01
May
2006
|
13:56 PM
America/Los_Angeles

Chinese blogosphere has peaked--is censorship to blame?


Technorati, the web services company that tracks the blogosphere, has also been tracking which languages are being used. And the findings are very interesting, and there are lots of them.


Can you guess which is the most popular language? Here is a post from Dave Sifry, CEO of Technorati, on the the analysis of the languages of the global blogosphere.

From: State of the Blogosphere, April 2006 Part 2: On Language and Tagging


Something that may come as a surprise (at least to the English-speaking world) is that English isn't the biggest language of the blogosphere. In fact, English isn't even the primary language of one third of all posts that Technorati tracks anymore.

Another interesting finding is that the Chinese blogosphere, which grew significantly in 2004 and 2005 (launches of MSN Spaces in Chinese, Bokee.com saw a peak of 25% of all posts in Chinese in November 2005) seems to be slowing down somewhat this year.


I wonder if the Chinese slowdown is because of the increasingly overt censorship of Chinese internet users? Blogging celebrates a rawness, a passion, a shoot-from-hip directness.


This isn't going to happen if you have to second-guess yourself when writing, and then think thrice about pushing the "publish" button when you know someone is looking over your shoulder.


Limiting self-expression is never good for a society and those energies generally find a way of alternate expression--sometimes covert, sometimes you have to hide opinion and read "between the lines" as in former Soviet-dominated countries, and other times self-expression bursts out onto the streets with an uncertain velocity and outcome.


The recent Frontline documentary on the "The Tank Man" was fascinating . It really puts into perspective the cowardly attitudes of some of Silicon Valley's most respected tech giants, towards standing up for what's right. You only have to stand up and do the right thing--you are not standing up to a tank column. [Frontline continues to produce and practice3 some of the very best journalism anywhere, imho]


Bush Calls For World to Stand With Young Man Who Braved Tanks
The Associated Press, June 5, 1989 (read excerpt »)


What interests me: Does Internet censorship harm an economy? If we say that blogging and all this free expression is so wonderful, and game changing, and vital to communities--then those places that don't have it will be clearly disadvantaged. At some point... Maybe?


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BTW, I'd like to commend Technorati on an excellent job in brand building and awareness. Its revamp of its service, and the way it has managed to skillfully use its knowledge of the culture of the blogosphere to promote itself is masterful.


And Technorati is in an excellent position to replace one of the core technologies of the blogosphere, the trackback. For some reason (spam related) trackbacks rarely work.


The idea with trackback is that every online post can automatically discover if it has been linked to by another post, and automatically publish an extract. This solves the problem of do I comment on your site or mine.


But trackback is hurt by swarms of spam trying to build online links on blog sites so that Google will rank some sites higher than others.


Technorati offers an alternative trackback solution, here it is, search results that show who is linking to Silicon Valley Watcher.


But Technorati is showing strains as the blogosphere expands to 37.3m blogs, doubling every six months. Lately, the Technorati search has often been unavailable because of high volumes of requests. Clearly its infrastructure needs a boost, I just hope it's a scalable design.