zonble’s promptbook

This post is the English translation of the previous one.

Kerim Friedman decided to visit Taiwan about at the end of May, and he will stay at Taipei and Hualien until the second week of July. He hope to organize a meeting during this time, and this meeting is not only for foreign bloggers in Taiwan but also for native Taiwanese bloggers. The plan of this meeting has been discussed via e-mails for a weak long, and Scott Sommers just posted a blog entry: ‘Blogger’s Meeting‘. He said:

I’m involved in what is being a very exciting opportunity for bloggers. A group of us are organizing a meeting of Taiwan bloggers tentatively scheduled for the week of May 23rd. Similar meetings of bloggers have taken place in other parts of the world, and at least one of our members has taken part in a meeting of bloggers from South East Asia. Our goals include establishing a link between Taiwanese and foreign bloggers, as well as sharing our thoughts on the current situation and future of blogging. You can follow the developments of our meeting on this site.

The known participants who will be there are including me, Kerim Friedman, Scott Sommers, E. Heroux, The Taipei Kid and son on. And in this discussing thread, Sommers mentioned:

In a personal e-mail to Kerim, Wei-zhong (well, it’s me) pointed out that there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of cultural exchange going on with blogging in Taiwan: foreigners read foreigner’s blogs and Taiwanese read Taiwanese blogs. He stated that this doesn’t seem to be the result of language problems as most of the Taiwanese bloggers he knows read and speak English quite well. I asume that this is because blogging is very much a cultural activity and what Anglo-Americans living overseas find interesting is quite culturally specific. The same could also be said for Taiwanese.

In fact, I have found the same pattern with my own blog, much of which deals with technical analysis of language policy. I had hoped initially to attract Taiwanese readers, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Of the hundreds of comments I have received on my site, only 1 was from a person identifying himself as Taiwanese. I have had several e-mails from Taiwanese concerning my site (one of whom I know personally), but both of these people are studying for their doctorate overseas. It’s not clear to me why this would be. I suspect that Taiwanese may see language-related scholarship as a cultural topic and not be interested in the topics I post on my blog.

My opinion is that language is not the problem which made native Taiwanese readers seldom read English blogs by authors living in Taiwan. Many Taiwanese read posts from SlashDot, BoingBoing and Suicide Girls daily (through they mostly would like to behold the pictures whiling visiting SG). I personally submitted some content about funny stuffs in Taiwan to BoingBoing, and you can see that YiYi is a Taiwanese suicide girl; Native Taiwanese bloggers are keen to know about the events from the English blogsphere. I think native Taiwanese seldom know about these English blogs is just because there should be more promotions on some entrance sites where Taiwanese readers used to visit. Foreign bloggers may add their RSS feeds to news aggregating sites such as Meerket, TWblog.net or Yam, to let people syndicate their posts. English is not the problem.

However, language is still a problem. Migrant and foreigners in Taiwan are not speaking English only, there are many people move to Taiwan from Vietnam, Thai, Philippines and Indonesia. For instance, Johannes Rusli is a blogger from Indonesia and now studying Mandarin Chinese in the National Taiwan Normal University, he writes his blog about his life in Taipei in Indonesian, and I think most people in Taiwan can not read any word in his blog. Local English blogs might be ignored by main-stream Taiwanese readers, but the status of bloggers from South Eastern Asia might be worth, I think lots of migrant workers even do not know that they can write on the Internet!