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!