The NITLE blog census says that there are more than three times as many Portuguese-language weblogs as Spanish-language ones (though Portuguese recently slipped into third place as French moved up).
40% of Orkut members are now Brazilian (vs. 25% U.S.), and some people are unhappy about it (more from Reuters here).
There are 212,842 Fotolog participants from Brazil, compared to 1,731 from France and 32,233 from the USA.
Joao Paulo Lopes Batista from Olinda explains that he wound up playing basketball in the U.S. because "[o]ne of my best friends called Kalu Guasco ... was playing basketball for Western Nebraska Community College and we were chatting everyday via the internet, so I told him that I was stuck in Brazil and I didn’t know what to do".
Felipe Fonseca says (about Brazil) that
...if you walk in a public telecenter right now, you would find some people filling their resumes for some employment agency, one or two actually reading something, but most of them, say more than 60%, typing at webchats. People want to talk to each other.
Well, people everywhere want to talk to each other. But it seems that in Brazil, they're doing it to an unusual extent via various text and image-based digital services.
Posted by Mark Liberman at July 17, 2004 07:52 AM