Following the downtime experienced by those on the Blogger platform, some will welcome a few new features for the system announced in the wee hours of the night. The blogging platform is now capable of employing Arabic, Hebrew and Persian.
Aside from the sociological ramifications (we’ll get to those in a second), the Blogger team considers this a not insignificant feat of programming, too. This is since those three languages (as opposed to the other 37 languages Blogger supports) are written from right to left. To accomplish this, they’ve flipped the entire interface around, and created a suite of right-to-left templates.
Instructions for resetting your blog and installing the new templates to one of the new languages can be found at the announcement post at Blogger Buzz.
More to the point of the social ramifications of the move to new languages, most of us that inhabit the social media space primarily can see the benefits to these tools being readily available, and of all the places on the planet, the region of the Middle East is the most likely candidate for positive results from decreased barriers to open communication. In other war-torn areas, we’ve seen what an influx of technology can do for those seeking to raise awareness and find solutions in the face of what is usually state-sponsored oppression.
In the Middle East, especially known for blocking sites that violate moral regulations, having a tool like Blogger that is simple to implement and provides a large platform to the world (think Salam Pax) can on the whole only lead to good things.
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