I’m in frigid Cambridge, Mass. right now at the Internet and Society Conference as a representative of Reza’s project, Tomorrow’s Future.
One of the themes that keeps getting brought up are underrepresented groups currently not in the blogosphere and how language excludes non-english speakers from the conversation.
Here we are in San Diego, probably the city with the highest percentage of Spanish speakers in the entire country and how many blogs in spanish do we have on San Diego Bloggers? None. (my girlfriend was the only one until she moved to Monterrey … and stopped blogging)
One solution brought up is bridge blogging in which bi-lingual bloggers translate or summarize posts from one language into another. Of course, this bottlenecks content, but it’s better than a total lack of exhange. I know there are several bilingual San Diego Bloggers and I think it would be great if they started translating selected posts from bloggers in Tijuana or elsewhere. This is the idea of Blogalization, but we really need it on the local level.
Also, SoCalFreeNet’s latest install in Barrio Logan seems like a wonderful opportunity to evangelize blogging in a neighborhood which is underrepresented in the blogosphere.
Finally, for those of you who speak Spanish or are trying to learn, Tijuana Bloguita Front is a sort of aggregator of various Tijuana bloggers.
Oso, as you noted, there are plenty of TJ and San Diego bloggers who write in English, Spanish, or Spanglish.
I’m completely bilingual, but limit any Spanish on my site to titles or headlines at most for a number of reasons.
What I have seen is a much higher percentage of Spanish-speaking fotobloggers, since it’s sometimes more feasible to upload a picture than to vent or speak yr mind.
There are cultural differences, as I’ve come to learn working w/ people who were educated in schools in Mexico. I’ll poke around and see if I can find some good Spanish blogs, though.