Isaac Mao

Isaac Mao (simplified Chinese: 毛向辉; traditional Chinese: 毛向輝; pinyin: Máo Xiànghuī) is a Chinese venture capitalist, software architect, and social media researcher. He is also known for co-founding CNBlogs.org, doing research in social learning and for developing the philosophy of Sharism. He is the director of the Social Brain Foundation, a vice president of the United Capital Investment Group (2004-2008) and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

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. Mao has written extensively about on-line journalism, and advises Global Voices Online and several web 2.0 businesses. Mao's essay "Sharism: A Mind Revolution" appeared in the Freesouls book project.

Blogging and blog advocacy

Mao is a co-founder of CNBlogs.org and a co-organizer of the Chinese Blogger Conference (2005 in Shanghai, 2006 in Hangzhou). He started a movement in 2005 to adopt Chinese bloggers on overseas servers.

Mao is a regular speaker at global conferences (such as Wikimania and the Chinese Internet Conference) about Internet culture, in China and more broadly and other global events on Internet culture. In 2009, he was a speaker at the 40th anniversary of The Internet Conference held at UCLA As a trained software engineer, he has a long history of developing both business and consumer software. He worked as a Chief Architect in the Intel HomeCD project and Tangram BackSchool suite.

As of 2008, Mao published an open letter to Google, challenging the search engine giant to support anti-censorship efforts and change its strategy on China.