What are Chinese always reading on their mobile phones in the subway? Chances are it’s a user-generated e-book. Here’s your guide to this innovative and innovative market in China: from the model and existing giants, to newcomers and mobile reading.

Why do Chinese buy this model?

According to CNNIC, by the end of 2010, online literature readers in China reached 195 million, an increase of 32.38 million since 2009.

In the early days of China’s internet history, gaming and music service providers made fortunes by convincing low-end Chinese users to spend 1 Yuan for a mobile ringtone or 5 Yuan for an hour of gaming in an internet cafe. The ringtone business established by China Mobile helped service providers make money off digital music for the first time.

It is believed online literature is another thing Chinese users would be willing to pay for. And 2-3 Yuan for a book of 100 thousand characters resembles the gaming/digi-music story.

Even though users still can get a large amount of free, illegitimate digital books somewhere such as Baidu Wenku and download services, China’s e-book sites expect more and more readers to buy first-hand, original, online content from their platforms.

And paying for online content has never been as easy as it is today. Choices range from the very traditional wire transfer, mobile, and broadband recharge services to all possible online payment channels.

Investors also Drawn to User-Generated E-books

In September, Sequoia Capital China invested RMB 27 million in Kanshu (“read books” in Chinese), a literature website where registered contributors sell self-written novels directly to readers. Or, in industry-speak, a C2C digital self-publishing platform (similar to Lulu’s self-e-publishing service, if you need a Western example for reference).

Kanshu’s web service charges for premium content: 0.03 Yuan per thousand Chinese characters, with 0.02 going to authors and 0.01 to Kanshu. From mobile end authors earn less — and that’s half of total sales, as Kanshu partners with telecom operators who also take a revenue shares.

Kanshu reportedly has 3 million registered users and two thousand registered writers, making millions of RMB in monthly revenue.

Although founded all the way back in 2004, it didn’t gain much attention until its current managing team brought in financing and took it over in 2010. Headquartered in Chengdu, the capital city of Sichuan province in Southwestern China, it also has a team in Beijing.

A business model practiced since 2003

Kanshu wasn’t the first that came up with this model. Qiadian was. CMFU, an amateur writers union, launched qidian.com in June 2002 and started charging for premium content in October 2003. It charged up to 0.02 Yuan per thousand characters and writers kept 50%-70% of total revenues.

One year later, in October 2004, when Shanda acquired it, Qidian reportedly had 10 thousand contributors and 14 thousand literary works. In 2006, Qidian turned a profit.

Gui Chui Deng (Ghosts blow out the light, published in 2006) and Xing Chen Bian (Legend Of Immortal, published in 2008) were two of Qidian’s most successful titles. After becoming wildly popular, both were put into print and licensed to film studios. Shanda Games even developed two MMORPGs based on the two novels.

Even though so many people read its novels through illegitimate free channels, in 2008, the year when Shanda Literature was established, Qidian reportedly gained RMB 60 million from paid users, with 40 million going to writers.

Cloudary leading the market

After Qidian, Shanda acquired another five online literature sites: hongxiu.com, readnovel.com, rongshuxia.com, xs8.com and xxsy.net, and two other sites: tingbook.com (audiobooks) and zubuent.com (magazine content). They all adopted the Qidian model after joining Shanda family, setting prices at 0.03 Yuan for average readers and 0.02 Yuan for members, sharing revenues with the authors half and half.

In July 2008, Shanda Literature, renamed Cloudary in 2011, was spun off as a new division under Shanda Interactive Entertainment (NASDAQ: SNDA). Sina’s former vice editor-in-chief Hou Xiaoqiang serves as CEO and Qidian’s founder as President. Earlier this year, Cloudary filed for IPO on the New York Stock Exchange to raise up to USD 200 million, although it has not succeeded in listing yet.

According to its F-1, filed with the SEC on September 27, Cloudary’s six sites totaled 1.4 million contributors and 5.4 million titles as of June 30, 2011. “In the first half of 2011, an average of 58 million Chinese characters were uploaded daily to this library,” with “approximately 69 million monthly unique visitors” . [See full breakdown of Cloudary's revenues].

The company claims, citing a report by iResearch, in 2010, that Qidian was the largest “original Chinese literature website” in terms of revenues and its content, including e-books licensed from publishing companies, accounting for “over 71.5% of China’s online literature market in terms of revenues and 60.6% of the market in terms of user time spent”.

However, revenues generated by online literary content account for just around 30% of Cloudary’s total income. The company saw big revenue increases in related offline businesses it began no earlier than 2008, such as print books and content licensing. That includes licensing popular books like Naked Marriages, the hottest TV drama of the year.

Newcomers

Sequoia Capital China is not alone eyeing this market. Recently two more participants joined in. By the end of October, Netease launched an Original Literature System. No more than half a month later, Douban launched a Reading Program.

The two are recognized as reasonable participants, as they each have a community of a large number of and “high quality” residents who have been actively either writing or reading online, or both.

Both of them have set up a system for everyone to apply for a “writer” and made clear that they‘d charge readers. Douban set a “trial” price at 1.99 Yuan for each work, suggesting writers create small works with 30-50 thousand characters each. Netease hasn’t announced pricing yet, but has offered to pay writers who regularly submit writings 300-500 Yuan every month.

Douban began as a site for users to discover, share, and review books. A majority of Chinese book readers, some of who are writers and professional translators themselves, became Douban users in the past six years. To this day, those people are still Douban’s most valuable properties; some of them have been writing relentlessly with Douban Journal. Not long ago, Douban started offering translators/writers Xiaozhan, a designed personal theme webpage, where they could publish multimedia content, including writings.

When it comes to ad revenues, Netease’s portal business cannot compete with Sina, Tencent or Sohu. But it is well-respected for its creativity and professionalism. Netease’s readers are famous for their creative comments on news and articles.

Mobile Reading

As reported by Eguan, in Q2 2011, 269 million Chinese users read on mobile phones. Not a single digital book supplier would dare skip the mobile marketplace.

Partnering with a manufacturer, Cloudary released Bambook, an e-reader, in October 2010. Apart from this device, it has made its content widely accessible through Android or iOS devices, and WAP (still widely adopted in China, especially for mobile reading), and is planning to cover as many platforms as possible. It also invested in a reading app, Byread.

Kanshu has so far only partnered with the three state-owned telecom operators, each of whom also has a mobile reading service. In May 2010, China Mobile launched CMRead whose content initially was from four publishing companies. From then on, more than 100 content suppliers, including Cloudary and Kanshu, signed up. So far it doesn’t allow individual writers to join in, which means Qidian’s C2C model cannot be applied there.

Following China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom launched their own versions of “CMRead” later in the same year.

CMRead takes 60% of total sales — which is why Kanshu shares less with writers for mobile phone sales. And content suppliers are not allowed to set prices. The big three are still the gatekeepers–or toll booths–that control access to the mobile market.

Around 2005, almost every Chinese netizen set up a blog and blogging revolution was expected to change the world of Chinese words. Unsurprisingly, not too long after, a majority of them stopped blogging. This time, ambitious internet tycoons, venture capitalists, and niche services are creating a new game to entice more people to write and to find ways to have readers to pay, aiming to eventually profit. By bringing in a revenue sharing mechanism, will everyone be better off?

CBN is a way for blogs about China to connect to one another and for readers to discover new sources of China-related content. All blogs in the network are joined via a Webring whereby visitors of one CBN blog can navigate to a new CBN blog with a single click on the China Blog Network Widget.

http://www.chinablognetwork.com/

China Digital Times has launched a participatory Web 2.0 initiative: the “Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon,” (“GMH Lexicon”), an online glossary of translations of terms created by Chinese netizens and frequently encountered in online political discussions. The Lexicon has been posted on China Digital Space, CDT’s new, collaborative wiki site.

The “Grass Mud Horse” phenomenon has been awarded a Special Mention at Prix Ars Electronica’s Digital Communities category in 2009.

Source: http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/12/introducing-the-grass-mud-horse-lexicon/

This project is part of our effort to contribute to a deeper understanding of the Internet’s cultural, social, and political impact by moving beyond anecdotal evidence and systematically documenting and interpreting political discourse created by Chinese netizens. By creating this lexicon, we hope to map out the dynamics of “domination and resistance” in Chinese communication and information networks. The aim is to vividly illustrate the increasingly dynamic and sometimes surprising presence of an alternative political discourse: images, frames, metaphors and narratives that have been generated from Internet memes. This “resistance discourse” steadily undermines the values and ideology that reproduce compliance with the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian regime, and, as such, force an opening for free expression and civil society in China.

Ultimately, we hope this project will contribute to the ongoing debate: Is the Internet acting as a “safety valve” to prolong the life of the Chinese authoritarian regime; or are new forms of networked communication enhancing opportunities for social change and helping to move China toward the “threshold” for political transformation?

Origins of the Grass-Mud Horse

In early 2009, a creature named the “Grass-Mud Horse” appeared in an  online video which became animmediate viral hit. The term grass-mud horse, which sounds nearly the same in Chinese as “f*** your mother” (cáo nǐ mā), was originally created as a way to get around, and also poke fun at, government censorship of vulgar content. After netizens created an online video depicting the grass-mud horse at war with and eventually defeating the river crab, a homonym for “harmony,” a propaganda catchword, the idea caught fire instantly and the symbolic meaning of this term has been completely transformed. Within weeks, the “grass-mud horse” became the de facto mascot of netizens in China fighting for free expression, inspiring poetry, photos and videos, artwork, lines of clothing, and more. As one Chinese blogger explained, “The grass-mud horse (草泥马) represents information and opinions that cannot be accepted by the mainstream discourse, and “ the Song of the Grass-Mud Horse” has become a metaphor of the power struggle over Internet expression”

The grass-mud horse was particularly suited to the contested space of the Chinese Internet. The government’s pervasive and intrusive censorship system has generated equally massive resentmentamong Chinese netizens. As a result, new forms of social resistance and demands for greater freedom of information and expression are often expressed in coded language and implicit metaphors, which allow them to avoid outright censorship. The Internet has became a quasi-public space where the CCP’s dominance is being constantly exposed, ridiculed, and criticized, often in the form of political satire,jokes, videos, songs, popular poetry, jingles, fiction, Sci-Fi, code words, mockery, andeuphemisms.

In recent years, Chinese netizens have shown they possess boundless creativity and ingenuity in finding such ways to express themselves despite stifling government restrictions on online speech. To the uninitiated, even those who can read Chinese, their coded language can be confounding. But to Chinese Internet users, the terms often resonate deeply by expressing feelings about shared experiences that millions of people can immediately relate to. Despite their subversive beginnings, many of the terms have already become mainstream in Chinese society; a few were even added to the Oxford Chinese dictionary this year.

How have these Terms Been Submitted and Selected?

The terms in our lexicon are all created by netizens and circulated on websites inside China, not just byprominent bloggers or opinion leaders. For many of the terms, one cannot identify the original author or how exactly it originated. China Digital Times selected these terms from a variety of sources. We discovered many from a self-initiated online project of Chinese bloggers to select for the “words of the year in Chinese blogosphere.” Others come from countless online articles, blog posts, articles from mainstream publications such as Southern Metropolis Daily or even Xinhua, and from Chinese BBS. The direct participation of Chinese netizens also yielded many terms after China Digital Times’s Chinese version made the call for submissions public in June 2010.

The selected terms are not a complete recording of pop culture online terminology. Rather, China Digital Times editors have focused exclusively on politically-charged terms which represent the netizens’ “resistance discourse.” These are not “censored” keywords, which have been documented elsewhere by CDT and other projects, nor are they part of the “legitimizing discourse,” used by people who actively defend and support government policy, including nationalists. At times, some of these words may be put on individual websites’ “sensitive lists” or outright blocked, but in general they are popular daily lingo for Chinese netizens.

The current list, chosen by China Digital Times editors, is by no means exhaustive and new words are being created daily. But we hope this list will provide a glimpse into online political discourse and make it more accessible to non-Chinese readers.

Help Us Build the Lexicon

This is an ongoing open source collaborative translation program with submissions from volunteers and professional translators. What is currently published is just a seed that we hope to expand upon in coming months and years. If you are interested in participating in this project by submitting and/or translating terms, please contact the GMH Lexicon editors at chinadigitalspace [at] gmail [dot] com.

China Digital Times would like to express deep gratitude for the extraordinary work of our primary translator, who wishes to remain anonymous.

The Sharism Forum will be held in Shanghai on October 22nd as part of the opening day of the arts and culture festival GETITLOUDER 2010. Our one-day symposium will feature thinkers, practitioners and activists whose work concerns and shapes the global movement of a new sharing culture, which has been unified under the ideology of SHARISM. The public at large is invited to join and to become a “shareholder” of this movement. The event will spark calls-to-action and demonstrate new modalities and technologies of sharing.

About Sharism

SHARISM is a Mind Revolution: The more you give, the more you get. The more you share, the more you are shared. Sharism is a belief system for our Internet Age. It is a philosophy piped through the human and technological networks of Free and Open Source software. It is the motivation behind every piece of User-Generated Content. It is the pledge of Creative Commons, to share, remix and give credit to the latest and greatest of our cultural creations. Sharism is also a mental practice that anyone can try, a daily act that beckons a future of increased social intelligence. It should not go unnoticed that a superabundance of community respect and social capital are being accumulated by precisely those who share.

Sharism is operative in the very workings of the human mind. Our model of the functional mechanism of the nervous system shows it to be one which shares activity and information via interconnected networks of neurons through patterns of feedback. This has profound implications for the creative process. Whenever you have an intention to create, you will find it easier to generate more creative ideas if you keep the sharing process firmly in mind. You can engineer a process of creative feedback to generate even more ideas in return.

The rapid emergence of social applications that can communicate and cooperate are allowing more and more people to output content from one service to another in a creative ecosystem. This interconnectedness spreads memes through multiple online social networks, which can reach a global audience and position social media as a true alternative to broadcast media. These new technologies are reviving Sharism in our closed culture. The missing pieces are open source hardware and software services that enable true freedom from top to botton in the entire communication stack.

One legal concern is that any loss of control over copyright will lead to noticeable deficits in personal wealth, or loss of creative freedom. But today’s sharing environment is more protected than you might think. Many new social applications make it easy to set terms-of-use along your sharing path (such as selecting Creative Commons licenses or privacy settings). Any infringement of those terms will be challenged not just by the law, but by your community. Your audience, who benefit form your sharing, can also be the gatekeepers of your rights.

Through emergent mobile communications technologies, we can generate higher connectivities and increase the throughput of our social links. The more open and strongly connected we are, the better the sharing environment will be for everyone involved. The more collective our intelligence, the wiser our actions will be.

Sharism promises to be the politics of the next global superpower. It will not be a country, but a new human network joined by social software. We can integrate our current and emerging democratic systems with new collaborative technologies, which will allow us to query, share and remix information for the public benefit. The future of democracy is real-time, and always online.

Sharism is the inspiration that brings it all together.

For more information:
http://sharism.org

http://freesouls.cc/essays/07-isaac-mao-sharism.html

http://freesouls.yeeyan.org/sharism-a-mind-revolution

Forum Guests

Christopher Adams

Christopher Adams is a publishing professional and free culture advocate based in Beijing and Taipei. He is a developer at Fabricatorz and works with Neoteny Labs. “Freesouls: captured and released by Joi Ito” was his first fully Creative Commons-licensed book project. Christopher is a co-founder of Sharism.org and a member of the Creative Commons Network. He graduated magna cum laude from Brown University with a degree in Cognitive Science.

Edmon Chung

Edmon Chung currently serves as the CEO for the DotAsia Organization and as Vice Chair for the Internet Society HK Chapter. Edmon is also an elected member of the Elections Committee of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, an elected councilor of the ICANN GNSO Council, and Secretariat for the ICANN APRALO (Asia Pacific At-Large Organization).
Edmon is an inventor of patents underlying technologies for internationalized domain names (IDN) and email addresses on the Internet. He founded Neteka, Inc. in 1999, and went on to win the Most Innovative Award in the Chinese Canadian Entrepreneurship Awards in 2001. In 2000, Edmon was selected by The Globe and Mail as one of the Young Canadian Leaders.
Edmon has a Bachelor of Applied Science and Master of Engineering from the University of Toronto, and is a PhD candidate at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.

Li Gong

Li Gong is Chairman and CEO of Mozilla Online Ltd, the Beijing-based subsidiary of the Mozilla Corporation, the producer of the Firefox internet browser. He was Venture Partner and Head of China Office for the US venture firm Bessemer Venture Partners until 2009. He previously held positions as General Manager of MSN China at Microsoft, and General Manager of Sun Microsystems’s R&D center in China. He has co-written 3 books (published by Addison Wesley and O’Reilly) and numerous technical articles, and has received 14 US patents. Li Gong has worked as a research scientist at ORA and Stanford Research Institute (SRI), has held visiting positions at Cornell and Stanford Universities, and served as Guest Chair Professor at Tsinghua University. He has served as both Program Chair and General Chair for IEEE S&P, ACM CCS, and IEEE CSFW. Li Gong received BS and MS degrees from Tsinghua University, Beijing, and a PhD from the University of Cambridge, all in computer science.

Hu Yong

Hu Yong is associate professor at Peking University’s School of Journalism and Communication, and a well-known new media critic and Chinese Internet pioneer.
Before joining the faculty of Peking University, Hu Yong worked for a number of media sources, including China Daily, Lifeweek, China Internet Weekly and China Central Television. He is a co-founder of the Digital Forum of China, a nonprofit advocating a free and responsible Internet, as well as Chinavalue.net, a leading new media business in China.
Hu Yong is a founding director of the Communication Association of China (CAC) and China New Media Communication Association (CNMCA). His publications include Internet: The King Who Rules, and The Rising Cacophony: Personal Expression and Public Discussion in the Internet Age. He has translated several groundbreaking books on digital technology, including Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital, Esther Dyson’s Release 2.0 and Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody. In 2000, Hu Yong was nominated for China’s list of top Internet industry figures.

Brianna Laugher

Brianna Laugher is a passionate free software and free culture enthusiast. She has been an avid editor on the Wikimedia projects, with over 10,000 edits, and was the first president of Wikimedia Australia. She has spoken at venues ranging from the National Library of Australia to the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

Mike Linksvayer

Mike Linksvayer is vice president of Creative Commons. He holds a B.A. in economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has experience as a software developer and consultant. He joined Creative Commons as Chief technical officer in April 2003, and held that position until April 2007 when he became vice president. He also co-founded Bitzi, an early open content/open data service.
Talk description: What does it mean for “culture” to be part of the “freedom stack”? How does free culture relate to other freedom stack components? What is its progress, prospects, and can sharism make a difference? This talk is informed by the speaker’s 7+ years at Creative Commons–providing licensing and public domain tools to increase sharing in the arts, education, media, science, and beyond.

Liu Yan

Liu Yan is the CEO and event curator of Xindanwei, the first collaborative workspace and community for creatives and start ups in China. Since 2004, she has been advocating cross-culture and inter-disciplinary connection and collaboration between Europe and China through events like PICNIC and Dutch Electronic Arts Festival (DEAF). She is also the chairwoman of 3S ReUnion in Shanghai, an event for people from arts, technology and academic fields to meet and share their knowledge.

Isaac Mao

Isaac Mao is a venture capitalist, pioneering blogger, software architect, entrepreneur and researcher in learning and social technology. He is the Vice President of United Capital Investment Group and Director of the Social Brain Foundation, and advises Global Voices Online and several Web 2.0 businesses. Isaac co-founded CNBlog.org and co-organizes the Chinese Blogger Conference (CNBloggerCon). He also serves as director of the Shanghai Youth Development Foundation.
Isaac is a regular keynote speaker at business and technology conferences around the globe, and has contributed to numerous commercial software projects. He earned a BS degree in Computer Science and followed an MBA training program at Shanghai Jiaotong University. From 2008 to 2009 Isaac was a Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Ou Ning

Ou Ning’s cultural practices encompass multiple disciplines. As an activist, he founded U-thèque, an independent film and video organization; As an editor and graphic designer, he is known for his seminal book New Sound of Beijing; As a curator, he initiated the biennale exhibition Get It Louder (2005, 2007) and launched the sound project in China Power Station, co-organized by Serpentine Gallery and Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art; As an artist, he is known for the urban research projects such as San Yuan Li, commissioned by 50th Biennale di Venezia (2003), and Da Zha Lan, commissioned by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes. He is a frequent contributor of various magazines, books and exhibition catalogues and has lectured around the world. In 2008, he was appointed the chief curator of 2009 Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture(09SZHKB). In 2009, he is chosen to be the jury member of the 8th Benesse Prize at the 53rd Venice Biennale. He is now working on 2010 Get It Louder and preparing a new literary magazine Chutzpah(Tian Nan in Chinese) which will launch on January 2011. He’s based in Beijing, and is the director of Shao Foundation.

Evan Prodromou

Evan Prodromou is an American writer and programmer based in Montreal, Quebec. He is founder of Wikitravel, the free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide inspired by Wikipedia and running the MediaWiki software. He is also the founder of wikiclock, Vinismo, certifi.ca, and kei.ki. He is the founder and CEO of Status.Net, the open source open microblogging software and service that powers Identi.ca and thousands of other sites.

Jon Phillips

Jon Phillips(rejon) is a developer contributing to society and building meaningful relationships. In 2002 he helped launch the open source drawing tool, Inkscape and the Open Clip Art Library, built Creative Commons‘ community and business development strategies from 2005 until 2008 and is growing the media company Fabricatorz in Beijing and San Francisco. He is community director for the open source social messaging service, Status.Net which powers Identi.ca, and is CEO of Aiki Lab in Singapore.

Jack Qiu

Dr. Jack Qiu is an associate professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Chinese University of Hong Kong. His academic interests include Internet and society, information and communication technologies (ICTs) and class, late capitalism, globalization, grassroots media, China, and the Asian Pacific.
His publications include Working-Class Network Society: Communication Technology and the Information Have-Less in Urban China (MIT Press, 2009), Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective (MIT Press, 2006, co-authored with Manuel Castells, Mireia Fernandez-Ardevol, and Araba Sey), and many chapters, articles, and review essays.

Wolfgang Spraul

Wolfgang Spraul is COO of Sharism At Work, a manufacturing company making the Ben NanoNote mini-computer and leading the copyleft hardware movement. At OpenMoko, a project to create a family of open source mobile phones including the hardware specification and the operating system, he served as the Vice President of Engineering.

Phil Tinari

Philip Tinari (b. 1979) is editor-in-chief of LEAP, a bilingual, bimonthly magazine of contemporary Chinese art and culture based in Beijing and published by Modern Media Group. Since 2007, he has also run the publishing imprint, editorial office, and translation studio office for Discourse Engineering. Tinari is a contributing editor to Artforum and adjunct professor of art criticism at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts. He serves as China advisor to Art Basel and worked previously as academic consultant to the Chinese contemporary art department at Sotheby’s. He has written and lectured widely on contemporary art in China, for publications including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Magazine, Parkett, and Dushu. Recent projects include the book Hans Ulrich Obrist: The China Interviews (2009) and the exhibition The Hong Kong Seven, mounted by the Foundation Louis Vuitton at the Hong Kong Museum of Art last year. A resident of Beijing for much of the past decade, he holds an A.M. in East Asian studies from Harvard, a B.A. from the Literature Program at Duke, and was Fulbright fellow at Peking University.

Gino Yu

Dr. Gino Yu is an Associate Professor and Director of Digital Entertainment and Game Development at the School of Design at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU). His research spans Design Automation, Computer Animation, Video Games, Creativity, and Consciousness with over 60 publications. Currently, his main research interests involve the application of media technologies to cultivate creativity and promote enlightened consciousness (meaningful media).
Gino Yu is co-founder of the PolyU MERECL, a commercially oriented digital entertainment laboratory that provides services to industry, and is Chairman and co-founder of the Hong Kong Digital Entertainment Association. He received his BS and PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley in 1987 and 1993 respectively. He is a composer and father of three.

Zafka Zhang

Zafka Zhang is co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of China Youthology, a boutique company focusing on brand-youth consultancy for marketing, communication, and product design targeting youth in the China market. Zafka formerly served as the senior front-page editor and columnist of China’s leading business newspaper, 21st CBH (21st Century Business Herald), and continues to write for mainstream media online and offline. He was an Advisor for the Association of Virtual Worlds and Director of Music Community and Public Relations of Creative Commons China, and was formerly head of research at HiPiHi.
Zafka is also an acclaimed sound artist and experimental musician. His art works have been published and exhibited in China, the US, Europe, and Asia. He obtained two Masters in Political Science, Sociology and Anthropology in Fudan (Shanghai) and SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London)

2010 SHAREHOLDERS’ MEETING
Date · 22 October 2010
Venue · Shanghai, China
Event · Get It Louder 2010
Organizer · Shao Foundation

ABOUT SHARISM
Isaac Mao · Sharism: A Mind Revolution »
毛向辉 · 分享主义：一场思维革命 »

AGENDA
The official schedule will be publicized at www.getitlouder.com

Session I: Global Shares
Speakers from Sharism.org, Peking University & the Open Society Institute

Session I: The Freedom Stack
Speakers from Creative Commons, StatusNet & Sharism.cc

Session III: The Science of Sharing
Speakers from Hong Kong Polytechnic University & Chinese University of Hong Kong

Session IV: Open Panels
Speakers from DotAsia, China Youthology, Xindanwei, Leap Magazine & others

Moderators:
Ou Ning (Shao Foundation)
Isaac Mao (Sharism)
Jon Phillips (StatusNet/Fabricatorz/Sharism)
Christopher Adams (Freesouls/Fabricatorz/Sharism)

Shareholders Team
Sophie Chiang (Sharism)
Han Yan (Beijing/Urban China)
Ingrid Fischer-Schreiber (Ars Electronica)

GET IT LOUDER 2010
www.getitlouder.com

SHARISM.ORG
sharism.org

During these years, new social communication flat, such as Flick, Facebook and Twitter, are created increasingly. At the same time, some juristic tool, Creative Commons, have been widely diffused. The new personal 2.0 network appears in the society. All of these creation and develops make an aggregation of human intelligence. They even rebuild the social trust and the relationship among people. Meanwhile, they reform the diffuse way of traditional media. They are not only influenced the pattern of global politics, but also set up a fresh business mode. As one of the most active human intelligence, cultures and arts need to respond towards this worldwide trend. As the new brand of Chinese exhibitions, 2010Get It Louder will show a comprehensive understanding of this new SHARISM.

by Tony Dokoupil and Angela WuAugust 09, 2010

In the history of the web, last spring may figure as a tipping point. That’s when Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”—a site that grew from 100,000 articles in 2003 to more than 15 million today—began to falter as a social movement. Thousands of volunteer editors, the loyal Wikipedians who actually write, fact-check, and update all those articles, logged off—many for good. For the first time, more contributors appeared to be dropping out than joining up. Activity on the site has remained stagnant, according to a spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit behind the site, and it’s become “a really serious issue.” So serious, in fact, that this fall Wikipedia will turn to something it has never needed before: recruiters.

There’s no shortage of theories on why Wikipedia has stalled. One holds that the site is virtually complete. Another suggests that aggressive editors and a tangle of anti-vandalism rules have scared off casual users. But such explanations overlook a far deeper and enduring truth about human nature: most people simply don’t want to work for free. They like the idea of the Web as a place where no one goes unheard and the contributions of millions of amateurs can change the world. But when they come home from a hard day at work and turn on their computer, it turns out many of them would rather watch funny videos of kittens or shop for cheap airfares than contribute to the greater good. Even the Internet is no match for sloth.

That’s why Wikipedia’s new recruiting push will not rely merely on highfalutin promises about pooled greatness and “the sum of all human knowledge.” Instead, the organization is hoping to get students to write and edit entries as part of their coursework. The Wikimedia Foundation teamed up with eight professors at schools including George Washington and Princeton to integrate the once frowned-upon research tool into public-policy curricula. As part of the program, Wikipedia’s “campus ambassadors” will lead in-class training sessions on how to edit the site and help start Wikipedia student groups.

Tech writers continue to tout social media as a transformative phenomenon in its infancy. That’s certainly true for such sites as Facebook, which boasts more than 500 million active users, or Flickr, which hosts some 4 billion photos. YouTube also shows no sign of slowing down. But those sites offer clear benefits to users, including the ability to easily stay in touch with friends, indulge in a game of Mob Wars, share baby pictures, or watch videos of fashion models falling down, in exchange for their time and efforts.

Many other elements of the user-generated revolution, meanwhile, are beginning to look sluggish. The practice of crowd sourcing, in particular, worked because the early Web inspired a kind of collective fever, one that made the slog of writing encyclopedia entries feel new, cool, fun. But with three out of four American households online, contributions to the hive mind can seem a bit passé, and Web participation, well, boring—kind of like writing encyclopedia entries for free.

Evidence of this ennui is everywhere. Amateur blogs, the original embodiment of Web democracy, are showing signs of decline. While professional bloggers are “a rising class,” according to Technorati, hobbyists are in retreat, and about 95 percent of blogs are launched and quickly abandoned. A recent Pew study found that blogging has withered as a pastime, with the number of 18- to 24-year-olds who identify themselves as bloggers declining by half between 2006 and 2009. A shift to Twitter—or microblogging, as it’s called—partly accounts for these numbers. But while Twitter carries more than 50 million tweets per day, its army of keystrokers may not be as large as it seems. As many as 90 percent of tweets come from 10 percent of users, according to a 2009 Harvard study. The others are primarily “lurkers”—people who don’t contribute but track the postings of others. Between 60 and 70 percent of people who sign up for the 140-character platform quit within a month, according to a recent Nielsen report.

Citizen journalism also has stabilized. Fewer than one in 10 Web users say they have created their own original news or opinion piece, according to Pew, and comment sections on blogs or mainstream media sites, which were supposed to turn the old one-way media model into a two-way street, are often too profane, hateful, or off-point to attract people. Only one in four Web users has left a comment—probably no more than wrote letters to the editor in decades past, says Brian Thornton, a University of North Florida professor who has studied the history of the letters page.

Naturally, as some energy goes out of the Web, sites that depend on enthusiastic free labor are scrambling to retain it. The task is made more difficult by the fact that the competition is steeper than ever. Michigan State University professor Cliff Lampe, who studies online communities, says that where there were once three or four sites that invited participation, there are now thousands or even millions. “You’re taking a limited resource—people—and spreading it over a much wider set of opportunities,” he says. “It changes the playing field.”

The smart players are changing, too. Digg began as “the new New York Times,” a digital front-page curated by users who “vote up” their favorite stories. The site quickly became one of the most popular destinations on the Web. But while Digg won readers, it struggled to sign up voters, according to a 2008 speech by its founder Kevin Rose. Now the site is changing format, relaunching (later this year) with a personalized home page that lets users connect with friends rather than just vote on the news. Consumer-review sites like Yelp, Amazon, and Epinions, which use an army of amateur critics to cover products and services, offer elaborate appreciation programs that reward their unpaid people and keep users engaged. Yelp has more than 40 “community managers” scattered around the world, who throw parties for prolific reviewers. (At one recent event for the “Elite Squad,” for instance, the snacks included squid-ink risotto.) And comment-driven news and aggregation sites like Gawker and The Huffington Post, where part of the fun is reading what the peanut gallery has to say, have decided to show the peanut gallery more love: mostly in the form of badges, stars, and special privileges. Even YouTube has added inducements, giving users the chance to play at Carnegie Hall—with a music contest—and partnering with the Guggenheim Museum to help them show off their art.

So far it seems to be working. After Gawker introduced its Star system, which gave preference to the work of “Starred” commentators, participation on the comment boards rose to a new high. The Huffington Post, which offers its best users digital merit badges and special rights (like the ability to delete other people’s posts), boasts the most active commenters of any news site. And Yelp says it has maintained a pace of a million new reviews every three months.

Such reward programs are only likely to grow more important, especially as the Web reaches into corners of the world where it never benefited from the frisson of a social movement. Last year, in parts of eastern Africa, Google launched the Kiswahili Wikipedia Challenge, an effort to grow the number of Swahili-language Wikipedia entries by tying them to the chance to win modems, cell phones, and a laptop. It worked. This wouldn’t surprise Jeff Howe, the author of Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business. Back in 2006, he predicted that the winners in the social-media world would be “those that figure out a formula for making their users feel amply compensated.” Prizes are a start. Can cash be far behind? Oh, right, then it would just be a job.