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Asia Next Frontier in Blogging

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the critical-mass dept.

Lullabye_Muse writes "Japan Today tells us that there are 3 million people blogging in Japan and over 16 million people visiting a blog at least once a month in the country. It also mentions that over the next two years the market for blogs will expand over 40%." Meanwhile, in regards to Chinese blogging, wayfaring stranger writes "A new Wired News article talks about Hong Konger Edwyn Chan's new www.blogkumedia.com Chinese blog network, which aims to make blogging a mainstream reality for the Chinese internet." From the article: "Blogs haven't caught on in China, so even when Chan can hire bloggers, it's hard to market them to consumers, attract advertisers and raise venture capital. The investors he has met don't use blogs as sources of information, so they generally have no clue of what a blog is. 'All they know is that it's something hot which they hope to be able to cash out hopefully in less than a year,' Chan said."

2 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Here comes UTF-32! by Nahor · · Score: 3, Informative

    Can't those characters be represented using UTF-8?

    Yes they can as in UTF-16 too.

    However, Java doesn't use UTF-16 encoding but wide characters (a.k.a. "wide char", or wchar). Wide char is just an extension of the regular one byte "char" to a two bytes value. So it can't store values bigger than 65535.

    With UTF-xx, several bytes/int/long/whatever can be combined to create bigger values. Not so with wide characters.

    So yes, UTF-xx can encode nearly anything (up to 8 bytes or something) but Java can't.

  2. How is Korean not mentioned? by alwsn · · Score: 2, Informative

    Almost all young people in Korea use 'mini homepages' or blogs every day. 10 million Koreans (of 48 million) are already using blogs. Only 30 million Koreans are online meaning a full 33% of everyone on the internet in Korea have blogs. It also means that 20% of the entire population of Korea are writing blogs. In Japan there is only 3 million of 127 million people writing blogs, or about 2%. The difference is an order of magnitude. The registered blogs in Korea are also each unique to a person, as you are are required to enter the Korean equivalent of a social security number before making a new page.

    For a bit more info, check out this page. http://english.kbs.co.kr/life/trend/1337632_11857. html