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.

Re:Here comes UTF-32!

[Nahor]

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.

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

Why it hasn't caught on there...

[bob whoops]

Instead of shutting him down, however, the Gong An told him if he wanted to continue he would have to remove the more heated posts, which he did

And so, why is blogging in China useful?

Re:Why it hasn't caught on there...

[jangobongo]

Exactly. When you have to follow the party line or face being "removed" - either your blog or you (going to jail) - what would there be to say?

The people are effectively gagged there as far as politics are concerned, which seems to be one of the hottest topics for blogging here in the U.S.

Blogging is close to the original vision

[Colin Smith]

For the World Wide Web. Wiki is maybe a bit closer.

However I've been looking into it and it seems to me to be a sad, isolated, lonely world, there are no connections between the people producing these blogs. No community.

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.

Blogging, Video bloging, podcasting

[Ckwop]

Is it hype or reality? I don't know, I write my own blog almost as a hobby; a nice pass time. I like to read the thoughts of others who enjoy the pass-time too. But I'm not so pretentious to think that blogging will "change the world" (tm).

It's nice that blogging has brought communities together and is replacing the lecturing of the old media (news papers and magazines) with the debate brought in new media (blogs).

When all is said and done, I think blogging is and will always be a nice pass time for the majority of people. Don't get me wrong, blogging is on the march and by no means has it reached it's destination. What I contend, is the final position of blogging within society; it will be somewhat different than people have come to expect.

Simon.

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?

There is no tradition of free expression in China

[wheelbarrow]

Blogging has not caught on in China because citizens in China have learned to keep their head down and stay quiet to avoid jail time or being murdered by army tanks. Blogging cannot work where there is government oversight and censorship. Especially not when the government in question has a long track record in stifling free expression.

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...

Please enlighten me

[Strange Ranger]

I've been an active and curious internet user since WAIS and Gopher were the tools of choice, maybe I haven't "seen it all", but I've tried to. Sooo with that in mind...

Can somebody please explain to me what sets blogging apart from Geocities "Meet my Dog, check my favorite links" pages.. multiplied by a million screaming ME TOO posts and cross links? Everyone with their own personal sad little version of Fark??

This is not a troll. I get that out of 10 million blogs a few will be thoroughly engrossing, but still I obviously don't get the blogging thing, so I'm seriously asking to be smacked with a clue-by-four regarding blogs. What's the big draw? What do they accomplish for most people? A good place for blogging newbies?

Swing away please. Thanks.

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...

How is Korean not mentioned?

[alwsn]

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