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You might have to be kind of careful when you say

Japanese culture is much less anti-intellectual and anti-geek

if you are including these 'Otaku' (shut-ins), then I would have to disagree with you completely. I have been living in Japan the last 11 months and every Japanese person who I have broached the topic with say they dislike 'otaku'. Might it be because there was a famous 'otaku' serial-killer?

As for your second point I would not call it racism at all, more of fascination. The Japanese citizens without 100% Japanese heritage is less than 1%. How many American's can claim they have 100% Native American blood? When you come from an immigrant country (read: USA) it may seem like racism, but some of these people have never had a conversation with a foreigner before in their life. Think about it, the total yearly immigrants into Japan is about 11k, whereas the USA is reaching 450K

The answer to the question posed by this development at Orkut: multilingual sites that allow users to choose to view content by languages (plural). ISSHO is one such experiment.

Someone needs to write books that address the need to deal with multiple language, bidi and related issues. PHP and MySQL can handle more than most people think, but one thing holding the non-Latin-1 development back is a rather chronic case of Latin1-centricity.

While Google is good at providing access to information in multiple languages, its news search is monolingual (English), at the moment. A new blog section might similarly mean a new section for English-based blogs only - not the approach I would like to see.
Rather than wait to see how Google will handle this and the issue of determining what is and is not a blog, this would be a good time for people involved in the affected industries and media to set forth practical definitions of blogs, klogs and whathaveyou and make recommendations.
Sooner the better.

It would be good to see some of the region's very special Native American languages get some PR out of this wave.

It would be good to see some of the region's very special Native American languages get some PR out of this wave.

Does blogging aversely affect the professional writer's writing? The Guardian interview touches on an important question, but only briefly - this is one that should probably be tackled by a team of researchers. When I started up a simple blog-on-a-Wiki last December, I was a bit plagued by a similar question:
Why would writers write in their free time?
For me, as long as I can get away with taking one or even two week breaks from the blog, it is not a problem. "Write when you need to, blog when you can," is about where I find myself at the moment.

Does blogging aversely affect the professional writer's writing? The Guardian interview touches on an important question, but only briefly - this is one that should probably be tackled by a team of researchers. When I started up a simple blog-on-a-Wiki last December, I was a bit plagued by a similar question:
Why would writers write in their free time?
For me, as long as I can get away with taking one or even two week breaks from the blog, it is not a problem. "Write when you need to, blog when you can," is about where I find myself at the moment.

ISSHO Kikaku currently uses the JoinProject module for PostNuke as a way to allow people to match their skills with the volunteer tasks that are in demand within the organization. It works well (need to register first), but it is very simple and is not adequate for more sophisticated needs. Why not look for something more sophisticated? We are, but don't forget that to give people all over the globe the potential for equitable access, everything must be translated - at least for some organizations.

So, mechanisms that match tasks and talent certainly need to be improved. But perhaps the bigger issue is tools for facilitating collaboration. These need to be reasonably priced, sophisticated and easy-to-use. And multilingual, of course.

In the specific case of ISSHO, an implementation of Wiki is very exciting so far, but - at the moment - lacks somewhat in the i18n area and in the linkage between the collaboration area and the website proper (this particular problem is related to the multiple flavors of RSS, ability or lack thereof of converting between encodings on the fly, and other issues). Sounds like it would be simple enough to solve, but so far these little nagging problems limit what organizations can do, considerably.

Once these and similar issues are addressed (and systems are in place to ensure that they will continue to be addressed, even as technology progresses) it will become much, much easier for volunteer organizations to get properly organized, and to organize potential volunteers. "Virtual Volunteering" will see a new dimension if and when these groups are able to focus more easily on the results, and don't have to do quite so many handstands to come up with adequate mechanisms for handling the basics.

ISSHO Kikaku currently uses the JoinProject module for PostNuke as a way to allow people to match their skills with the volunteer tasks that are in demand within the organization. It works well (need to register first), but it is very simple and is not adequate for more sophisticated needs. Why not look for something more sophisticated? We are, but don't forget that to give people all over the globe the potential for equitable access, everything must be translated - at least for some organizations.

So, mechanisms that match tasks and talent certainly need to be improved. But perhaps the bigger issue is tools for facilitating collaboration. These need to be reasonably priced, sophisticated and easy-to-use. And multilingual, of course.

In the specific case of ISSHO, an implementation of Wiki is very exciting so far, but - at the moment - lacks somewhat in the i18n area and in the linkage between the collaboration area and the website proper (this particular problem is related to the multiple flavors of RSS, ability or lack thereof of converting between encodings on the fly, and other issues). Sounds like it would be simple enough to solve, but so far these little nagging problems limit what organizations can do, considerably.

Once these and similar issues are addressed (and systems are in place to ensure that they will continue to be addressed, even as technology progresses) it will become much, much easier for volunteer organizations to get properly organized, and to organize potential volunteers. "Virtual Volunteering" will see a new dimension if and when these groups are able to focus more easily on the results, and don't have to do quite so many handstands to come up with adequate mechanisms for handling the basics.

ISSHO Kikaku currently uses the JoinProject module for PostNuke as a way to allow people to match their skills with the volunteer tasks that are in demand within the organization. It works well (need to register first), but it is very simple and is not adequate for more sophisticated needs. Why not look for something more sophisticated? We are, but don't forget that to give people all over the globe the potential for equitable access, everything must be translated - at least for some organizations.

So, mechanisms that match tasks and talent certainly need to be improved. But perhaps the bigger issue is tools for facilitating collaboration. These need to be reasonably priced, sophisticated and easy-to-use. And multilingual, of course.

In the specific case of ISSHO, an implementation of Wiki is very exciting so far, but - at the moment - lacks somewhat in the i18n area and in the linkage between the collaboration area and the website proper (this particular problem is related to the multiple flavors of RSS, ability or lack thereof of converting between encodings on the fly, and other issues). Sounds like it would be simple enough to solve, but so far these little nagging problems limit what organizations can do, considerably.

Once these and similar issues are addressed (and systems are in place to ensure that they will continue to be addressed, even as technology progresses) it will become much, much easier for volunteer organizations to get properly organized, and to organize potential volunteers. "Virtual Volunteering" will see a new dimension if and when these groups are able to focus more easily on the results, and don't have to do quite so many handstands to come up with adequate mechanisms for handling the basics.

You need to look more closely at that data - you are missing a few zeros.

Careful not to miss the human side of this issue. I don't know what the people rotting away in prison said on the Internet, but Amnesty doesn't think they deserve to be locked up.
Note: the above link is not English. Non-Francophones may wish to give machine translation a shot.

Ordinary people are still having major issues when trying to work in utf-8.

If everyone had the latest browsers, fonts, OS et al, or found it really easy to get these things, working with utf-8 would be much easier.

But in reality, a lot of people just get confused, frustrated or both when their environment doesn't display certain characters, or when they get screen garbage when trying to input some data in a submit field.

sigh...

Why not make something that can be used by ordinary people during peactime activities...like at the FIFA World Cup that kicks off tomorrow. Think of the demand for interpretation, machine or otherwise.