GlobalVillage

ThoughtStorms Wiki

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See RestOfWorld for a recent (2022) world-level news.

Previously

Blogalization (link gone)

Blogalization: globalization with a twist — twisted into a more human shape ... it was a Brazilian blogger — "a Baiano exiled to Maranhão" — who first used the timely jogo de palavras ... A recent post on linguablogs by Weblog Central asked "How do you read foreign language blogs?" Machine-translation tools such as Google's language tools provide gisting, but how common is it to find bloggers linking to gisted posts in languages other than English? The answer, I wrote back to the WC, is that I took the trouble to learn a few foreign languages, and know other people who have learned other ones.*

These are the people that I would like to enlist in this group blog — a sort of multilingual Metafilter, with community features such as forums to be added as I find time.*

What I envision is a game of linguistic six degrees of separation in which I, with my English, Portuguese, Arabic, and French, could read about memes propagated in Chinese from someone with, say, Chinese, French, and German, and pass on memes from Arabic and Brazilian Portuguese to English blog browsers.*

There's likely to be a lot of excitement at the interfaces of different linguistic networks, as ideas percolate from one culture to another. (LanguagesAsNetworks) Shame my Portuguese is still so rudimentary (though it's improving).