Asia Next Frontier in Blogging

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."

Comments

Here comes UTF-32!

[Eunuch]

Well it looks like more of us will have to deal with UNICODE above 0xFFFF. Some of these additional characters have important business implications as some Asian names just plain need code points above 0xFFFF. So these bloggers will tip the scales even further.

Any bets when we'll meet a bunch of sentients from another galaxy and break past thirty-two bits per code point?

There is a somewhat hilarious description of how the Java developers dealt with all this: http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/In tl/Supplementary/.

Transhumanism/singularity will probably whittle down the whole thing to the bit of course!

Re:Here comes UTF-32!

[Sexy Commando]

You are confused UTF-16 with UCS2. UTF-16 has surrogates to represent the entire Unicode table.

dot com boominess

[gumbo]

Does this remind anyone else of stories from when Netscape went public years and years ago? I remember hearing things like a woman called up and said she had no idea what the Internet or Netscape was, but she wanted to buy some shares in it, because it sounded like a hot money-making ticket to GET RICH QUICK!!!11

Chinese Calendar

[Doc Ruby]

Chinese investors sound like they're state-of-the-art 1998. Which means blogs won't take off there until 2010. And their Internet crash will come right on schedule in 2008.

Hmmm.

[AnObfuscator]

I can't exactly see the Chinese Government taking a shine to this. Independent analysis? Free speech? Free information sharing? A community where anyone can say anything he choses? This... in a country that has a firewall at the national level to block access to block non-approved websites, a government that bullied Google into filtering its search results?

BLOGGING in CHINA?!

Was that the sound of hell freezing over...?

I really hope this *does* get off the ground, of course; this would be a wonderful human rights victory for the Chinese people. I'm just highly skeptical and cynical. While the government can shut down/monitor a few major blogs, can it really hope to monitor tens, hundreds of thousands, even millions of blogs? Is it willing to take the chance?

old wine new bottle??

[sacbhale]

I dont get what the big deal about blogging is??

I mean yeah its cool to blog and be heard...But how is this different from years ago when everyone had their own website on geocities and said things there???

Yes its easy and more accessible and everyone's doing it...but its basically still the same old thing...

Re:old wine new bottle??

[Anonymous Coward]

It's more important for the bloggers I guess. Like that feeling when you put up your first website, and you thought about stuff you would put on it, but no, what if someone you knew read it, so you put up something else. Then you put up more stuff and had links, and oh, here's my first Java app. Wow the whole world is going to come here and see this. I really have a platform for free speech and I can share my views with the whole world.

Then you checked the logs and realized no one cared.

So you put an email link saying "Comments on this page click here." And the only email you got was from ruffian420@yahoo.com saying, "Yer website sucks." What, they don't like my blink and marquee tags? Dude, I'm using animated gifs!!!

The purpose of blogs is the perception that you are speaking to the world, when in reality, you can't even go to the local pub and get the balls to join a political discussion or even disagree with someone. So you sit in your house on a computer (hehe much like me now!) babbling into a HTML form. I tried to figure out this blog thing and most sites I saw need a login to even read other peoples blogs, and the ones I could read were just boring.

So the bottom line is blogs are for people who write "private" stuff in their diary they really want people to read but leave the key right next to the diary. Jesus, just go have an honest conversation with someone, get some live feedback, and grow as an interactive human being.

I much prefer the slashdot moderation system. Get on a topic, hundreds of viewpoints, but the really good (or funny) comments are modded up. Plus there is the ability to reply, anonymously or not, right there on the spot. If I want to see how much someone's life sucks, I can read at -1 and see how much time people have to waste. Do I really want to read about some l'user and how pissed he was about what his boss did, or chickadees problems with some guy she likes but has never noticed her? Give me humor, insight or information.

A more important question

[ShatteredDream]

Does China even have a tradition of freedom of any kind at all? The Communists didn't exactly change the cultural outlook on individualism overnight you know...