Friday 25 January 2008

New direction for Blogger

Google's Blogger, that drives CairnsBlog, have launched their blogging interface into Arabic, Hebrew and Persian.

Blogger is now available in 37 languages, and Google has 159 country sites.

The difference with Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew is that they are written from right to left, and therefore the back-end of the editing tools had to be flipped completely.

If you want a permanent link to instantly translate any text, you can add your own particular one to your Favourites.

It's tremendous that such a big player like Google is helping facilitate independent freelance journalism by encouraging more to join the blogging community.

And if you thought most blogs were in the English, you are wrong! Japanese is the top blogging language and we come a close second. In the State of the Live Web, Japan takes the top spot with 37% (up from 33%), with English at 36% (down from 39%). Italian overtook Spanish for the number four spot. The newcomer to the top 10 languages is Farsi, just joining the list at 10.

Both English and Spanish are more global languages based on consistency of posting, whereas other top languages, specifically Japanese, Chinese, and Italian, are more geographically correlated.

Technorati is now tracking in excess of 112 million blogs. This is one of them.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

goodstuff Kiwi ...
ka nui ngaa mihi
2 more years and we will think about it !!!
Ka kite ano

muzza

Anonymous said...

Interesting that Farsi is no 10 in blogging languages.

Perhaps Iran isn't quite the oppressive police state that the Zionist-dominated mainstream western media and their chums in government would have us believe?

How many bloggers do Bush, Sarkosy and Olmert want to bomb today?

Anonymous said...

I have been talking to Iranians on the internet for years. The internet is very popular in Iran. My friends in Esfahan tell me that everyone they know has the internet connected and that there are satellite dishes on roofs everywhere. "Oprah" is popular in Iran and there are warehouse style shops like "Overflow" full of imported Chinese and Indian goods. Iranians like Hollywood movies and they are freely available. Tehran has a red light district and drug addiction is quite a problem.
University education is free in Iran, however students are then bonded to the Government for two to three years after graduation.
Females outnumber males in the universities, in some faculties, by two to one.

Anonymous said...

You mean Iranians have affordable satellite-delivered broadband?

Perhaps they haven't had telecoms policy run by crooks and fools for the last decade or three?

I find the Tehran Times considerably more balanced on world events than the Times of London, although it's much lower on the nubile model quotient.

The Times of India is also a good read.

Unfortunately, the TIME it takes to download all of this on my unreliable ISDN 'service' is very long indeed.

Latest is that Telstra tells me the times they are a changing yet again. ISDN for home users will be phased out at the end of the year.

I have yet to hear whether this means a downgrade to dialup!

I registered a complaint some weeks ago after the latest service outage of more than 10 days, but no-one from Telstra has called.

I was promised that someone would call me about my 'future' after ISDN. No one has.

If it was down to me, I'd ask the Ayatollahs to take a sabbatical and sort out Telstra once and for all.