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!

[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.

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?

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.

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.

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...