When Was The Last Time You Linked Outside the US?
In Hoder’s session on Building a Blogosphere, Rebecca MacKinnon asked “what can we do to encourage people to link to bloggers internationally?”
Thats been sort of a theme today. I think its challenging, because often bloggers in different places have very different orientations; that combination of cultural, educational, and training background that acts as a lens on everything we see.
But I’ll ask: When was the last time you linked to a blogger whose first language isn’t English? (Mine was April 17th, on Lebanese Democracy.) In review, it seems that my comments on the world at large rarely engage the primary sources that are available.
Technorati: blognashville
Do you consider Australian non-English? 🙂
I’m sort of in the reverse situation. Most of my blog links were from overseas (USA, Europe and Canada) and I put my first Aussie link up a couple of weeks ago. No Asian, South American or African blogs as yet.
The cross borders thing isn’t uniquely American. Most of the Aussies I know have mainly Australian blogs, I suppose it’s a case of localised content and interest in these cases.
Being in Estonia and speaking Estonian natively actually puts up two barriers for blogging. First is national and cultural, a lot of the stuff you write concerns local matters and as such is not of interest to international readers. The second is language. The first problem can exist even for someone in US, where you have two different target groups who are interested in what you have to say, but these are not interconnected. Lets say cryptography and hip-hop music, if you mix messages from both, you actually turn off a lot of people. So for that purpose you could separate those 2 groups of content into 2 independent blogs.
I personally have 2 blogs, one in English, one in Estonian. Although sometimes it is hard to decide into which and in which language to write.
Hi Jüri,
You’re absolutely on here. Rebecca McKinnon calls the bloggers who work to overcome the cultural issues “bridge bloggers” (more on that later.)
On the crypto and hip-hop, however, I’m not sure I agree. After several conversations this weekend, I think that the need for showing a human side is important, too.