China's first blogger on his country's rapidly expanding blogsphere | Asia New Zealand Foundation
"The number of bloggers in China has exploded in the past seven years to over 40 million and that number is continuing to grow, says the man who was there at the beginning when the scene was a nascent one in 2002.
Isaac Mao is the man credited with being one of the very first Chinese internet users to set foot in what has since become the country’s massive blogosphere. He’s a kind of godfather to the movement which is becoming increasingly self aware of its power to circumvent the Chinese government’s centralised efforts to control news and social media content.
Mao was in New Zealand for a week to talk to journalism students in Auckland, Hamilton and Wellington and to meet with journalists and bloggers. In his presentations at AUT, Wintec and Whitireia, Mao illustrated the explosive growth of blogging and social media in China from 2002 when there were about 1000 bloggers, all of whom he says he knew personally, to the staggering number we see today.
The Shanghai-based Mao travels constantly. He is very much in demand as a speaker and commentator on the internet and social media trends. His visit to New Zealand was organised by Jim Tucker at the Whitireia Polytechnic Journalism School who had met Mao at a regional media forum in Jakarta last year. The Asia New Zealand Foundation provided funding to enable the visit to happen.
Mao says he chose his English name from two pioneering individuals who inspired him when he was growing up – the scientist Isaac Newton and the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. He says it is impossible to prove if he and another person whom he met online were the first bloggers. “Mr Zheng and I were called the first bloggers in China. But it is very hard to track who is the first one.”
As an alumni of the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard University in Massachusetts, he divides his time between researching social media trends and his work as a blogger, venture capitalist, educationalist and public speaker. The common denominator of all aspects of his work is being
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