Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

3 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. Here comes UTF-32! by Eunuch · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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!

    --
    Transcend Humanity. Please.
  2. Why it hasn't caught on there... by bob+whoops · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  3. There is no tradition of free expression in China by wheelbarrow · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.