February 21, 2003

  • Damn Blogger!  'Random sampling' it has presented me with an unforseen difficulty: there are a helluva lot of blogs in foreign languages.  Spanish, Norwegian, Portugeuse, Polish...even Arabic.


    So far, none of the xanga blogs I've 'sampled' have been in anything but English, yet it appears that somewhere around 20% of Blogger blogs are in a wicked tongue.


    Yet, this is a very important finding (currently, more properly, an unquantified impression) in itself (which I shall later attempt to quantify, i.e., assign a more or less exact percentage to). 


    Why is Blogger more cosmopolitan and xanga comparatively so Anglified? 


    Could it be because xanga feels more like 'a community', and because it's nearly a homogenous 'English-speaking' community, foreign language blogs feel more like 'a minority' and tend to self-deselect from participation?  In that case, if Blogger feels less like 'a community', foreign-language blogs would feel less or no pressure to comply with a language norm and tend not to de-select from participation.


    Or has Blogger just done its legwork to get established in foreign markets thus creating viable self-sustaining interactive foreign language blogs?  And is 'Blogger' becoming a sort of universal 'proprietary eponym' for blogging around the world--like 'Xerox' for copying, 'Thermos' for hot-liquid container, 'Styrofoam' for polystrene foam, etc., (see more Proprietary Eponyms  ) that draws new bloggers around the world to it, by word-of mouth, first?


    In any case...my initial inclination to compare all xanga and Blogger blogs will now be footnoted to indicate that I'm only comparing xanga and Blogger English language blogs while Blogger clearly claims a significantly greater (to yet be specified) foreign-language appeal.


    Okay: enough statistical thinking for now!  Did someone just mention 'beer' at the end of today's workday?

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