Page 185 - How China Is Winning the Tech Race

that might pose a danger to national security. Posts about the spiritual group
Falun Gong, Tibetan independence, and the Tiananmen Square student
uprising lead to an error message or are turned into gibberish, for instance.
2. The source for the China statistics is the Internet Society of China, 2006
report. The sources for the U.S. statistics are the Blog Herald and the blog
tracker Technorati as of April 2007.
3. Microsoft has been criticized for censoring its Chinese-language blogs
on its MSN Spaces by removing words such as freedom and democracy. In
early 2006, Microsoft took down an edgy politically oriented blog written by
the journalist Zhao Jing, according to the media expert Rebecca MacKinnon.
Microsoft said it was acting at the request of Chinese authorities.
4. Her Chinese blog was shut down in 2005, when Muzimei released the
names of her sex partners. She then shifted her blog to a Chinese-language site
in the United States. Her notoriety also helped her land a job as Bokee’s mar-
keting strategy manager, where her role is to publicize the merits of blogging
to China’s vast population.

5. The source is Technorati as of May 2006.
6. Rieschel invested in Bokee when he was the managing director at
Mobius Venture Capital before he founded Qiming Ventures in Shanghai.
7. The $10 million in funding came from three American venture capital
firms: Granite Global Ventures, Mobius Venture Capital, and Bessemer Venture
Partners in addition to Softbank Asia Infrastructure Fund, a partnership between
Japan’s Softbank and the U.S. computer networking giant Cisco Systems.
8. In May, the government backed down and decided that it would be all
right for bloggers to provide only an e-mail address and an anonymous user
identification name. But in late August new guidelines issued by the Internet
Society of China encouraged blog providers to ask users to register their real
names and contact information. Bloggers also were asked to delete “illegal
and bad” comments from their posts. Sohu, SINA, Yahoo! China, and Micro-
soft have agreed to follow the new guidelines, according to an AP report and
Reporters without Borders.
9. Formula 1 race car coaches posted blog diaries about race car training,
and Bokee users were invited to participate in a Q&A racing contest with
prizes awarded to the winners. Tan says Ford got 1,200 prospective buyers
out of the push, which also helped to build Bokee’s base of users.

Endnotes 159