The Yomiuri Shinbun published another article on blogging in yesterday’s evening edition, which you can see by clicking on the image to the left, which spells out burogu in Japanese katakana script (the script usually reserved for words borrowed from other languages). This marks the second week in a row that the newspaper, in their Internet and Technology section, has written about blogging. (And according to the article, there will be yet another article in next Tuesday’s evening newspaper, on how blogging is perhaps having an effect on traditional journalism).
This week’s story is headlined Gijutsu nakutemo puro nami, which loosely translated, comes to something like “No matter your skill level, you can be a pro.” Whereas last week’s article focused more on the content management system developed by Blogger, this week’s article centers on Movable Type‘s software, and even features a picture of MT creators Ben and Mena Trott (taken at last month’s MT users get-together arranged by Joi Ito and Neotony). It discusses the Movable Type Japanese language pack developed by Daiji Hirata, and similar to last week’s article, talks at length about how software like Movable Type makes it very easy for those who have no web site or home page building experience to get up and running. (It uses the analogy of car owners who for the most part know next to nothing about the inner workings of their car nor how it runs, yet are able to drive it around at ease).
I know a couple of people mentioned that they found last week’s article helpful to explain to their Japanese friends and co-workers exactly what blogging is, so I made the image of the article large enough so one can either forward the image URL to others, or save the image to your hard-drive and then print it out (again, you can get to it by clicking on the image at the top of this post).
After my post the other day on blogging and how mainstream it really is, which was occassioned by a comment regarding something I had said about the first Yomiuri article last week, I came across this post and comment thread at Joi Ito’s site which speaks to the issue of blogging’s accessibility to a wider audience (specifically his blog, but I think a lot of us who blog can relate to it), and how language can be one barrier to that. Joi takes up someone on the suggestion that there might be a need for a blogging glossary, and others chime in with some links to various “blog glossaries” that exist out there. Unfortunately none of them I would take seriously (do we really need definitions for juvenile one-off terms like blogvana or blogule?), so it would seem the still exists a need for something like this.
