Global Voices Online

There are 15 million Web sites in the Russian segment of the Internet. They account for 6,5 percent of all Web sites available online. An average Russian Web site contains 255 pages, 159 thousand words, and 204 images.  These facts were revealed in the latest research “The Runet Content” by Yandex [RUS].

Google is pushing for more content on Kiswahili Wikipedia through Kiswahili Wikipedia Challenge: We invite you to take part in this challenge to create Wikipedia articles in Kiswahili. We hope to make the online experience richer and more relevant for 100 million African users who speak Kiswahili.

David on Formosa publishes a series of posts introducing some of the best Taiwan blogs in English(bridge bloggers).

Pink Tentacle has translated into English all of the “Top 60 Japanese words/phrases of 2009″, released by publisher Jiyu Kokuminsha: Included are plenty of references to Japan’s recent political shake-up, the ailing economy, and the blurring of traditional gender roles.

“I've always thought of autobiography as an attempt to leave behind–forever in memoriam–something more or less truthful about one's existence”: Signifyin' Guyana wonders what the first lines of your autobiography would be.

More on the Hungarian reactions to Imre Kertész's Die Welt interview - at Hungarian Spectrum. (Marietta Le's GV post about it is here.)

Anpontan's post about the word “obamu” (オバむ) , a Japanese word play that's a verb form of “Obama”, was picked up by James Fallows at the Atlantic and is making its way across the blogosphere, although very few Japanese people actually seem to have heard of the word, as Daniel Krieger at cnngo reports.

Nordic Voices writes about Finland's “language issue.”

Maud Newton writes about a newly-published anthology of immigrant writing, “Becoming Americans.” Sublime Oblivion examines the views of “Russian political analyst & nationalist Konstantin Krylov” on “international diasporas” and “the diaspora mentality.”