hightext

Japan blogs most

I agree with all the reasons given in the Japan Times as to why blogs in Japanese outstrip blogs in English and Chinese in number. And I also agree with Terrie's Take that it is a kind of therapy, in the absence of acceptance of counselling in Japan. I would also say that it is an indication of a nation of enthusiasts. Japanese people get very passionate about food, for example, so will blog about restaurants, growing vegetables, cooking etc far more than the Brits or Americans.

I also wonder if the survey they refer to includes mobile phone blogs, on sites such as Mahou no Island. That would certainly bump the figures up for Japan, also South Korea.

South Korean 'cyberterror'

It turns out the whole saga of dog-sh**t-girl in South Korea was just the tip of the, um, iceberg and the South Korean media have been working themselves up into quite a state about 'cyberterror' - where netizens gang up to bombard a website they don't like or to express an opinion. The South Korean government is as a result looking into whether to insist that people give their real names online (apparently some sites already ask users to input their citizenship numbers).

It's quite amusing how the dog-sh**t-girl saga made its way around the net and round the world, into the Washington Post and then back onto the Korean language internet again and now it's been taken up in the Nikkei Express (electronic newsletter from Nikkei Business, Japan's leading business magazine) by a professor from a Korean women's university. She explains the whole story, and other cyberterror incidents but takes a different tack from the government, saying that most Koreans are quite happy to post on blogs revealing their real names, but now some are saying that this leads to too much invasion of privacy, and apparently have started a 'Victims of Portal Sites' group.

I sense a clash between traditional, authoritarian segments of Korean society, who believe people should be made to clear up their dog's mess and that the government should take the lead in enforcing socially acceptable behaviour, no matter what the threat to privacy, and the blogging generation, who are still trying to understand the implications of being one of the most 'wired' societies in the world.

Blogueurs

According to a Business Week article the French are the keenest bloggers in terms of number of blogs as a percent of the total population - 4.9%. It's 1.4% for the British, 3.5% for the Dutch and 0.2% for the Germans. Even American bloggers only make up 3% of the US population.

Loic Le Meur, founder of Ublog.com says it's because "French people love to tell everyone exactly what's on their minds - far more than Germans, for example." I would add to this that they also like to have a really good argument about it too, and the comments on a blog provide an excellent venue for that.

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Ton Zylstra (Interdependent Thoughts weblog, http://www.zylstra.org/blog) sent me this comment which he was not able to post (I'm sorry, I still haven't been able to fix the problem that has led to my disabling the comments):

Those numbers come from my partner Elmine (http://elmine.wijnia.com/ ) who added them to the wiki of Loïc when he asked numbers for the European blogosphere. She took the estimated totals in those wiki-pages for all countries mentioned and divided them by the number of inhabitants (those numbers taken from the CIA Factbook website) So all percentages are speculative at best, as the number of blogs in any country remains speculative (France's position is due to 2.4 million blogs at Skyblog, a contested figure e.g.). Also note that this list only covers European countries, not what's happening in Asia for instance.

You can find the whole list here:

http://www.socialtext.net/loicwiki/index.cgi?summary_page

Blogs and the Japanese search for identity

I can't link to this article by Kobashi Naohiko in the Nikkei Business Express on Japanese blogs because it's subscription only, plus it's in Japanese, so I will paraphrase/translate.

Apparently the Japanese Ministry for Internal Affairs and Communications has just issued a report from its Study Group on Information Frontier (sic) on blogs. According to the report, there are around 3.35 million cumulative blog users in Japan as of the end of March 2005, of which 950,000 add a new entry at least once a month. They estimate there will be 7.82 million bloggers and 2.96 million regular updaters by the end of March 2007.

Apparently the rate of updating of a blog is closely related to how strong the element of 'community' is in the 'service' the blog provides. Kobashi comments that just as in the US some bloggers have become recognised as journalists in the last election, so the number of Japanese blogs that are more than just a diary and have some kind of strategy behind them is increasing. However he thinks there might be a difference between the community orientation of Japanese blogs and the journalistic orientation of American blogs - although he also says this might be just a question of stages of development and adoption. He suspects there is a cultural difference at the heart of this.

Kobashi refers to a psychological study where people are asked to finish a sentence which begins 'I am...'. Appparently Asians tend to finish it with a statement about their role in society, such as 'I am a mother' whereas Westerners tend to finish the sentence with a statement about their personality such as 'I am kind'. He thinks this kind of tendency in Asia explains why Japanese bloggers are spurred on to post new entries by comments left by readers or trackbacks. Western blogs are a place to present yourself, whereas Japanese blogs are about building relations to their surroundings, and by doing so, the blogger finds his or her own identity. He finished up by stating that 'finding yourself' is much needed in today's Japan. I suppose by that he is referring to the younger generation in Japan, who do not have the certainty of lifetime employment in a major company. There is a high and hidden level of unemployment in the under 30s, and many are getting by as freeters - doing temporary work, without much idea of what they might do in the long term.

I agree to some extent with his thesis, but I also think Western bloggers are just as motivated by getting comments and trackbacks (for myself, I would welcome comments, but unfortunately have had to disable my comment function due to spam and then the spam remover I had installed now not working due to some sort of technical problem with my host, sigh.). But maybe for Westerners it might be more about status and a need to be admired rather than wanting to feel part of a community.

100th entry on this blog

This is my 100th entry on this blog and as luck would have it, I found the perfect quote today from James Lileks' The Bleat:

In the future, everyone will be hyperlinked for fifteen minutes. And that's a good thing.

You say blog, I say... (II)

When I wrote about coining words like blog, and being wary of it seeming as if you were claiming the invention and ignoring the fact that other languages and cultures may have something similar, called something else, I hadn't realised that Joi Ito had already had a lot of flak from the Japanese not-blog blogging community for exactly this, in 2002. Joi refers to this a propos of a current row between Loic Le Meur and his French blogger customers since Ublog (his company) became part of Six Apart. Touchy lot, bloggers, whatever the culture!

Blogs of Japanese people living in the UK

Most of them have photos, so you can see what has caught their eye even if you don't read Japanese.

Love-hate London
Poohotosama's Joke Diary
Stay Cool (Manchester)
Living in the UK
London with time on my hands
Denko@London
Typically English? Everyday life
KTMorris' what happened today
Oink Oink
Sort of thing
Finding small happinesses
Yummy (living in Sheffield)
Living in London Diary
Family life in the UK
Inside Chicken World

A lot of them are about food again...

Japanese blogs

I have been lazy about reading Japanese blogs in Japanese. I read Gen Kanai's and Joi Itoh's blogs, which are written in English and mostly link to English language material. I also read blogs written in English by expats in Japan such as the beautiful looking and award-winning Antipixel, Mediatinker and Cerebral Soup.

And now there seems to be some controversy over an article on The Feature which talks about the low uptake of moblogging even in Japan. I've said before that we Anglophones should be very careful about inventing a term, defining it and then assuming that it is the universal term and definition, allowing us to judge whether non-Anglophone cultures 'do it' or are any good at it.

This point came up again at The Royal Institute of International Affairs Japan Group meeting yesterday in London, where someone pointed to a recent survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit, which ranked the UK second in terms of 'e-readiness' and Japan 25th. 'E-readiness' is, according to the EIU, "a collection of factors that indicate how amenable a market is to Internet-based opportunities." As far as I can work out, Japan is placed rather low despite high uptakes of 3G, broadband, local loop unbundling etc - because it scored badly on 'consumer and business adoption' (presumably the low penetration rate of PCs - but what about the fact that people can and do access e-mail, the Web and do e-commerce from their mobile phones?) and 'supporting e-services' (meaning consulting and IT services). Well I guess this criterion has been included because the survey is sponsored by IBM, who want to drop a big hint at Japanese companies and the Japanese government who have traditionally preferred to do things in-house, rather employ consultants...

There is no doubt that a lot of Japanese people are blogging, and have been doing something like blogging from their mobile phones since 1999, when i-mode was launched. It may be that 'moblog' software as has been developed in the US and Europe does not exist in the same way, but being a very visual culture, Japanese bloggers have found ways to incorporate all kinds of images, some from cameraphones, into their websites. For example, this site, Magic Island, hosts over 3 million 'home pages', attracting 900 million page views a month, largely created and viewed via mobile phones.

So over the next few days I will introduce some Japanese blogs, written in Japanese, by Japanese people, that I have randomly picked up and started reading on a regular basis. I'll translate some of their self description and any entry that catches my eye. Here's the first:

a wild flower. "I am a working woman. A mother. One strike against me [Japanese expression for having one failed marriage]. A woman. As such, here are my various feelings... Being a woman is fun..."
Entry for April 27 "I walked home with my son in a pitch black street. Holding hands. His small round hand was warm. 'A shooting star!' he called out, but Mama didn't see it. 'If you see a shooting star you can make a wish.' 'I didn't know that, so I didn't make a wish.' 'Yes, well...' 'If there hadn't been traffic lights and buildings and cars I could have run and caught it.' He's so sweet! [Japanese emoticon for parent silly with pride which I can't reproduce in MovableType grrr] I hope he can somehow put off becoming a difficult adolescent."
Other postings are on the subject of makeup, the Pill, tomatoes, buying male underwear, semi-naked mannequins and Lush (the UK soap shop now in Japan).

I suppose some might find this saccharine and insubstantial. I rather like it.

Saudis and their mobile phones

Jeff Jarvis has found a Saudi blogger, and seems to be implying it's the first (I bet it isn't - or maybe it's the first written in English, on a 'recognised' Western blog host) but anyway, as he says, it may be "the first crack in the wall".

There's a great post on it about how much Saudis love their mobile phones. Apparently camera phones are banned but are openly on sale. This story was particularly funny:

A Saudi was giving a presentation at my place of employment. Screen, PC projector, Powerpoint, the whole thing. Then his phone rang. He didn't switch it off, he answered it. Just as well, it was his Mother! We sat listening for 5 minutes while he explained why he'd not been to see her for two days. I have to say, some of his excuses were ingenious, I'll use them myself sometime. Finally he resumed his presentation, without an apology.

It's often said in intercultural research and texts that people from Arab cultures will answer their phone whilst having a meeting because they are polychronous in their attitudes to time - nice to have a bang up to date example to cite next time I need to explain the difference between monochronous and polychronous.

Romancing

Interesting explanation of why Romance languages tend to express themselves in more long-winded ways than Anglo-Saxons would like from Nelson Ascher at Europundits.

Key quote:
"While most of the advantages that the English language has are, I think, in the realm of semantic adequacy, with the ability of its speaker to find the right adjective for a noun or the right adverb for a verb, since our Romance languages are not so semantically rich or precise, we compensate with the richer nuances made possible by our own richness: that of verbal tenses. But while the advantages of English become more evident in as short a space as possible, those of Portuguese and other Romance language need a wider or longer space to unfold, to show themselves."

It's true that it does make reading blogs written by Romance language people, even when they're writing in English, quite hard work and then I feel guilty that I'm being intellectually lazy...!

Filipino blogging and texting

I've just had an interesting e-mail exchange with aMia, who is a Filipino student and blogger. She left a comment on my entry about using LiveJournal as a cultural adjustment tool because she's writing a paper on blogs as an adjustment tool and came across my post while researching it on the web.

I took the opportunity to ask her more about Filipino use of mobiles for texting and also blogs, as I'd noticed in the past that young Filipinos are avid users of texting and blogging - right up there with Koreans and Japanese even though, as she points out herself "our country is still under the category of 'third world'." Of course this partly explains the popularity of mobile phones - they're a lot cheaper than a PC.

But aMia also made the interesting comment that "u should see the way we text, people come up with lotsa things like quotes, jokes, political stands, prayers, etc just to connect or share with other people. i think it's an indirect approach in wanting to be heard." Which ties in nicely with her thoughts on why young Filipinos blog - because "most people are afraid to be judged by people they know" so a blog lets them express themselves semi-anonymously.

Both mobiles and blogs offer a way to express yourself boldly, without being completely direct. I'm guessing this is useful both if you're younger and still not sure of your social circle, but also, to make a huge cultural generalisation, when people are influenced by 'Asian' considerations of not offending and maintaining group harmony.

aMia also pointed me at this blog entry and comments by another Filipino blogger, talking about her worries that she is blogging to please people and her blog now owns her, when she thought she owned it - a concern which strikes a chord with bloggers from any culture I would think.

Hecklesnot

This kind of stuff suddenly makes me come over all monochronous and old European. Trying to give a presentation when there is a hecklebot/IRC feed on display causing sudden unexplained outbreaks of laughter and god knows how many virtual conversations, silent but public snide remarks and collaborative notetaking going on in the audience is bad enough for the poor old presenter/teacher/lecturer. But imagine being in the audience too, and not quite keeping up, always thinking that the joke is forming without you - this would happen to anyone not quite technically literate or linguistically fluent enough to keep up. I really don't see this is as bridging the digital divide at all, just another way of mostly male young geeks reassuring each other about how clever they are.

Just after writing the above I came across this thread on Joi Ito's blog, regarding the echo-chamber and "censorship of the commons" that can occur in IRC communities and blogs. The description that V gives of people's behaviour towards Joi Ito and each other on the IRC community and at ETech (lots of sucking up and an unspoken pecking order) all sound very plausible. And then of course lots of people attack V for saying that on the same thread. I have already heard of someone getting flamed for having the temerity to point out on a Howard Dean blog that a Plan B should be drawn up for using the support he has gained for some other constructive campaigning if he were to stand down from the Presidential race.

I still hope that information and telecommunication technology could be used to help bridge cultures - but clearly this is not going to happen if cultures are adolescent in their reinforcing behaviour.

LiveJournal as a cultural adjustment tool

Emily Nussbaum wrote a lengthy article (subscription required - here's an excerpt from it) for the New York Times on LiveJournal, a blog site much used by American teenagers, and the former home of this blog.

She points out that the vast majority of bloggers (across the board, not just LiveJournal) are teens and young adults. 90% are between 13 and 29 years old, 51% between 13 and 19. As I have noted before, this meant that the seemingly multicultural treasure trove of blogs on LiveJournal is partly due to ironic or ignorant US teenagers claiming to be from Iraq or Georgia.

Looking at the LiveJournal blogs claiming to be owned by people living in Japan, I've come to realise that LiveJournal is being used by a lot of people (not just teenagers but mostly Americans) who are living as expatriates around the world, to keep in touch with families, boyfriends and girlfriends and friends. So when I was helping a couple of Japanese girls with their adjustment to living in Germany at the end of last year, I recommended that the older one (13 years old) looked at starting a LiveJournal as a way of recording her experiences and also keeping in touch with her Japanese friends. I kept a scrapbook when I lived in Japan as a child, so this is the digital equivalent.

Nussbaum talks about the privacy issues surrounding exposing a teenage diary to the world, and ends on a positive note that keeping a LiveJournal blog might even help teenagers to become less inward and more sociable with each other, through the medium of leaving comments on each others blogs, using the drop down emotions menu to be more open about their feelings and posting instant messaging dialogues for all to see.

Adult bloggers tend to be a bit sniffy about LiveJournal and its ilk, I discovered, which is one of the reasons I've moved to Movable Type (yes, I admit, I was concerned about my reputation). I suppose the big distinction is that LiveJournal blogs are primarily about the blogger, whereas we adults like to think that our clean, plain, forensic blogs are purely about our ideas. Yeh, right.

Chinese bloggers, cyber dissidents or internet essayists?

Much rejoicing at the release of Stainless Steel Mouse, Liu Di, 23, a psychology student at Beijing Normal University, who was detained for a year for what she wrote and posted on the internet.
Bloggers have been quick to claim her as a blogger. Other news articles suggest her activities were: writing a satire of the Communist Party, posting essays critical of the Communist Party on her website and posting comments to internet chat sites calling for the release of dissidents. Washington Post calls her an internet essayist, blogger Peking Duck calls her a cyber dissident.

Ditching the pedantry for a moment, let us note there are still 35 or so Chinese people in prison for what they posted to the internet, and Reporters Without Borders estimates that China employs 30,000 people to watch what its people are doing online.

Blogs of War

When I posted about bloggers in Iraq using LiveJournal, I namechecked Rebelcoyote as one of the US soldiers in Iraq who had a LiveJournal blog. It turns out (thanks to Norman Geras) he's called Private First Class Trueman Muhrer-Irwin, and is now in hospital after a bomb went off under his transport, blowing off half his left foot, lodging some shrapnel in his eye and killing one of his colleagues.

The article also explains a question I had, about how far the US army allows its troops to blog:

"Soliders have the freedom of speech to express their own personal views. As long as it does not threaten anyone personally or denigrate the national chain of command, which is illegal, or claim to be from a standpoint of policy, that's fine," says Major Gary Tallman of the US Army Public Relations Office.

I wonder how many other countries' armies would allow such freedom of expression for their troops - I'm not making this point particularly to praise the US Army, just wondering if it's another cross-cultural difference. Specific differences that come to mind are, firstly, an American attitude that rules are rules, explicit and universally and rigorously applied, therefore soldiers will be well aware of them and will comply. Secondly, there also seems to be an American attitude to information that is quite different in higher context cultures, and is reinforced by the spread of internet access - that information is everywhere, so there is no point in worrying about shared organisational information becoming public. If you don't want it publicly known, don't share it within the organisation - viz Bush's Thanksgiving visit to Iraq. Higher context cultures are much more paranoid - they worry that the unspoken rules may not be observed, and that putting even benign, shared corporate information into explicit form may subject it to all kinds of misinterpretations.

Apparently some questioned whether his blog was a fake, or just part of US Army propaganda, but as you can see from my previous list, he was one of several US soldiers in Iraq blogging on LiveJournal. And I would imagine, if he was a US Army PR flack, he wouldn't have got blown up, or at least it would not have been admitted that he had.

All the world's a song

Cinderella Bloggerfeller referred to a Blogspot blog written in English by an American in Tbilisi, Georgia. I thought I'd have a look at what LiveJournal has to offer and found that 48 (37 live) LiveJournal bloggers say they are from Georgia. American teen count about 50% - this time not 'ironic' like the 'Iraq' LiveJournal bloggers I looked at in a previous posting, I think, just living in Georgia USA and unaware that there is a country called Georgia too. The distinction between Georgia the US state and Georgia the country is made quite clear on LiveJournal so no excuses there.

The other 50% are blogs written in Russian or Georgian - apart from the odd bit (eg "evil days" for last Thursday's entry title) from this guy who also has a nice line in a perpetually rising and falling eyebrow on his user photo (top right hand corner), and clearly is not a teenager either. It's intriguing to see that someone is listening both to Nitin Sawhney and Metallica and decided to quote "Don't Cry For Me Argentina" in full ten days ago - seeing parallels with Georgia there? Some of them have become very active in the past few days, for example pepsikolka. Pepsikolka has done a lot of networking with others - she's a member of several LiveJournal communities and many of her friends come from Russia, Latvia, Ukraine, Greece, Germany as well as Georgia.

So, good points about LiveJournal - you can find blogs from people in other countries, you can get some idea about them from their music, their choice of emoticons, friends and designs... Otherwise I'm still contemplating moving this blog elsewhere for various reasons, some of which Ton has touched on.

Anglosphere Blogosphere

With my interest in the cross cultural uses of IT I would love to be able to understand and analyse blogs and other information on the internet from countries whose languages I don't speak. But, uh, duh, I can't because I can't read them. Not only that, it's really hard to find them in the first place. For example, if you put "Chinese blogs" into Google, you get a nice list of blogs based in China, but written in English, usually by Westerners living in China. Searching for "mandarin blogs" or "pinyin blogs" doesn't get you much further. So I tried what I do when looking for Japanese stuff on the web, go to Google in the native language version, but I can't type in Chinese like I can for Japanese (both linguistic and keyboard/software constraints) so I tried typing 'blog' in English, and - finally - I see something promising. One of the links is to this blog - XuPing's Space. It looks really interesting - he (or she) is obviously interested in the same things as me - blogs and how they relate to Knowledge Management, e-learning etc. With my 1 year of Mandarin studies I can see some of his diagrams relate to 'people' and 'words' and the different ways they connect. But that's it - I don't know their gender or where they are (could be China, could be Taiwan) let alone what they're trying to say.

We get excited about how global we the blogosphere or the internet have become when Iranians start blogging, but again, it's when they're blogging in English that they get our attention. There is a list of Iranian blogs written in Persian who won prizes recently btw - but, well, it's all Greek to me.

The language used matters because English as a language has various characteristics that force you to express yourself in certain ways - because of the 'subject verb object' construction, it is less easy to be as vague as you can be in other languages. It is therefore much more 'low context' (although British English native speakers can be pretty good at writing in a 'read between the lines' high context way ;-)).

These frustrations with the Anglosphere's own blindness to its non-globality, conscious or unconscious, are expressed in a post on the Chicagoboyz blog as well as some good statistics from Melvyn Bragg (!) on the commercial reasons why we only care about the English language speaking countries.

Who's the most multicultural blog host of them all?

Continuing on from looking at The Mesopotamian blog, I saw a list of 9 other blogs written by Iraqis - they're all on Blogspot. Then I recollected that LiveJournal had a big list of where all their users came from, with links. Sure enough there are 260 LiveJournal users in Iraq.

Except there aren't. Yup, I was being naive and reckoning without the oh-so-ironic (in an Alanis Morissette sort of way) American teen who makes up the majority of LiveJournal users as far as I can tell. I clicked through 50 of the most recently updated and my rough estimate is that 80% are American teens living in Podunk, and the rest are US soldiers in Iraq, plus a few Americans who are out there on infrastructure building projects - oh, and two Russians for some unfathomable reason.

Actually it is quite interesting reading the US soldier blogs - with my HR/organisational change hat on I am trying and failing to imagine how their 'managers' maintain morale and purpose - maybe LiveJournal is a good place for them to vent though, and one shouldn't read too much into some of their down moments. You can find them by going to www.livejournal.com/users/ and then adding spastik-bob, givingintoashes, paladyn, rebelcoyote, mykmykmotorbyke, slownewsday, hawkinbagdad, themeshuggener, bumpthekoala, desertfox11m, combatpattybot.

So maybe LiveJournal isn't quite as multicultural as I had hoped. Another reason for choosing them now looking less attractive....

Blog brush with cultures (2)

The Dissident Frogman recently added a quiet version of one of his banners to his blog. Apparently the noisy version was annoying Spartacus, an American blogger.The banner was a Flash movie which played every time you visited his site, complete with spooky music.

The Dissident Frogman's site is still full of distractions and very 'busy' to a Northern European or American's taste. It is bilingual, has lots of graphics, Flash movies, things in boxes, interjected comments in different fonts, obscure references, lots of links... All very well designed and stylish, but, I would say, a classic example of French polychronicity. As the Halls put it in 'Understanding Cultural Differences', "the most important thing to know about the French is that they are high on the polychronic scale. This means they do many things at once, they can tolerate constant interruptions...they use all their senses, visual, auditory and olfactory."

Merde in France, another bilingual French blog also makes a lot of use of cartoons, obscure references and links and is similarly quite difficult to follow for this plodding monochronous Brit. Goodness knows what these guys will do to their blogs if we ever get smellovision on the internet.

Blog brush with cultures (1)

The Mesapotamian, an Iranian blog written in English, has had a recent brush with cultural communication differences. Alaa, the blog owner, wrote a very moving response ("I don't want to say anything to spoil this moment of awe. I kneel and kiss your hand.") to an American woman who left a comment on his blog about her two sons in the US Army, one in Iraq, one who was in Iraq.

Mr JoJo, (who describes himself as Western in outlook), left this comment:

"Do you know what the image of Alaa going down on his knees in awe brought to my mind? Well, it's a slave my friends. We Africans know alot about going on one's knees in a "moment of awe". American slaves did as well. There is NO need for him to go on his knees and kiss anyone's hands to show his appreciation for their help, support or sacrifice. Quite frankly the whole notion highly disturbs me. Showing gratitude is one thing; crawling head-over-heels to debase oneself is another. I hope I am not misunderstood [...]
What I am trying to tell Alaa is that it is not necessary for him to play to his audience. I may be wrong but the notion of his going down on his knees in awe smacks of over dramatization. It appeared to me as a calculated statement made to elicit a favorable reaction"

You can imagine this led to quite a lot of debate on The Mesopotamian, mostly quite restrained, as I think a large number of the commenters realised they were dealing with cultural differences rather than deliberate nastiness. Looking for some theoretical back up to my sense that there was a culture clash going on I picked up Hofstede to look at the results of his research with regard to Iraqis and Westerners such as Americans and Brits. The biggest difference between Iraqis (in Hofstede lumped in with Arab nations as a whole) and Americans/Brits in the various dimensions Hofstede looks at is in what he calls 'uncertainty avoidance' - which is a measure of how comfortable people are with ambiguity, measured by how stressed they feel at work, how rule oriented they are and so on. Americans have fairly weak uncertainty avoidance, whereas Arab countries have quite strong uncertainty avoidance. In Arab countries therefore, it is the norm that "emotions may at proper times and places be ventilated", compared to "emotions should not be shown" for the USA and Northern Europeans. Interestingly, West and East African countries are pretty similar to Arab countries on most of the dimensions, apart from uncertainty avoidance, where they are closer to the US.

So what might seem rather florid, over-emotional and possibly manipulative language to Alaa's Western readers is not at all how an Arab reader would react to Alaa's language. As the Saudi woman who trained me in intercultural theory recently told me, it's not uncommon for Arabs to cry at work. To give Mr JoJo credit, he came round to seeing that Alaa was just expressing himself in a way that was quite normal in Iraq.

Don't shoot the messenger

When I was asked to speak in July this year at a Voxpolitics meeting in London about politics and blogs, with the brief that I talk about moblogs and anything relevant from Japan, I soon hit a brick wall. There wasn't any connection between mobile phone-based blogging in Japan and politics. In fact I couldn't even find any general Japanese web blogs that had a political focus. Unsurprisingly, explaining this to the audience of keen-as-mustard geek bloggers and warbloggers did not go down particularly well. Lesson learnt - if asked to speak, make sure that the brief you are given really will lead to something substantial and relevant to the audience.

I've now seen this on Japan Media Review, a site I've looked at many times and printed off lots from in the past. I unaccountably failed to spot this article in time for the July talk about how Japanese anti-war activists are using their mobile phones and the internet to organise themselves. But, rather as my friends in Hong Kong explained when I asked them about mobile phones, blogs and the democracy protests in July (in desperation for something to say to those fierce Voxpolitics bloggers!), it turns out that mobile phones were mostly used to organise and coordinate protests rather than to create moblogs.

There does seem to be some kind of cultural barrier (and not just because of government censorship) to being overtly political on weblogs in (certain? all?) Asian countries. An indicator of this is the ban in Japan on using the internet for electioneering, for fear of libel.

One of the Japanese anti-war organisations' websites does have a weblog (and even calls it a weblog) though. But it has no comments, just links to relevant news stories, which is something that I have seen with other Japanese blogs - comments, if they exist at all, are often one liners.

At least it is still being kept up-to-date - another thing I noticed with Japanese blogs in general was that many of even the most popular ones had been shut down by their owners, who were finding it too much work for no money after a couple of years of fun. (I had to duck the flak again when I made this point at Voxpolitics ;-) ).

You say "blog", I say, well, never mind, I don't want to argue about it.

Like Adam in the Garden of Eden, if you name something, you supposedly have the ownership of it. The coinage of 'weblog', its shortened form 'blog' and now 'moblog' (mobile + blog) has been claimed for English speaking male Westerners: Jorn Barger in December 1997 for 'weblog', Peter Merholz for 'blog' and Adam Greenfield in November 2002 for 'moblog'. It's not surprising therefore that blogging is seen by some non-white bloggers as "...a technology that is mostly the pursuit of upper middle class white males and does diddly to change the real world."

Blog-like sites, whose owners would not recognise the terms weblog, blog or moblog, have been up and running before 'blog' was coined - but they are unknown in the West because they are not written in English, or don't use the standard blog software that Westerners are familiar with. They can be called blogs in that they are in a diary format and contain links to other sites, with comments. In Japanese, they are snappily known as 'kojin nyuuzu saito' ?????????or individual news sites - or just simply ??or diaries. Blog sites with cameraphone photos inserted are also common in Japan, where cameraphones have been available since 2000. Many of these sites are more sophisticated than the systems currently being touted as 'moblogs' in the West in that they can be viewed and published to directly from a mobile phone browser.

'Blog' has become known as a word and concept in Japan recently. A book is about to come out called ?Bloggers? and when surveyed, 65% of the owners of 'kojin nyuuzu saito' said they would be happy to classify their sites as blogs.

Nonetheless, I think there is a difference in the way bloggers (and their equivalents) design and write their blogs in different cultures, particularly when it comes to warblogs and other overtly political, argumentative blogs. I will return to this in later postings.