As part of the event, Open Web Asia is putting together a web survey on what companies in the west are considering coming to Asia to start companies. The survey is about the challenges western companies face when coming to Asia, including cultural, economic, and other issues. The survey starts today (Oct. 14) and will be open for two weeks.

If you are interested in China, business, economics, the Internet and technology, then I highly recommend that you take this survey. All you need to do is click on the button below.

The results of the survey will be announced on November 14, when Robert Scoble, Shel Israel and others come to China as part of the China Web 2.0 tour which is put together by the China Business Network.

I’m sure that the results will be interesting, and I look forward to seeing them.

In 10 years, we probably we won’t talk about blogging, we will just call it writing, and writing will come to include the term blogging almost automatically in everyone’s vocabulary. It’s just that now, the technology and its capabilities are new enough, that some people have become enamored with its possibilities. Blogging, from my point of view, is just a new form of writing.

I’m convinced that a good part of the reason for the popularity of blogs has been because the mainstream media has done such a bad job of explaining for example, China and the west to each other. In particular, the US mainstream media, under the pressure to achieve profits and ratings, has turned everything into a gladitorial epic struggle. One moment it’s between China and the west, the next day it’s between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the following day it’s between the rulers of Myanmar and the international community. And on and on it goes.

Part of my reason for writing this blog is to highlight issues and bring to peoples’ attention issues which I believe are not shown correctly and intelligently in most of the western media. There is an awful lot going on in China, and 99% of it cannot be analyzed intelligently in terms of a gladitorial contest between opposing forces. Besides, gladitorial contests are a Roman form of entertainment! The Chinese much preferred strategy games to achieve their ends. Chinese heroes are Sunzi (writer of the Art of War) and Zhuge Liang, who used his wits to achieve his strategic goals.

The server logs indicate that most visitors to this site come from the US. If the articles on this site show visitors from the US and the west that there is more than one possible interpretation to events in China and Chinese behavior, then it has done a good job. It would be presumptuous to ask anyone who has not lived in China for more, but it certainly is a good first step. This is why I like writing about China as a medium. The reader can think things over, and then decide to agree or disagree. When they want, they can post a comment. I must say that I have been very impressed with the intelligence, thought and perception behind the vast majority of the comments, even when my opinions may be different. This is the kind of dialogue which engenders respect, even when people are separated by time, distance, language, culture and even opinions. The world needs more of this kind of dialogue.

I have become disconcerted at what I call the dumbing down of American society. Too much, issues have been reduced to 15-second sound bites and become trivialized. The relationship between China and the west is far too complex and complicated, and the relationship is so deeply intertwined, that it simply cannot afford to be trivialized.

It would be great if American bloggers visited the sites of Chinese bloggers, and western bloggers with a Chinese angle, such as this one, and posted thoughtful comments and questions about China. In my opinion, it would be entirely improper if well-known American bloggers came to China, lectured the Chinese about freedom, human rights and freedom of speech, without even making a dedicated effort to understanding what the Chinese bloggers were thinking about and discussing on their blogs. The Chinese would feel insulted, and I would agree with them. They would be insulted, yet again, by yet another example of arrogance, ignorance and stupidity. And then the Americans would move off, completely oblivious to all the damage which had been done to an event which had the best of intentions, but then didn’t play out right.

If China is about to become the great power that many think that it will become in the 21st century, wouldn’t it make sense to start reading the blogs of Chinese bloggers to find out what they are thinking about and saying? What’s so difficult to understand about that?

Why is it that Robert Scoble is so quick to condemn China’s lack of rule of law (as he recently has), and then quickly changes subject to something totally unrelated to China? The answer is simple: Robert Scoble is a media gadfly who is seeking new subjects which he can feed to his followers. He is not really interested in his subjects; he wants to stand in the spotlight and serve his own agenda. And he will move wherever the spotlight moves, as long as he is in the center. China is interesting to him only so long as it serves his purposes. After that, it becomes yesterday’s newspaper. He is incapable of going deep on any subject.

When are people like Robert Scoble actually going to make an effort to understand what Chinese are thinking about before they lecture them about how they should run their country? Is that too much to ask?

I hope that this event is not turned into a spectacle. The way to do that is to start talking to each other, through our blogs, NOW.

That is what real dialogue is about.

There has been a lot of talk lately about valuing social networks and Facebook's management knows that, which is why they try to track everyones' activities across the Internet with Facebook Beacon.

There has been a lot of discussion
if/how/when/who Facebook will acquire a social network company in China. As usual, I will jump out to offer my often contrarian views on social networking.

Let me put it this way, I don’t think that there is a way to value social networks, even though this is what advertisers would very much like to see happen. And the reason that social networks cannot be valued in a top-down/corporate/advertising way is because they are entirely subjective and dynamic according to each individual at any given moment in time.

That’s why it makes much more sense for each individual to assign a value for _access_ to his network, and anyone who wants to access it has to pay an access fee. If you don’t like the access fee, then don’t pay. If you like the fee, pay, and you will get access.

It’s that simple. Nobody owns the network except me. Not Facebook, LinkedIn, Google or anyone else. I own my relationships, just as you own your relationships. They only exist on Facebook insomuch as I’m active on Facebook now, but that is no guarantee that I will be there tomorrow.

That is why it doesn’t matter if Facebook owns all my data; if I no longer go there, it’s dead, out-of-date data. My data is only valuable as long as I’m active there.

I talked about the idea before, let me fill it out some more.

Here is my problem with Facebook’s Beacon:

1. If Facebook wants to track my activities across the Internet, they should explicity ask me first, and give me an opt-out option.
2. If I say “Yes”, they should ask me how much I want to be paid for access to my network activities on a 24-hour basis
3. I go in and set my fee for 24 hour access beginning immediately and click submit.
4. Facebook’s servers churn and return “yes” or “no”. If “yes”, they will be directed to my payment gateway. After confirmation, Facebook will say something like “Thank you for giving Facebook access to your network activities for 24 hours. After 24 hours, the cookie installed in your browser will automatically expire. (More blahblahblah from corporate and legal departments.)

In this model, each user has control over his/her activities, and is paid for access to their data by each social network.

Now wouldn’t this be a much better world than the current free-for-all where everybody is playing “Let’s screw the users and see how much we can get for free?” The current valuations on social networks are based on not paying users for access to their data.

How would you value social networks if they had to pay users for access to their data?

And since the Internet is all about pushing power to the edge, then why shouldn’t users have the power to earn money from having their activities and relationships tracked?

It would be great to hear what Seth Godin, Dare Obasanjo, Dave Winer and Robert Scoble have to say about the idea.

UPDATE: It’s been three hours since I posted this article, and I wanted to see if Facebook had imported this article into Facebook Notes so that I could tell my Facebook friends about it. (I have set Facebook to automatically import my posts here.)

Guess what? Facebook has not imported this article. Now what have I done to get that kind of treatment? I seem to have some recollection about “empowering users” and all that stuff.

Charming. Did their PR and marketing people go to the “Khmer Rouge Charm School of How to Win Friends and Influence People”. I guess I should be so grateful to Facebook and their management where they can watch all our moves and try to monetize it without passing anything down to us dumb users who haven’t figured out the shill yet.

I’m a great believer that if you fail, you should fail fast. In this respect, Mark Zuckerberg and his flaks have done a great job in record time. Mark, what are your chances now that you will hit that 15B valuation?

Scott Karp has written a great piece “Facebook’s Crisis Demonstrates That People Matter More Than Technology”. Be sure to read it.