I’m a week late on this but there is an interesting article on Microdoc News about how stories evolve in the Blogosphere. Some pretty good points and facts, well worth a read. I dont think I’ve written a whole lot of particularly brilliant stuff worth recognition (if any) but nonetheless, this caught my attention;
Voters and reaction bloggers tend to be native bloggers of other languages, such as German, French, or Spanish. However, some foreign language bloggers who blog in both English and their common tongue, are often opinion writers who get little recognition from the main bunch talking about the story.
Too bad they dont really offer an explanation as to why this happens. I think for an idea to get recognition it needs either (or ideally both) to be brilliant thus making itself a must read or for the blog to already be judged as being of value. By that I mean some A-listers and/or a lot of readers have been following it and come to it with a positive opinion of the post even before reading it simply because they know some quality content as come from there before. That makes it easier to jump from being read to being linked and quoted.
I think that positive approach is probably harder to build for “foreign language” bloggers. Not as many people visit regularly (or subscribe to their feed) because they sometimes dont write as well in english or include a lot of content in their native language and so arent as interesting to the “english only” masses. To take from a book I’ve just finished, The Tipping Point (yeah I know, that’s so 2 years ago), they arent as sticky as an equivalent english only blog and so might not get the attentive readers that might bring their ideas to the forefront.
Of course, like the article, that theory refers only to the Blogosphere, the one that encompasses all blogs and is composed of a majority of english speakers. “Foreign language” blogs are foreign and less sticky only to english speakers, some stories become important and largely linked to in thousands of smaller Blogospheres everyday. Writing in two or more languages is stickier for some, for example I like finding english/french blogs, I’m sure there are a lots of italian/english or portugese/english or japanese/english readers out there who feel the same.
Like all such stories, after appreciating and absorbing the ideas they contain, I always try to put them in perspective, to keep in mind that they reflect only a certain aspect of a much larger, more complex and varied whole.