Meet the Bridgebloggers

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.