Xu Jing Lei Takes Boing Boing’s Crown

Steve Rubel points to Sam Fleming's succesful argument that Technorati was not correctly weighing Chinese blogs. This demonstrates once again that data about Internet traffic and usage are unreliable– especially when we're talking about the non-English Internet. Chinese actress Xu Jing Lei doesn't have a (English) wikipedia entry yet– other than the stub I just started– but Sam in Shanghai gives some of her data:

She can get well over 100,000 page views per article and at least 1,000 comments per article, sometimes 3-4,000. I would be curious how many blogs can generate thousands comments per article on a regular basis. Granted, Xu Jing Lei is not your typical "citizen" blogger, but her not being on the list suggests that Technorati is missing Sina. And if they are missing Sina, Bokee, and Blogbus…then they are missing a big chunk of the Chinese blogosphere.

Ethan Zuckerman says all thisgoes to prove the need for projects like Global Voices and Blogamundo:

All of which suggests that English-language blogging is becoming a smaller plurality each day. Which makes me very happy that we made the decision a few months ago at Global Voices to focus heavily on translating blog posts as well as linking to them. Haitham, Veronica, David, Feng and Alice have been steadily translating content from Arabic, Russian, Spanish, Chinese and French, respectively, and we’ll be introducing our new Portuguese translator in a few days. This has let us run fantastic posts, like this analysis of the Spanish blogosphere’s reaction to today’s boycott of US goods in much of the Spanish-speaking world by David Sasaki. But it makes me hungry for even more, including projects like Blogamundo, which promise large-scale systems to help translate blog content.

In the meantime, monolingual idiots like me are made even more aware of what we’re missing…

If all monolinguists were as "moronic" as Ethan, the world would be a much better place.