Sunday, July 18, 2004

Yahoo! News - Brazil Internet Craze Angers English Speakers

Yahoo! News - Brazil Internet Craze Angers English Speakers

"When the average Orkut user goes to look at community listings to see what's out there, he'll see a list populated with pretty much all Portuguese communities," Gibbs said. "This is highly frustrating since Orkut is not a Brazilian service."

WTF?

Remember when those commercials were all over the TV about how the Internet was going to bring the world together? Remember how it exciting it used to be to chat with someone in another hemisphere? Maybe that was just me.
Orkut is a service for friends to have a network amongst each other. Now, how all of these people are bumping heads? I don't know. But declaring that Orkut is "not a Brazilian service" is like saying that the Internet is "not a Brazilian service". If someone has access to the internet and in invite to Orkut, they have a right to be there.
It *is* frustrating however to do a search and results come up in different languages. I don't really care about the things in the other language because I don't read another language. It has a right to be there but I can filter it out. There has to be a way to filter out people who speak your language. There is room enough for everyone on the Internet. It is not an "English Only" technology. I wish these types of elitist would die out.
ON THE OTHER HAND......


"Brazilians have the right to create anything they want in any language they want," Miyazawa said. "The problem is to invade forums with specific languages and write in Portuguese. Brazilians are still learning how to behave in the Net."


That type of behavior is unacceptable. Even if you don't know a lot of Internet/Newsgroup etiquette, invading a forum that is established in one language and posting things in another language is rude. It is not using common sense. If you want to have a forum that is not established in your language, guess what? Make another forum. It's easy, it's simple.

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I'm assuming that since people can Babbletroll* into any forum that these are not moderated and/or can not be set up to allow certain members. That should be looked into. If people can't search for whatever they need and filter out languages they don't speak, then a site for every language that is being used on Orkut should be created. Or... they can always let it stay the same and the people will migrate elsewhere.






*Babbletroll- I just made that up :) Well, I think I did. I haven't ran into the term anywhere else. Babbletrolling is to post in a forum that is established in one language in a different language.

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