June 17, 2005
euroblogs
Loic Le Meur has a nice overview of The European Blogosphere.
This was built as a wiki for the talk he gave at Reboot last week.
[On the subject of Euroblogs:] One big issue I kept on hearing from a lot of the Danish bloggers at Reboot was whether or not it was a good idea to write in English.
Obviously, English is the lingua franca of the internet, and if you decide to write in your non-English native tongue then your readership is going to remain quite limited. Loic solves the problem by writing in both English and in French, but like he told me personally, that can be a real pain.
I have no opinion one way or the other. Local is good. So is global. Depends on what you’re trying to acheive.
I writn time always in ur Anglish. He help lot communication!
But seriously, be realistic about your level competence as well, better to have a loyal following in your own language than to start the next “All you base are belong to us” in a foreign one that you do not speak well.
I speak German and Hungarian as well as my native English, and so far what I’ve found is that there are lots of German-language blogs but not so many Hungarian-language ones; on the other hand, there are a lot of very active forum sites in Hungarian, so a lot of what might otherwise go onto blogs goes there. That said, the Magyar blogging world is growing fast.
My completely subjective impression is that the Hungarians are more likely to blog in English (or in English and Hungarian) than the Germans… possibly part of a small country’s desire to connect beyond its borders, possibly something about the Hungarian minorities in neighboring countries, who knows.
But I have to admit that all the blogs I read regularly are in English. Maybe I just haven’t found the best German and Hungarian ones yet.
Idea about target languages: I’ve got a client who’s (hopefully) going to use blogging as his primary marketing tool. The idea is that he, an active blogger already, will naturally be blogging about his business in English anyway; and his girlfriend should start blogging in Japanese to get exposure for the product in Japan.
I’m guessing that sheer weight of numbers will favour English-language blogs at the moment, but I suspect that as blogging spreads you will see bloggers in non-English countries finding enough of a native audience for it to be worthwhile concentrating on that language …
I don’t think it is so much about audience. It is about peers. Who do you want to have a conversation with?
When fellow danish bloggers try to convince me that I should blog in danish, and if needed discontinue my english language blog, it is much because it would free me to take more part in the national danish blogosphere.
It is clear to me though, that there is no european blogosphere because very few bloggers blog as europeans and the only common language that would allow a european blogosphere to emerge — is english.
So unless we blog in english there will be no european blogosphere.
My personal experience with blogging both in Danish and English, without any warning and without language differentiated feeds is that it works quite well. English for tech stuff/general stuff. Danish for local political commentary or e.g. concert reviews.
It’s all about joining an existing conversational sphere where it’s at, in whatever language.
I think the ability to tune out stuff one does not care about is quickly learned in the blogosphere.
good to know open source has not changed the language of programmers. otherwise:
http://www2.ignatius.edu/faculty/turner/languages.htm
Now we only need a chinese non-discriminating google with a native tongue babelfish translator.
Do you mean English or American?
If one chooses to wrote in the english (note small ‘e’) language then one also has to decide which set of spellings to use.
Do I search for color or colour? Depends on the author at the moment.
Hello
I’m a Basque and I have experience in blogging both in Basque and in English. It’s two worlds apart, with English being the lingua franca nowadays and Basque being an epithome of a minoritary language. I basically agree with your point of view… global and local are both good depending on who your fellow co-bloggers and your readers are, and on whom you’re aiming your blog at… In my experience, blogging in Basque is immensely rewarding, not only because it’s a personal implication in using a language that is endangered, but also because we’re such a small community that it is relatively easy to get to talk to people and feel you share some common ground with them (since being speakers of Basque already means having a lot in common). On the other hand, writing in English is great because, obviously, many more people have access to your blog, as you have to theirs. All communication is good