ABOUT 200 PEOPLE have roused themselves on a wet Saturday in Shanghai to attend China's first bloggers' conference. They pile into a conference room in an office on Julu Road, a flurry of webcams, laptops and gadgets. As the movers and shakers of China's blog scene get onstage to talk about their medium's future to a live audience for the first time, the optimism is palpable. It's like watching a generation come together - a micro-Woodstock for blogging in China.
Like any good concert, the real action happens backstage. In this case, it's a small side room where conference speakers prepare or take a breather from the main event. Isaac Mao Xianghui sits cross-legged on the floor. He drifts in and out of 'peer-to-peer talks' with conference-goers, brimming with enthusiasm for ideas such as 'social brains', the 'semantic web' and 'Web 2.0' - ideas that he says will help rewire Chinese society.
Mao is something of a rock star in the Chinese tech world. But he's more Bono than Jimi Hendrix; a thoughtful observer and activist who wants to change things for the better. 'I'd like to be known as a thinker more than anything else,' the 33-year-old says. 'But when I think about something, I will also do it.'
Mao owes his position near the top of China's tech tree to a well-rounded resume. The youngest of four children, Mao left his home town of Qinhuangdao, in Hebei province, to enrol at Shanghai's Jiaotong University. 'To some people, getting in to Jiaotong was difficult,' he says. 'For me, it was my second choice. I actually wanted to go to Tsinghua.'
Mao remained in Shanghai after graduation, earning his stripes as a software engineer at Intel. Within four years, he'd risen to chief architect. In 1997, Mao left the giant chip-maker to start Tangram Software, a company that sold computer-based corporate training systems. When the dotcom bubble burst, he sold Tangram for US$5 million before becoming a venture capitalist two years ago, as one of four partners at United Capital Investment.
A year earlier, Mao co-founded CNBlog.org, China's first forum for serious discussion about blogging and technology, with Zheng Yunsheng, a teacher from Fujian. It was then that Mao discovered his passion for the medium.