Everyone surfing blogdex or other sites of this nature will already have experienced it: you find an interesting topic, but when you land on the blog itself, it’s in a language you don’t know. So you can’t digest the info, you won’t link to it and the information is hence not transported further down the network of blogs. This is the one reason I write this blog in English, which is, like it or not, the common language of the web. And I am lucky enough to be able to read both German and English blogs. But when I zap through blogspot blogs, very often I land on, for example, spanish blogs, which I only understand 50% of the times or other languages, which I don’t understand at all.
Alwayson has an article on MT (Machine Translation):The Blogosphere: Lost in Translation?. MT is still far from perfect and provides more added value to your surfing, if you’re searching for humour and entertainment rather than real translation… But watch the companies that work on it. Should they at some point deliver better results, then it will be the next big thing in the blogosphere and help to connect the sofar through the language barrier disjointed parts of the web.