Blocked by the Great Firewall of China
A small claim to fame, the time when I was blocked by the Great Firewall of China. Exactly how controversial were my opinions?
Sometime around mid-2007 I created an online publication focusing on the convergence of the entertainment, communications and media industries. It was fun to write and publish.
If you're familiar with Ben Thompson's Stratechery, it was a little like that, but ahead of its time (in that the monetization models hadn't matured). The focus was primarily on entertainment/media industry business models and market behavior. A failure to scale financially, I nonetheless learned a lot about internet economics.
The site scaled to 100000 MAUs in about 9 months. Given this was before Facebook made it super easy to drive engagement at scale, I consider it an achievement (of the time).
But my proudest moment was when I was blocked by the Great Firewall of China. I did write a lot about China's market emergence, especially in the context of mobile devices and media, but I can't say it was particularly controversial content.
I'll still take it as a small claim to fame. Happy to share war stories.