Blogger Expands Languages

If ethics can be viewed as the expansion of choice, the Blogger service is trending in a good direction. They recently started offering blogs in three new languages: Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian. These languages posed a programming challenge because of their right-to-left orientation. Blogger responded with new templates and bi-directional text editing.

It will be interesting to see how this expanded reach impacts the blog communities in politically sensitive countries where these languages are spoken, in a region that could really benefit from more positive dialogue. Policy Innovations has covered a little bit of the Iranian Internet censorship story, and the revolutionary potential of blogs, but there is also the risk that this language customization will feed into the group polarization effect that Cass Sunstein identifies in Republic.com 2.0.