Isaac Mao

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Isaac Mao

Isaac Mao (毛向辉) is one of the pioneers of blogs in the People's Republic of China.^{[citation needed]} He is co-founder of CNBlog.org and a researcher in social learning. In 2005, he started the movement for adopting Chinese bloggers on overseas servers.

Isaac Mao is a venture capitalist, blogger, software architect, entrepreneur and researcher in learning and social technology. He divides his time between research, social works, business and technology. He is now Vice President of United Capital Investment Group and Director to Social Brain Foundation, advisor to Global Voices Online and several web 2.0 businesses.

As one of the earliest bloggers in the Chinese community, Isaac is not only co-founder of CNBlog.org which is the earliest evangelizing site in China on grassroots publishing, but also the co-organizer of the Chinese Blogger Conference (2005 in Shanghai, 2006 in Hangzhou). Later on, the CNBlog team transformed into Social Brain Foundation (SBF) to promote free culture in China covering Free Access, Free Speech and Free Thinking areas. The current project SBF is supporting Ideas Factory, Open Education and Creative Commons China, etc.

Isaac is also a global bridge in the blogosphere. He is a regular speaker/keynote to Wikimania, the Chinese Internet Conference and other global events on internet culture. As a trained software engineer, he has a long history developing both business and consumer software. He worked as a Chief Architect in the Intel HomeCD project and the Tangram BackSchool suite. He applied many HCI methodogies into software design processes and significantly improved the usability of software. He also researches Social Computing and organized the first Social Software Forum in China.

Isaac Mao earned a BS degree in Computer Science and took part in a MBA training program at Shanghai Jiaotong University. He also serves as a pedagogy consultant to some local institutions and advices some local hi-tech firms on their business strategy. Isaac Mao was one of the people included into "2006-2016, Map of the Decade", by the Institute for the Future. He is also as director of Shanghai Youth Development Foundation.

Recently, Mao got a lot of resonance in the technology and business world with his open letter to Google, challenging the search engine giant to support anti-censorship efforts and change its strategy on China.