Yesterday while checking Google for something too complicated and boring to mention here, I found a link to an entry on Randgänge a German/English blog that focuses on new media, online publishing, etc. What caught my eye was a lengthy quote from another blog, Idle Words, which dealt with how English language blogs tended not to link to non-English language blogs.

The author raises some interesting questions, but before I even considered these questions, I got sidetracked by secondary information about the number of bloggers in Iceland (something I spent an inordinate amount of time ranting about last November): "Take Iceland, for example. The Icelanders are avid bloggers, with about 3500 weblogs (out of an online population of about 160,000). In any given Icelandic weblog, 12% of the links will point to a site written in English. So even those Icelandic readers who don't speak any English are fairly likely to come into contact with ideas that cross over from the English-language Internet." The 3500 figure seems a bit small to me (although I'm sure it's accurate), especially when I recall how I would run across blogs in Icelandic on a daily basis late last year when I'd regularly dig through Blogger's "Fresh Blogs" links. Out of all the non-English language blogs I'd find in my daily roaming, the majority were Icelandic. And since the population of Iceland is less than 300,000 it seemed all the more extraordinary. Brazil has a population of over 164 million, and quite a few bloggers, but I still saw more Icelandic blogs. Today I think the most common non-English language blogs I find are in Persian, but Icelandic is still high up on the list.