Blogs, Politics and Power || Meet the Bridgebloggers

Meet the BridgebloggersAuthor(s): Ethan ZuckermanSource: Public Choice, Vol. 134, No. 1/2, Blogs, Politics and Power (Jan., 2008), pp. 47-65Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27698210 .

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Public Choice (2008) 134: 47-65

DOI 10.1007/slll27-007-9200-y

Meet the bridgebloggers

Ethan Zuckerman

Received: 2 June 2007 / Accepted: 9 June 2007 / Published online: 21 September 2007

? Springer Science+Business Media, BV 2007

Abstract As the blogosphere has expanded outside its original US context, it has changed from an extended community in which everyone shares a roughly similar set of supposi

tions and languages to a set of separate blogospheres characterized by different cultures

and languages. Bridgebloggers?bloggers who seek to mediate between these cultures and

languages?play an increasingly crucial role in connecting these disparate spheres of con

versation and argument together. In this paper, I discuss the difficulties of quantifying the

extent to which the blogosphere is characterized by different language communities and

national communities. I employ qualitative evidence to examine blogospheres emerging in

Asia, Southern Africa, the Arab-speaking world and elsewhere, and to assess the importance

of bridgebloggers in drawing connections between them.

Keywords Blogs Internet Africa India Middle East Iran

When Iraqi architect "Salam Pax" (http://dear_raed.blogspot.com) began blogging in late

2002, the term "weblog" and the practice of blogging were both five years old.1 Salam Pax

was not the first non-US or Middle Eastern blogger. He was, however, the first blogger from

the region to receive widespread attention from the US and European blogosphere and press.

In that sense, Salam Pax was one of the first major "bridgebloggers".

Salam Pax's accounts of life in Iraq provided an at times funny, at times heart

breaking perspective on the US-led invasion that was impossible to obtain through other

media. He went on to publish a book derived from his blog posts and became a print and

Dave Winer's Scripting News, begun in April 1997, is widely acknowledged as the first blog. J?rn Barger of Robot Wisdom is widely credited with coining the term "weblog" in December 1997.

E. Zuckerman (?E3) Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School, 23 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA e-mail: [email protected]

E. Zuckerman

e-mail: [email protected]

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48 Public Choice (2008) 134: 47-65

television journalist in Britain.2 Originally celebrated for providing perspectives outside the

journalistic mainstream, Salam Pax is now part of the mainstream media. As a bridgeblog

ger, he's not only introduced online readers to novel perspectives, but ensured that these

perspectives influence offline coverage too.

The term "bridgeblog" was coined by this author and Chinese weblogger Xiao Qiang in

October 2004 and popularized by Iranian blogger Hossein Derakshan in his characteriza

tions of Iranian weblogs as "bridges, windows and caf?s" (Zuckerman 2004; Pelta-Heller

2005). Bridgeblogs are weblogs that reach across gaps of language, culture and nationality

to enable interpersonal communication. They are distinguished from the vast majority of

blogs by their intended audience: while most blogs are targeted to friends, family or coun

trymen, bridgeblogs are intended to be read by an audience from a different nation, religion, or culture. A Tanzanian blogging in Kiswahili about local politics is not bridgeblogging; a Tanzanian blogging in English about Tanzanian politics, explaining the positions of the

politicians mentioned and the context of the issues debated, is bridgeblogging. Bridgeblogs don't need to bridge between another language and English?Jerzy Celicowski, a Polish cit

izen living in Hungary, uses his Polish language blog Jez Wegierski (jezwegierski.blox.pl) to bridge between Hungary and Poland.

The emergence of bridgeblogs hints at a wider phenomenon: the emergence of local blo

gospheres. In some communities, local bloggers write for both a local and global audience.

In others, the conversation is not intended for an outside audience. Some of these local

blogospheres are becoming large, well connected and politically important.

The appearance of bridgeblogging raises intriguing questions about blogging outside

North America and Western Europe. How many "international bloggers" are there? What

fraction of them are bridgebloggers? What audiences are they attempting to reach? How

effective are bridgebloggers in reaching North American and European audiences? To what

extent are bloggers in North America and Europe interested in news and perspectives from

the rest of the world?

This paper offers cursory answers to a few of these questions, focusing more on quali

tative than quantitative data. Extensive quantitative research is necessary to offer definitive

answers, which are in any case likely to change as the blogosphere itself changes. The paper

offers some future research directions and techniques for answering these questions quanti

tatively.

An inescapable conclusion of this early research is that bridgeblogging was a small

phenomenon at its point of emergence, and may be proportionally shrinking as the non

English blogosphere grows. While the bridgeblogger community is small, it may be an es

sential component in enabling conversations that include otherwise separate parts of the

blogosphere.

1 Quantifying the international blogosphere

Researchers have previously attempted to quantify the growth of the web by counting

unique, accessible web pages (Lawrence and Giles 1998; Murray 2000), but have inevitably had to rely in part on inference, given the complexities of the task. Furthermore, as content

on the web is increasingly automatically generated by assembling database elements into

web pages when the user requests them, it's become very difficult to measure it. Search

2He became a biweekly columnist for The Guardian and his films have been extensively featured in European film festivals.

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Public Choice (2008) 134: 47-65 49

engine companies have stopped publishing their feuding estimates of the catalog sizes of in

dexable web pages (Yahoo! 2005) reflecting the difficulty of maintaining an accurate count.

Similarly, attempts to directly count blogposts have given way to assertions of in

dex size from blog indexing sites like Technorati and Blogpulse. These services rely less

on "spiders"3 (as search engines traditionally have) and more on "ping servers".4 As of

May 2007, Technorati claims an index of 83.2 million blogs (http://technorati.com/about,

accessed 5/27/2007), while Blogpulse claims 47.6 million (http://blogpulse.com/, accessed

5/25/2007). These figures likely overestimate the number of "active" blogs. They also seek

to eliminate "Spam blogs," whose sole purpose is to link to each other and to other pages on

the Internet, driving up the search engine rank of the linked pages. As a result, estimates of

blogosphere size are a function of the number of blogs that send pings, minus blogs elim

inated by the proprietary anti-spam algorithms of the indexing companies, which makes it

very difficult for outside researchers to validate these counts.

Complicating the specific estimation challenge for weblogs is the fact that data on the national origins of bloggers is difficult to obtain. Most blogs are hosted on large servers

that host hundreds of thousands or millions of individual blogs, and there is no reason

why the users of the service need be in the same country as the host, rendering IP trac

ing/geotargetting useless as a means of determining geographic location.

The National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE) began a survey of blogs in May 2003, using a spidering method to identify 1.1 million active blogs, and the textcat (http://odur.let.rug.nl/~vannoord/TextCat/) text categorization system to classify the language of each blog. NITLE's tools determined that 62% were in English, followed, in decreasing order of popularity, by French, Portuguese, Farsi and Polish.5 NITLE's iden

tification of over 75,000 blogs in Farsi received widespread media attention (Alavi 2004); other NITLE statistics such as the apparent dearth of Russian, Chinese, Korean and Japanese

blogs caused some controversy (Languagehat 2003). It's quite possible that the NITLE sur

vey radically undercounted some languages by failing to spider large collections of URLs in those languages.

Recent data from Technorati's quarterly "State of the Live Web" paper (Sifry 2007) re

ports that there are more posts per hour in Japanese than in English and that Japanese

language posts represent 37% of indexed blogposts, as compared to 36% in English and 8% in Chinese. However, Technorati primarily indexes sites that send pings to public pingservers

when blogs are updated?many Chinese blogging hosts do not use pingservers, and are

3 Spiders are software programs that traverse the web, moving from hyperlink to hyperlink and counting or

indexing webpages encountered around the way.

4Ping servers like http://blo.gs or http://weblogs.com are servers that attempt to index posts made to weblogs. Rather than querying servers with spiders to find new pages, ping servers ask weblog authors to "ping" those servers with a short message each time a weblog post is added or modified. Most modern weblogging software is configured to send messages to one or more ping servers when a new post is made. While ping servers are essential tools for researchers who study blogs, the major ping servers have had major stability issues over the past year. 5 The researchers behind the NITLE project pulled their site from the web in early 2005, probably due to

controversy over the accuracy of their data. The 62% English figure and the ranking of secondary lan

guages are from my notes, based on a retrieval of the NITLE census in February 2004. The rankings are echoed on David Schlossberg's "Blogging By the Numbers", http://www.themeat.org/rant/blogging/ BloggingbythenumbersTheBigNumberPrint.html, accessed 9/14/2005. In December 2005, the engineers be hind NITLE appear to have restarted their spiders. Current results indicate a total of 1.9 million blogs indexed, 1.3 million of which are categorized as being in English. The second most popular language is Catalan, with

nearly 73,000 weblogs, followed by Spanish. The fact that Chinese ranks as the sixth most-frequent language identified suggests the current numbers still inaccurate.

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50 Public Choice (2008) 134: 47-65

39584 32.99%

11985 10.00%

10828 9.03%

7436 6.20%

5817 4.85%

likely underrepresented. Matthew Hurst's (2006) close analysis of data from a single day,

July 28 2005, suggests that Chinese blogs are quite active. He analyzes pings from blog

gers who use blogspot.com and MSN Spaces; the latter are especially interesting, as 82%

of bloggers using the MSN Spaces service provide information about their location in their

blog's "profile" page. Of the 119,954 blogs that provide location information, the top five

nations are represented in Table 1.

This doesn't mean that there are three times as many Chinese bloggers as Americans;

MSN was introduced late in the US, and is disproportionately popular with Chinese and Taiwanese audiences because it is accessible in China and has a Chinese-language inter

face.6 MSN reported 4.5 million user accounts at the end of March, 2005?if Hurst's ratios

hold true, that would suggest 1.5 million Chinese and 400,000 Taiwanese blogs on MSN

alone.7

A comprehensive language identification system for blogs would require combining ex

isting pingserver data with automated retrieval of new blogs from Chinese and other servers

that choose not to send ping data. A representative sample (the blogs updated in one minute

per hour, for instance) could be analyzed using a system like textcat to determine the lan

guage of origin. Unfortunately, it would also be necessary to filter out spam blogs; this would

be a huge technical challenge for any academic researcher.

Even if realistic estimates for the number of blogs in each language were available, we

would have deeply imperfect information about the national origins of bloggers; it would be

hard to determine, for example whether an English language blog was written by someone

in the US, the UK, Australia, or indeed by an Arabic speaker seeking to reach a wider au

dience. Language-based classification also fails to correctly categorize expatriate bloggers,

multilingual bloggers, and others.8

A combination of IP tracing and geolocation might work better; but only if weblog host

ing sites were willing to cooperate with research efforts by resolving the IP addresses users

utilize to post updates to a blog. However, it would be necessary for several major hosting

providers to participate, as there appear to be major self-selection biases that govern who

chooses to use which blogging platform.

6Hurst looks at reported location information on the Blogspot server, the major competitor to MSN Spaces. While far less information is available, as only 34% of users provide location information, China doesn't even

make the top 20 of countries represented on Blogspot, which makes sense as Blogspot is generally blocked

by the Chinese firewall.

7Using another extrapolation: 21.8% of the blogs represented in Hurst's ping set are MSN Spaces blogs. If

33% of those blogs are written by Chinese authors, 7.19% of active blogs should be Chinese-authored MSN

Spaces blogs. With Technorati estimating over 23 million blogs, that's 1.65 million Chinese blogs on MSN

alone.

8 Top 100 blogger loi Ito blogs in both English and Japanese. Leading European blogger Lo?c Le Meur blogs in French and English.

Table 1 Results from Matthew ; Hurst's "24 Hours in the Cnma

Blogosphere" USA

Taiwan

Japan

Brazil

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Public Choice (2008) 134: 47-65 51

2 Journalists, bloggers and diarists

Blogs may differ dramatically from each other in terms of authorship, audience and partic

ipation in the linking culture of the blogosphere. A small subset of top blogs have multiple

authors, generate substantial revenue for their authors, and have online readerships that rival

mainstream media sources. Technorati's David Sifry (2005) shows that top blog BoingBo

ing is linked by bloggers more often than powerful media properties like USA Today. These

top blogs work to different rules than most other blogs: the authors resist being contacted di

rectly by other bloggers; they expect stories on their blogs to be picked up by the mainstream

media; they sometimes disable comments.

At the other end of the spectrum from these journalists and entrepreneurs are diarists.

Some diarists explicitly don't want to be linked to?a quarter of Live Journal posts are

"friends-locked" so that they can be viewed only by individuals the user lists as a friend.9

A smaller subset are "private"?they are viewable only by their authors.

An exploration of a set of 9.8 million Japanese blog pages by NTT researchers Fuhimura

and Sugisaki (2005) turned up the remarkable statistic that only 1.15% of blog entries were

linked to from other blog entries. Only 16.3% of blog posts linked to any URLs, and only 1.25% linked to another blog.10 These unlinked blogs are less like journalism and more like

diaries or letters?they're intended to be read by the author alone, or by a small set of friends.

Rather than documenting links and stories found online, they document daily life. ' ' While some of these diaries might provide insight into a different culture, offering that insight isn't

the author's intent.

Between the journalists and the diarists are bloggers. Links are perhaps the most use

ful metric for measuring the influence of international blogs and the interconnection of

local and global blogospheres. Bloggers link to other blogs to announce their interest in

a topic and contribute to the conversation. A blog linked to by Kenyan bloggers is likely discussing topics germane to the Kenyan blogosphere; a Kenyan blog linked to by non

Kenyan blogs is likely talking about topics interesting to non-Kenyans, even if that topic is

Kenyan politics. If this holds true, looking for highly linked blogs should be one method for identifying key players in local blogospheres (highly linked by bloggers from the same

country/language/region) and key bridgeblogs (highly linked by bloggers inside and out side the same country/language/region). Some hub figures might also be bridge figures. In

other cases, a hub figure might be a focal point for a local-language blog community and

another (bilingual) blogger might serve as a bridge between that hub figure and the larger blogosphere.

Language and linking patterns give us two qualitative criteria to help identify bridge blogs. If a blog is regularly and extensively linked to by webloggers from two or more

nations, especially nations that don't share a border or common language, it's very likely a bridgeblog. If a blog is written in a language other than the dominant language of the

author's country, it is also likely to be a bridgeblog. (We can imagine exceptions to this

9Sullivan, "Kids, Blogs and Too Much Information", 4/29/2005. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7668788/

page/2/, accessed 9/14/2005.

It's quite possible that linking behavior in the Japanese blogosphere, which is widely considered less polit ical and more personal than the US blogosphere, may be very different than linking behavior in the US.

Japanese philosopher and cultural commentator Hiroki Azuma believes these blogs are a form of primate

"grooming behavior"?these blogs are important not because of their content, but because the process of com

menting on these blogs reinforces the social ties between the members of a community. From a conversation

with Mr. Azuma, December 2, 2005.

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52 Public Choice (2008) 134: 47-65

rule?a blog that includes technical information useful to webloggers in many nations might

be internationally linked, but not serve to bridge between cultures.)

3 Big in Japan

Weblog search engine Technorati maintains a rankings page (http://technorati.com/pop/

blogs/) which lists the top 100 weblogs, as determined by total incoming links.12 Exam

ining the Technorati Top 100 list from mid-September 2005, 15 of the weblogs listed were

identifiably from authors outside of the United States.

Analyzing links to these blogs generated over a three day period in September 2005,13 three patterns emerge. Several blogs were most likely widely linked because they pro

vide services that are useful to other bloggers. Beccary (beccary.com) and BrokenKode

(www.brokenkode.com) were heavily linked because links to their blogs appear on popular

weblog templates. Other bloggers such as PrincessCeciCastle (spaces.msn.com/members/

princesscecicastle/) and HackMSN (spaces.msn.com/members/d3vmax/) provide icons or

customization information that bloggers from other countries find helpful. Seven of the 15 blogs in the set were only linked by blogs written in the same language;

Interney.net, a Portuguese blog was linked to by 16 Portuguese blogs and one in Bahasa In

donesia.14 These blogs are likely central figures in local, language-constrained blog commu

nities. It's likely that many German bloggers read Wahlblog.de, while many Italian bloggers read bepegrillo.it.

Four blogs in the set: Beppe Grillo (beppegrillo.it), Baghdad Burning (riverbend

blog.blogspot.com), Joi Ito (joi.ito.com) and Xiaxue (xiaxue.blogspot.com) can be char

acterized as bridgeblogs. While Beppe Grillo is widely linked to by Italian bloggers, it also

appears in English and provides insight into Italian politics for non-Italian speakers. Written

by an Iraqi woman in English about Iraqi current events, Baghdad Burning had recent links

in English and French?bloggers writing in English identified themselves as coming from the US, India, Palestine and sub-Saharan Africa. Joi Ito is a bilingual, bicultural Japanese

entrepreneur?links to his blog included two from Japanese language blogs, one from a

Spanish language blog, and eight from English-language blogs. In one case, a Japanese blog

translated Joi's English words into Japanese.

Xiaxue (Wendy Cheng) is a young Singaporean woman, known for posting glamorous

photos of herself on her blog?accompanying texts are in English. Blogs linking to her page

have been in English and Chinese; several identify themselves as blogging from Singapore or Malaysia. While the appeal of her blog doesn't appear to extend beyond Southeast Asia,

within the region, it evidently crosses cultural and language barriers.

It's worth noting that the apparent bridgeblogs were written in English. As bilingual blog

ger Lo?c Le Meur (2005), puts it, "English is the TCP/IP of language" in the blogosphere. It's possible that Chinese will emerge as a linguistic rival for bridgeblogs in East Asia as

bloggers in China, Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia communicate across borders.

l2Until September 2005, Technorati counted all links over a blog's lifetime; now it only counts links created

in the last six months.

13Technorati lists from 10 to 20 incoming links, generated in the past 3 days, on the first page of results for a

blog's "link cosmos". My cursory analysis is based on the first page of cosmos results, which varied from 11

to 20 links.

14The link comes from a blog related to Indonesia Blogshares, an online contest that mimics a stock market,

using blog link rankings instead of share prices. In this context, the linguistic disparity is less surprising as

Interney is historically one of the most popular blogs on the web.

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Public Choice (2008) 134: 47-65 53

Looking at the same Technorati Top 100 page in December 12 of the same year, the results are significantly different. This difference is partly because Technorati changed its

ranking algorithm, making room for a number of newer, more recently popular blogs, many

of them from outside the English-language blogosphere. Only four of September's inter national entrants still ranked in the top 100 in December, but they were joined by 20 new international blogs in the top 100.

Five of the top blogs were written in Japanese; two by Japanese celebrities. Twelve of

the 24 leading non-English/non-US blogs were written in Chinese; at least nine of which

focused on ways to customize MSN Spaces. The linking patterns to these customization

sites suggests interlinking between Chinese speakers around the world, primarily from other

MSN Spaces users. Similarly, Herramientas para Blogs (in English, Tools for Blogs, http:

//spaces.msn.com/members/mmadrigal/) which offers tips in Spanish for customization of

MSN spaces, ranked 22nd on Technorati's list.

Two of the three other new blogs were European blogs aimed at European audiences?

a German-language blog about German media, and a Spanish-language site about the Euro

pean technology industry. The third, Kennysia.com, is a Malaysian bridgeblog in the spirit of Xiaxue,15 linked to extensively by other Malaysians, but also by Singaporean, American, and Australian bloggers.

The disappearance of Joi Ito and Baghdad Burning from the top 100 prompts two

hypotheses?that these blogs were ranked highly primarily because of their longevity and that they've experienced fewer links in recent months or that the emergence of strong local

blogospheres in other languages (Chinese, Japanese, Spanish and German) is creating more

competition for the top spots.

4 Big fish, small pond

While writing in English is apparently helpful in creating a well-read bridgeblog, it's not a sufficient condition for success. BlogStreet India provides data on the hundred blogs most

frequently listed on the "blogrolls"?static collections of links to other weblogs a user reads

regularly, wishes to promote, or wishes to display a social connection?of Indian blogs. Most of these blogs are Indian or

highly India focused; while some are highly influential within the Indian blogosphere, none registered in the top blog lists on Technorati or Blog pulse: The blog with the largest number of incoming links as tracked by both Technorati and Blogpulse was IndiaUncut (indiauncut.blogspot.com), which serves as one of the major hubs of the Indian blogosphere, but only ranked #1062 on Technorati.16

The blog with the lowest (i.e., most prominent) Blogpulse rank, "Vantage Point"

(gauravsabnis.blogspot.com), is an interesting case study in controversy and linking be havior. In July 2005, Indian youth magazine JAM published an expos? of the Indian Insti tute of Planning and Management, a graduate school that advertised widely in mainstream Indian newspapers. The article accused IIPM of misrepresenting its facilities, accreditation and job placement records. Indian blogger Gaurav Sabnis linked to the JAM article and

added the accusation than IIPM founder failed his graduation exams on his first attempt (Sabnis 2005a).

15Though Sia would protest that he's a more "serious" blogger than Xiaxue and prefer a comparison to

Singaporean blogger Mr. Brown (http://www.mrbrown.com).

16IndiaUncut ranks #649 on Blogpulse, which tracks links over a shorter period of time than Technorati, and suggests that IndiaUncut's Technorati ranking is likely to rise.

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54 Public Choice (2008) 134: 47-65

IIPM objected to the article and threatened Sabnis and several other Indian bloggers

who'd linked to the piece with libel suits. (They also are alleged to have conducted a cam

paign to smear Indian bloggers with insulting comments and rival weblogs.) They contacted

Sabis's employer?Lenovo?and threatened to hold a public burning of all IBM/Lenovo

laptops used by IIPM unless Sabnis removed his post (Sabnis 2005b; Glaser 2005). Out of concern for his employer, Sabnis resigned, and became something of a folk hero to the In

dian blogosphere. Rashmi Bansal?the editor of JAM magazine?also saw her blog Youth

Curry (youthcurry.blogspot.com) benefit from the IIPM attention?it ranked third in this set of Indian blogs in terms of incoming Technorati links (see further Zuckerman 2005a;

Viswanathan 2005).

While many of the top Indian blogs could be considered as bridgeblogs, the modest

ranking of India's best-known blogs on a global scale suggests at least two possible expla nations: that India's blogosphere is so small in comparison to US, Chinese and Japanese

blogospheres that top Indian bloggers are crowded out of global rankings (Mookerji (2005) asserts that there are 100,000 "India-centric" blogs, but it's unclear where this figure origi nates or if it is accurate); or that blogs focused on Indian politics are, generally speaking, less

interesting to a global readership than blogs about technology, entertainment or US politics.

5 A whirlwind world tour of local blogospheres

Understanding the impact of blogs in other nations requires looking closely at blogger com

munities and government and media reaction to those communities. A whistle-stop tour of

selected national blogospheres points to the importance of local context in understanding

blogging behavior, but also hints at themes that cut across national communities.

6 Iran

The early and rapid rise of weblogging in Iran has led to an awareness of the Iranian

blogging community in the wider world. In September 2001, Salman Jariri established the first Persian language blog; in November of 2001, Hossein Derakshan published weblog ging instructions in Persian on the blogger.com site (Retrieved September 15, 2005 from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_blogs). Less than a year later, PersianBlog began offer

ing a blogging platform fully localized into Farsi, with free user accounts. Blogging in Iran

rapidly became political, controversial and, sometimes, dangerous for the blogger. Reporters

Sans Fronti?res speculates that journalists turned to the web as the government ordered the

closure of more than 100 newspapers. Iranian journalist and blogger Sina Motallebi was

arrested in April 2002 and held for 23 days, apparently in connection with an entry on his

blog defending a fellow reporter from reformist newspaper Hayat-?-No who had been ar

rested some months earlier. Dozens of Iranian bloggers have been detained for short times.

Others have been imprisoned for extended stretches, like blogger Mojtaba Saminejad, who

was sentenced to two years like blogger Mojtaba Saminejad, who was sentenced to two

years in prison for "insulting the Supreme Guide" after being found innocent of "Insulting

the Prophets" (Reporters Sans Fronti?res 2005). While Iranian authorities have taken steps to prosecute journalists using blogs as plat

forms for government criticism, some political figures, including then-Vice President Mo

hammed Ali Abtahi, have used them to communicate with younger constituents, and, per

haps surprisingly, to support reformist bloggers and journalists. Iranian bridgebloggers have

found it difficult to open these conversations to the wider blogosphere, although continued

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Public Choice (2008) 134: 47-65

interest in sites such as Hossein Derakshan's English language weblog suggests an ongoing

interest in the Persian blogosphere in English speaking countries (discussions with Hossein

Derakshan 2004-present). The election of conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has caused

Iranian bloggers to realize that opinions expressed in blogs may not be reflective of opin ions in the wider populace. A June 2005 BBC article on Iranian weblogs and the upcoming

election didn't mention Ahmadinejad by name, focusing on debates over whether or not

to boycott the election, and blogger support for liberal candidate Mostafa Moin over fron

trunner Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (Jami 2005). Some Iranian bloggers would argue that Ahmadinejad's election was not representative of the popular will. Moin, the candidate

most strongly supported by Iranian bloggers, accused the Guardian Council of carrying out a

campaign to sway the election in Ahmadinejad's favor (BBC News 2005), and some Iranian

bloggers believe at least the first round of the election was rigged.

7 East Africa

Kenya has emerged as the unlikely capital of weblogging in sub-Saharan Africa. Prominent

Kenyan weblogs, like Mental Acrobatics (mentalacrobatics.com) have been online since

at least March 2003. A community of Kenyan bloggers?KenyaUnlimited?maintains we

brings and an annual blogging award called The Kaybees. The Kenyan blogosphere has been

characterized by a strong sense of community identity. Many Kenyan bloggers maintain ex

tensive blogrolls, pointing to dozens of other Kenyan blogs. KenyaUnlimited (n.d.) provides some background materials about weblogs and ways to get started with blogging, in both

English and Swahili. While most American bloggers may be unaware of the Kenyan weblogging scene,

Kenyan newspapers are clearly paying attention. The Thinker (2005a), a Kenyan IT pro fessional who blogs at "Thinker's Room", posted a satirical help wanted ad on his blog,

recruiting new ministers for the Kenyan cabinet on February 15, 2005. On February 25,

2005, Clay Muganda (Muganda 2005), a popular columnist for Nairobi's "The Nation",

reproduced the entirety of Thinker's post in his weekly political column, lamely noting that the original version of the piece was available "on the internet". Kenyan bloggers and

blog readers responded angrily, emailing and calling The Nation, and eventually received a

printed apology in the paper, which agreed that Muganda's actions constituted plagiarism (The Thinker 2005b).

The Kenyan blogosphere cemented its reputation for good humored political punditry with extensive coverage of the November 2005 referendum on amending the Constitution.

Kenyan bloggers had having a field day with the Electoral Commission's choice of symbols for the referendum, an orange signifying "no" and a banana signifying "yes". Ory Okol

loh (2005), a young Kenyan lawyer who blogs as "Kenyan Pundit", wryly observed that

oranges had already sold out in a local market. A roundup of Kenyan blogs shortly before

the vote featured commentary from a dozen Kenyan blogs, including one written in Gikuyu

(Matenwa 2005). Thus far, there are no known cases of Kenyans being arrested for online publishing activ

ities. One reason blogs may be unthreatening to Kenyan authorities is that the vast majority of Kenyan blogs are written in English, the language of upper-class, wealthier Kenyans rather than Kiswahili. Kenyan bloggers may be more effective in bringing their perspective into international debates by participating in the English language blogosphere?they were

prominently featured in debates over the utility of the Live8 concert series (Conor 2005; The Thinker 2005c; Zuckerman 2005b).

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56 Public Choice (2008) 134: 47-65

The emerging blogosphere in Tanzania stands in sharp linguistic contrast to its north

ern neighbor. Of the blogs listed on a wiki page dedicated to documenting the Tan

zanian blogosphere (Retrieved September 15, 2005 from http://cyber.law.harvard.edu:8080/

globalvoices/wiki/index.php/Tanzania#Bilingual_Blogs), 19 blogs are written in Kiswahili, five in English, and four are listed as "bilingual", though they contain largely Kiswahili

content; speaking Kiswahili is seen by many Tanzanians as a source of national pride. The Tanzanian blogosphere can largely be traced back to the efforts of Ndesanjo Macha,

a Tanzanian journalist, activist and blogger who appears to have a personal relationship with

many Tanzanian bloggers. Macha currently resides in the US, where he teaches Swahili?his

fondness for the language may have set the linguistic tone for the national blog community.

Macha has started blogging in English, as well as publishing summaries of conversations

taking place in the Swahili blogosphere (Macha 2005a), hoping to open the closed conver

sations to a wider audience. Macha also bridges in the other direction, opening English

language conversations to Swahili speakers. Invited to attend Pop?Tech, a technology and

futurism conference held in rural Maine in October 2005, Macha (2005b) responded by blogging over two dozen presentations in Swahili, translating complex political and techni

cal terminology in the process.

8 The Arabic blogosphere

While some Iraqi blogs are well known, less attention is generally paid to thriving blog communities in Jordan, Bahrain, Egypt, Tunisia and other Middle Eastern nations. As in

Kenya, the Jordanian, Bahraini, Egyptian and Tunisian communities maintain national blog

aggregators and create a sense of blogosphere identity through cross linking. There's a strong

emphasis in these communities on face to face interaction?in all three countries, there

are monthly gatherings of webloggers to discuss collaboration and common issues. There's

also a strong interest in creating an Arab blogosphere, linking across national borders and,

especially, in celebrating bloggers from Palestine.

Despite a strong regional identity, many bloggers from the Middle East write in Eng lish. The vast majority of the three dozen bloggers aggregated on Jordan Planet (jordan

planet.net) blog in English. Prominent Tunisian blogger Subzero Blue (subzeroblue.com)

blogs in English and Arabic, but his English blog is updated more frequently. 29 of 32 blogs listed on BahrainBlogs.com are titled in English. Projects like Haitham Sabbah's NoToTer

rorism.com, a collection of images from the Middle East with an anti-terrorism message,

and blogs like the Bahraini Mahmoud's Den attempt to challenge perceptions of Arabs and

Muslims as terrorists. While some prominent Egyptian bloggers write in English, others

bloggers, like Kefaya activist Alaa Abdel Fateh (http://www.manalaa.net/), focus on a do

mestic audience. Alaa tends to write in Arabic when organizing local events, and in English

when reporting on Kefayah actions. Bloggers affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood move

ment, like that of imprisoned blogger Abdel Monem Mohammed, tend to write exclusively

in Arabic, covering political and activists topics more germane to a domestic than interna

tional audience.

A number of bloggers in the region have attracted unwanted attention from legal author

ities. Tunisian journalist Zouhair Yahyaoui served over 14 months in prison in conjunction

with his satirical website TUNeZINE (Reporters Sans Fronti?res 2004). Bahraini bloggers have reacted with hostility towards a plan by the Ministry of Information to register web

sites, allegedly to protect intellectual property created by authors (Al-Yousif 2005).

Given the attention paid to the Middle East by global media, it's unsurprising that there is

an audience in the US blogosphere for English-language commentary, especially from Iraq.

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Public Choice (2008) 134: 47-65 57

Popular Iraqi blogs like Baghdad Burning (riverbendblog.blogspot.com) and Iraq the Model

(iraqthemodel.blogspot.com) are well known within the United States, where left-wing po

litical bloggers link to Baghdad Burning and right-wing bloggers to Iraq the Model, but it is

unclear to what extent their readership extends beyond the US and whether they are read by

other Iraqis. By contrast, the Jordanian, Tunisian, Egyptian and Bahraini blogospheres cross

link extensively, maintain national blog aggregators and have frequent face to face meet

ings between bloggers. The sophistication of these blogospheres becomes apparent only when an event like the Amman bombings prompts bloggers to organize. Jordanian bloggers set up a "virtual newsroom" on Jordan Planet (jordanplanet.net) and Global Voices (glob

al voicesonline.org), covering the aftermath of the bombings and the resulting anti-Zarqawi

marches in Amman, using first person accounts, digital photographs and Screenshots of tele

vision broadcasts from around the Arab world?the effort involved Jordanian bloggers in

the US and Bahrain as well as in Jordan (see Al-Assi 2005 and http://www.jordanplanet.net/ archive/2005/11/12 and http://www.jordanplanet.net/archive/2005/ll/12, retrieved May 27, 2007).

A roundup of Muslim reactions to the London bombings (universally condemning the at

tacks) on Global Voices led to a different kind of interaction when it was linked to by promi nent US conservative blogger Glenn Reynolds (http://instapundit.com/archives/024124.php) at 10:21am on 7/8/2005 (it was later linked by Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine). 24 minutes later, the first of several dozen comments critical of Islam and the Arab response to the bombing

were posted to the thread. They included comments such as Bradley M. Cooke's "There is

a sickness in the muslim culture that worships death, hates Jews, fears modernism and plu ralism. They cut off heads, they dance in the streets at the massacre of thousands on 9/11,

they blame their societal woes on bogus Zionist conspiracies, and enshroud their women in

garments that are literally and figuratively oppressive. There is nothing good about muslim

culture today. Nothing" (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/globalvoices/?p=310#comment-1418, retrieved on May 27, 2007).

By the next morning, Muslim bloggers from the Middle East were responding in the thread. Mohamed of "From Cairo, With Love" (fromcairo.com) began his comment, "To all

the commenters here. Just in case you are wondering, no, we are not going to renounce our

religion?Islam?just because some of the ignorant comments made here about the faith, or because of some criminal terrorists who think they are Muslims who went off to kill

innocent people in a heinous manner" (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/globalvoices/?p=310#

comment-1481 retrieved on May 27, 2007).

Subsequent conversations on this thread and on other threads posted by Muslim authors

on Global Voices turned into angry exchanges on the nature of the Koran, whether Islam

was inherently violent, and whether US imperialism or European colonialism was ultimately

responsible for violence in the Middle East. It would be unrealistic to suggest that more light than heat was generated during these exchanges, but the online interaction did allow two

groups with radically different opinions to confront each other's preconceptions directly, as in a debate on violence in the Koran between Rufus Lee King and Zaid Hassan.17 In

this sense, the interaction met some of the stated goals of some Middle Eastern bloggers,

allowing them direct dialog with people who clearly had a negative and hostile view of

Arabs and Muslims.

17King's background is unknown, but his comments suggest he is a US-based conservative. Zaid Hassan is a Pakistani Muslim, living in the US and the UK. The textual debate begins with a series of Koranic "quotations" from King (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/globalvoices/2005/07/10/ is-it-a-muslim-problem/#comment-1661), most of which Hassan points out aren't actually from the Koran.

(http://cyber.law.harvard.edU/globalvoices/2005/07/10/is-it-a-muslim-problem/#comment-1682).

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58 Public Choice (2008) 134: 47-65

9 Understanding community blogospheres

The diversity of local blogospheres makes it unwise to make generalizations across different

communities, even the four communities featured here. There are, however, a number of

themes, some contradictory, that arise from an exploration of these communities.

9.1 Blogs can be a printing press

In environments such as China and Iran where journalism is controlled, blogs become an

alternative platform for journalistic endeavor. Even in nations where free speech is less obvi

ously threatened, blogs may become an alternative news venue. In South Korea, where news

papers are historically ideologically conservative, reformists rallied around OhMyNews, an

online "citizen journalism" website that supported Roh Moo Hyun to election, and through his subsequent impeachment (Committee to Protect Journalists 2004). There's no guarantee,

though, that a local blogosphere will become journalistic or political. Despite widespread net

penetration and a generally tame domestic press, political blogging has yet to become a ma

jor force in Japan. And in the US, despite numerous other outlets for political opinion, the

political blogosphere has become highly polarized.

9.2 Local blogospheres can be a closed community

The emergence of large blog communities in Iran, China or Egypt doesn't guarantee that

these communities will widely interconnect with the Anglophone blog community. In many

cases, discussions concern local topics, and are held in local languages. This can occur in

small language communities as well as large ones. More than half of all active Icelandic

blogs surveyed in a study ofblogspot.com are in Icelandic, a language spoken by fewer than

300,000 people worldwide (http://www.blogger.com/profile-find.g?t=l\&locO=IS, retrieved

on September 15, 2005). Given that many Icelanders are also fluent in Danish or English,

the choice of language appears to be a conscious decision to keep discussions closed to the

linguistic community.

9.3 Local blogospheres can have international aspirations

Bloggers in Jordan and Bahrain are self-consciously blogging for an international audience.

Bloggers in Tanzania are changing their behavior to reach a wider audience. Kenyan blog

gers may not acknowledge targeting an international audience, but their choice of language

suggests a desire to reach across national borders. Some bloggers are becoming aware that

blogs influence on search engines means that the domestic blogosphere has some power over

a nation's image online.18

18Iranian bloggers' success in "googlebombing" the search terms "Arabian Gulf" and linking searches to

a page that declares "The Gulf that you are looking for does not Exist. Try Persian Gulf" is a partic

ularly funny example of blogger's power over national image. See http://arabian-gulf.info/, http://www.

google.com/searcfi?q=arabian+gulf, and the Wikipedia entry on Googlebombing (http://en.wikipedia.org/

wiki/Googlebomb) for more information.

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Public Choice (2008) 134: 47-65 59

9.4 Blogs can be spaces for conversations that can't take place anywhere else

Hossein Derakshan suggests that blogs became popular so rapidly in Iran because they al

lowed women to speak anonymously, and because they allowed an older generation to un

derstand what the younger generation was thinking and talking about. There are social re

strictions on conversations between genders and age groups in Iran, and blogs create a new

space where these conversations can take place.

It's unlikely that the conversations referenced above about Live8 and the London bomb

ings would?or could?have taken place in the physical world. By creating an online space

where speakers are unconstrained by their ability to gather physically (though still con

strained by language and their ability to access the Internet), blogs allowed entirely new

discussions to take place.

10 They're speaking. Who's listening?

Global Voices (globalvoicesonline.org), a website run by Rebecca MacKinnon and this au

thor to aggregate bridgeblogs, has as its motto: "The world is talking. Are you listening?" While this question may not be relevant for all international bloggers, it's profoundly im

portant for bloggers who explicitly seek to reach an international audience and challenge dominant perceptions of their nation or culture. Johan Gaining and Mari Ruge's (1965) pio

neering work on news gathering suggests that developing nations will be disproportionately undercovered by mainstream news sources. It comes as little surprise that current quantita

tive studies of coverage of the developing world in mainstream media reveal many of the

problems Gaining and Ruge anticipated. My research on media attention (Zuckerman 2003),

analyzing stories that mention the names of nations, suggests that coverage of international

news in newspapers and on television, is strongly correlated to national wealth, as measured

by gross national income (GNI), and much less strongly correlated to factors like population. At first glance, patterns of media attention in weblogs appear to closely echo patterns

seen in mainstream media.

Fig. 1 Visualization of news stories available through Google News, May 5, 2005. Nations depicted in red

had the most stories available; nations depicted in dark blue had the fewest.19 (Colour figure online)

19Current maps of media attention and detailed information on methodology are available at http://h2odev. law.harvard.edu/ezuckerman.

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60 Public Choice (2008) 134: 47-65

Fig. 2 Visualization of blog posts stories indexed by Blogpulse over the 90 days preceding May 5, 2005.

Coloring as above. (Colour figure online)

Fig. 3 Comparison of Blogpulse 14 day sets with Google News 14-30 day sets. Nations in blue had propor

tionally more hits on Google. Nations in red had proportionally more hits on Blogpulse. Generated from data

retrieved May 5, 2005. (Colour figure online)

Blogposts appear to concentrate on countries well covered in mainstream media?China,

Iraq, the USA, France?and ignore the same regions neglected by the media?Central Asia,

Sub-Saharan Africa and Central America.

Bloggers, as a whole, appear worse at covering developing nations than mainstream

news, suggesting that bloggers in developing nations may find it hard to win recognition from their fellows in the North. It's hard to pin this down statistically as a comparison between Blogpulse blogs and Google News data is not entirely fair: many of the blogs tracked by Blogpulse are diaries, which we would not expect to regularly reflect on interna

tional news. Comparisons of top blogs on Technorati or Blogpulse, rather than the whole set

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Public Choice (2008) 134: 47-65 61

of blogs, might reveal different results. Early research on Daypop, a now-defunct catalog of

40,000 top blogs, suggested more focus on developing nations in top blogs than in the larger

blogset tracked by Blogpulse and Technorati.

There is also evidence that bloggers will cover stories pertinent to the developing world if

they are adequately primed by mainstream media coverage of the event. Research commis

sioned by AlertNet, a nonprofit arm of Reuters, indicated that coverage of the Indian Ocean

Tsunami dwarfed coverage of ten other pressing humanitarian stories (Jones 2005)?the ten

"forgotten" stories put together received only 78% of the coverage the tsunami received.

A rough parallel study, using data from Blogpulse and keywords designed to approximate

the AlertNet searches,20 revealed that coverage of the tsunami in the blogosphere dwarfed

coverage of the ten "forgotten" stories to an even greater degree than in mainstream media?

bloggers wrote 39% as many stories about the forgotten stories as about the tsunami.21

It's possible that the larger gap between tsunami and "forgotten" stories in the blog data

is less because of bloggers' lack of interest in humanitarian crises than because of their

extraordinary interest in the Indian Ocean Tsunami. Searches on the New York Times for

"tsunami" and "Iraq" revealed 11 times as many Iraq stories as tsunami stories over a year

long interval. Similar searches on Blogpulse revealed a 2 : 1 ratio between Iraq and tsunami

stories. In other words, bloggers took a disproportionate interest in the tsunami, covering it

with an intensity that rivaled their interest in the ongoing US invasion of Iraq. This might seem to suggest that bloggers seeking attention for their national issues need

to increase their national wealth or suffer a massive national disaster. Close analysis of what

headlines bloggers choose to amplify suggests a less radical path for gaining attention: blog about topics bloggers follow.

By collecting the headlines and URLs of stories published by media outlets from RSS feeds and checking in subsequent days to see whether links to these stories appear on Blog

pulse, it is possible to determine what types of stories are widely amplified by weblogs and

which are largely ignored.22

Technology stories published by the BBC had a 96% chance of being linked to by one or more blogs within 4 days of publication?the average technology story was linked to by 6.1 blogposts within 4 days. Heath and Science/Nature stories are also well blogged. Front

page stories, unsurprisingly, are popular?they're both the stories editors thought were most

important, and the stories that are most promoted. On the regional level, stories about the Middle East are the most blogged, and stories

about South Asia and Africa the least. Stories about the UK also fared poorly. The latter

result is consistent across other news sources?local news and sports stories are the least

blogged stories from the New York Times. A possible explanation: both the BBC and the New York Times have international readerships?local news is likely to be interesting pri

marily to people living in the coverage area, while other stories have a global audience.

20I have not been able to obtain methodology information from Reuters, which has made it impossible to

replicate their results exactly. 21 Detailed methodology and results are available on my weblog, in a post titled

" 'Simple statistics' and the

blogging of humanitarian disasters", 5/5/2005. http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/?p=60.

22My research on amplification of headlines was presented at the 14th WWW conference in Chiba, Japan in May 2005. Data collection is ongoing and final publication of results are pending. Information about the

headliner project is available at http://h2odev.law.harvad.edu/ezuckerman/headliners. Data in the table below was calculated from July 1-7, 2005, using BBC RSS feeds and link data from Technorati, and from December

4-10, 2005 using BBC RSS feeds and link data from Blogpulse. Synthesis of the data was a simple summing of sets?no attempt to normalize the two sets was made.

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62 Public Choice (2008) 134: 47-65

Table 2 Data from July 1-7, 2005 and December 4-10, 2005. Links analysis of four-day old BBC stories, checked in July on Technorati, in December on Blogpulse

# of stories Mean links Links to

toplinked story

# unlinked % unlinked

July

FrontPage 177 6.72 100

Science/Nature 13 5.69 24

Technology 17 5.47 22

Entertainment 31 3.10 26

Health 26 2.73 11

Americas 49 2.49 15

Middle East 23 2.13 10

UK News/Magazine 4 2.00 7

Europe 72 1.76 15

Asia/Pacific 29 1.66 8

UK News 162 1.37 22

Business 14 1.36 4

South Asia 58 1.17 19

Africa 54 1.09 16

Mean 52.07 2.77 21.36

December

UK News/Magazine 3 18.00 53

Science/Nature 13 13.89 66

Technology 10 7.22 21

FrontPage 182 7.01 146

Health 15 6.07 18

Middle East 37 3.95 31

Americas 46 3.61 34

Business 19 2.58 17

UK News 153 2.32 29

Europe 63 2.10 29

Africa 57 1.97 40

Asia/Pacific 53 1.85 12

Entertainment 43 1.51 12

South Asia 61 1.48 20

Mean 53.93 5.25 37.71

27

1

1

10

10

18

7

2

32

8

86

4

35

34

19.64

1

1

0

30

1

9

18

12

57

27

29

26

22

28

18.64

15.25%

7.69%

5.88%

32.26%

38.46%

36.73%

30.43%

50.00%

44.44%

27.59%

53.09%

28.57%

60.34%

62.96%

35.27%

33.33%

7.69%

0.00%

16.48%

6.67%

24.32%

39.13%

63.16%

37.25%

42.86%

50.88%

49.06%

51.16%

45.90%

33.42%

Looking closely at links to specific headlines, another pattern becomes apparent?stories

that involve a US troop presence, or focus on terrorism are well blogged regardless of what

region they are classified under.

Bloggers' interest in science and technology suggests that bridgebloggers who focus on

these topics?like Joi Ito?may find it easier to draw audiences. Other bridgebloggers are

likely to generate an audience by virtue of blogging from a location of high interest to blog readers, like Baghdad Burning or Iraq the Model.

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Public Choice (2008) 134: 47-65 63

Table 3 Synthesis of data from July 1-7, 2005 and December 4-10, 2005. Link analysis of 4-day old BBC

stories, checked in July on Technorati, in December on Blogpulse

Stories Links Unlinked Mean links % unlinked

Technology

Science/Nature

Front Page

Middle East

Health

Americas

Asia/Pacific

Entertainment

Europe

UK News

Business

South Asia

Africa

Totals

Means

27

26

359

60

41

95

82

74

135

315

33

119

111

1477

165

255

2466

195

162

288

146

161

259

377

68

158

171

4871

1

2

57

16

11

36

34

32

59

143

16

63

63

533

6.11

9.81

6.87

3.25

3.95

3.03

1.78

2.18

1.92

1.2

2.06

1.33

1.54

3.3

3.70%

7.69%

15.88%

26.67%

26.83%

37.89%

41.46%

43.24%

43.70%

45.40%

48.48%

52.94%

56.76%

36.09%

11 Further directions and open questions

Quantitative analysis of weblogs is a relatively new field and research techniques are still be

ing refined. Analysis of international weblogs is in an even earlier state. Any research on the

dynamics of international blogs is complicated by lack of believable data on the size of bl

ogospheres in different languages and countries. A comprehensive, regularly updated study of the size and demographics of the international blogosphere would be a critical baseline

for future studies in this area. Such a study would likely require cooperation from blog

ging service providers, blogging analysis companies and multilingual expertise, especially in Asian languages.

As researchers gain expertise in partitioning the set of "bloggers" into subsets by lan

guage, nationality, gender and type (diarists/bloggers/journalists), it will become possible to answer questions that compare blogger behavior. Do bloggers in Japan and the US link

the same way, or is the US blogosphere link-heavy? Do male and female bloggers, as danah

boyd suggests, use links differently? Do bloggers write more about the developing world than diarists? Which blogospheres connect to other cultures and which remain isolated?

With data on the national origin of blogs (or at least language data), one could determine

whether bridgeblogging is a mainstream or fringe activity. How many blogs have ever linked

to a blog in another nation? Another language? Is bridging an activity we expect to see at all

levels of the blogosphere or only at the elite, high-traffic blog level?

Many bloggers?especially English-speaking cyberenthusiasts?believe that the blo

gosphere is an extended, interconnected community. Data presented here and elsewhere

suggests this may be increasingly untrue as non-English blogospheres grow rapidly and be

come linguistically or culturally insulated from the existing blogosphere in the absence of

bridging efforts. This, in turn, suggests that these bridging efforts, nascent as they are, are es

sential if the blogosphere remains an interconnected community. A bridged blogosphere or

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64 Public Choice (2008) 134: 47-65

multiple separate blogospheres? Both appear to be possible futures as weblogs are adopted

by an growing international population of Internet users.

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