Generously sponsored by Web Analytics Demystified, we hosted our August Web Analytics Wednesday event yesterday at Club Camp. In the spirit of continuous improvements we changed from a normal dinner set up to a buffet style arrangement, and I won't look back. I was happy to observe and join the many small group discussions, that would have been impossible before. Plus we could easily host all 18 - 20 participants and have room for more.

Attentive Listeners

The main attraction of the day was the presentation of Feedsky CEO Lv Xin Xin. The most interesting point for me was actually the audience reaction after the presentation had started. More that 50% of our audience were not familiar with the concepts of feeds in general and RSS in particular. While there are 50 - 60 million blogs in China, the way to follow them is still very different to the US and Europe. While western users often use their browsers and RSS readers to subscribe to RSS feeds to feed their news habit, Chinese blogs are mainly personal journals set up on platforms run by IM companies (Q-Zone by QQ, LiveSpace by MSN) and portals. In order to keep updated users just check their corresponding IM client to see if their friends have updated their blogs. The "old way" of bookmarking blogs and checking them directly remains popular too. Google reader or other RSS readers are still only used my a minority of users. Lv Xin Xin mentioned that only 2 million users subscribe to Feedsky feeds, while the online population is estimated at 253 million users.


LV Xin Xin in from of his slides

Other point from his presentation:

What is Feedsky?

• A Feedburner clone in China (Feedburner is blocked in China by the GFW)
• It provides are platform for publishers, mainly bloggers, to publish and track their RSS feeds easily
• Publishers can also merge multiple feeds, change the layout of the feed, add advertising and online bookmarking links