PressEthic

This information is hard to come by. There’s been lots and lots published about how many bloggers are supposedly out there, but not much about where those bloggers are.

At the NYU-hosted Transatlantic Dialogue last week, vice president of CNN en Español Christopher Crommett said his network is relying more and more on blogs as a "barometer of what people think.” Which raises the obvious question: what people? If international networks take CNN’s lead, whose views are they representing?

After a quick survey of the international webscape, I’m not quite sure.

There’s Blogafrica, for example, which catalogues African blogs and contains some 569 links. Many of the blogs are written by Africans, but many aren’t. They have titles like “Nubian Undergrounder,” “South African Safaris” and “The Weekly Observer.”

For an entire continent, 569 blogs seems like a drop in the bucket. But then again, how would I know. The number is without context.

In Brazil, blogging has grown exponentially according to Wired News. When the entertainment company Rede Globo launched a blog service in 2001, it picked up 16,000 users during the first week. BliG, another blog service, has 45,000 registered users, while Weblogger claims 100,000 users (and 1000 new blogs a day). Again, all of these numbers are without context.

There are a throng of Cuban blogs (presumably Miami Cubans, based on their uncensored anti-Castroisms) on the net, most of which are posted in English. An advanced search through blogger.com’s international-language database isn’t much help, since you have to rely on keywords, which doesn’t do you much good if you’re trying to figure out ethnicity or geography.

China’s become famous for its Internet–savvy culture. According to a UC Berkeley conference hosted by the Berkeley China Internet Project, it had some 78 million Internet users by May 2004. Yet the only thing I can say somewhat conclusively about Chinese bloggers is that the government doesn’t like them. According to Reporters without Borders, there have been 62 Chinese “cyberdissidents” arrested over the last several years. Yet it was RWP who lobbed on the catchy title. Only one of the arrestees was identified as a blogger.

This is all to say that it’s not very clear which people are part of CNN’s barometer. The easy answer is that in many international communities it's the uppercrust, which has access to computers and the latest technology. But given the trajectory of blogging and open-forum discussions in China—and now in Saudi Arabia, where a blog site was blocked on October 4 and 5 by the Saudi government—I’m not so sure.