Top foreign language blogs

Zia Daniell Wigder | May 17, 2007, 03:43 PM

Here at Jupiter, we spend a lot of time tracking how many people are reading blogs. While clearly blogs are widespread in the US and Europe, they’re far from an insolated phenomenon. Blogs have grown exponentially on a global basis, yet only a small percentage of the top 100 "most linked to" blogs aren’t in English. The blogging languages included in the top 100 list are Chinese, Italian, Farsi, Russian, Spanish, German and Japanese (highest is a Chinese language blog called Yanxi Internet Life at #17).

It’s pretty easy to get these blogs translated. All but one can be translated online easily - if roughly - using either Systran or Google (an interesting aside: Google’s Chinese, Russian and Japanese products are still in beta, so users are served the original text and prompted to suggest better translations when the cursor is placed over the translated text). The only language I had a hard time translating online was Farsi.

Part of it is sheer numbers – there are just 60 million native speakers of Farsi vs. around a billion Chinese, over 300 million Spanish, 170 million Russian and 125 million Japanese speakers (and some blogs like the #20 Italian language one already have an English version). However, if Iran remains prominent in the global arena, it would be great to make content from this part of the world more accessible.