one day. Maybe that would be the my life style if I become a professional technology author. In fact, I really think that the position of a pro tech author somehow attracts me. The advantage of being a free lancer is freedom, with plenty of flexibility in scheduling. The disadvantage is that you have to arrange everything for yourself, because there's no boss issuing tasks to you.

I have no idea whether I'll be a pro tech author. I don't even know what kind of job or study I will have next year. There are too many possibilities.

So far, most of our audience are from mainland China, and speaking Chinese as their everyday language, according to Google Analytics' data. This is one audience group we might pick, then we have to figure out what's point of writing English blog posts for Chinese readers. Here are some possible answers:

• Typing English is a whole lot faster than typing Chinese, and that can save our time.
• Just for practicing English.
• For getting to know Chinese who might have the same higher value(at least have the same higher English skill).

What is the other possible audience group? They might be people who know little about but are interested in Chinese language and culture. And what are the benefits for targeting these audience? They might be:

• Getting to know foreigners, which means people who have different culture background with us.
• Let people who are interested in Chinese culture get to know Chinese easier and better.

So, tell me why do you think that this blog is worth writing or worth reading? Which audience group do you think that we should target first?

I'm Zane Tower from Chongqing China.And my nickname on internet is usually 'hidecloud' .This name comes from my Chinese pseudonym '潜云' which means cloud hides in the sky.

I'm a Chinese blogger for 3 years.And u can read my blog here.Of course , it's written in Chinese.

Since I usually have some ideas which only can be described in English . I started to think about having an English blog recently.