Meet the bridgebloggers

摘要

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 suppositions 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 conversation 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.