June 7, 2003

  • Well, it’s interesting over there at 20six.  It was becoming apparent that refugee xangans arriving on the 20six shores were rapidly ascending in all the categories provided to measure popularity.  In fact, they were publicly and statistically establishing themselves with great prominence, and by trend, eventual pre-eminence.


    Then the ‘ranking tools’ that 20six had furnished to measure community popularity suspiciously broke.   This coincidence of refugee xangans’ clearly visible growing influence a along with this ‘mishap’ that they say cannot be fixed for ‘at least a couple weeks’ led me to speculate that 20six was experiencing a transplant rejection: they appeared, to some degree officially, to deem their blood type different from the blogging refugees debarking from their freedom boats. But it really turns out that they don’t so much feel threatened by the ‘xangan presence’ as much as by the fact that most xangans arriving are Americans! 

    Apparently, the synchronous startups of 20six’s in the U.K., Germany, France, and the Netherlands are designed to preserve the indigenous culture of those nations through some notion of localized blogging.  And the reverse osmosis that the arrival of so many American xangans presented to them has disturbed their ever-more apparent desire to steer the tone of the community to things corely British.


    Here was my response to their self-limiting vision:


    Pseudo-hydrophobia


    So it seems our world conspires
    to consign us to less vigorous expressions
    today--but that's okay
    lest the somebodies begin to think
    the foam forming around our mouths
    is a sign of animal rabidity
    and not just the frothy overflow
    from our thrusting tongues
    churning to excess
    in the love labor of birthing
    exquisite blogging delectations.


    Attempting to restrict a blog to a particular language may be successful.  And, as notasoul points out in a comment on my last post, this is obviously the strategy of the multiple and simultaneous (U.K., Germany, France, Netherlands) 20six startups.

    But attempting to restrict the language of such a site to a particular geographic or cultural node is entirely cyber-suicidal and counter to the whole spirit of the internet's spirit of inter-commingling. Essentially,     restricting a blogging community to chauvinistic culture-teering is like swallowing the Sun. At first you'll glow brightly. But such attempts at containment are always fusionally fatal.

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