New feature: Indigenous Blogs!

The Indigenous Tweets project turned six months old on Saturday, coincidentally the same day we reached 1000 followers on Twitter.  To celebrate these milestones, I've added an exciting new feature to the site that tracks blogs written in 50 indigenous and minority languages.  You can find this new feature at http://indigenoustweets.com/blogs/ (I also registered http://indigenousblogs.com/ but it should just redirect you to the other address).

Indigenous Blogs: Main Page

For now, I'm only tracking blogs hosted at Blogspot, which hosts more than 90% of the blogs written in the languages I'm interested in.  That said, I hope to add other popular services like Wordpress, Tumblr, MovableType, etc. going forward.

The site is laid out just like Indigenous Tweets: there is a main page with a table of the supported languages, and then if you click on a language in the table you'll be taken to a new page that shows all of the blogs in the language along with some statistics for each: number of posts, percentage of posts in the language, total number of words, date and title of last post.

Indigenous Blogs language page: Irish/Gaeilge

What I hope will be most useful are the feeds that I've provided on each language page; these will contain every post in every blog written in the language.  You'll see a link to the feed on the right-hand side of the page, with the text "Subscribe to all posts in this language: ".  With most browsers, you can subscribe to the feed just by clicking on this icon (if you've never used a news feed before, here is a useful introduction).  I subscribe to feeds using Google Reader, but there are many other popular readers like NetVibes, NetNewsWire, My Yahoo!, and RSSOwl.

If you'd like to be more selective about what you read, you can pick any blog that looks good to you, click on it in the table to visit the blog itself, and subscribe from there.  Most Blogspot blogs have a link that says something like "Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)", usually at the bottom of the page.

If you know of a Blogspot blog that is missing from one of the tables, simply enter it into the form on the right-hand side of the page.  It should appear in the table within 24 hours.

Finally, like the Indigenous Tweets site, I've designed things to make it easy to translate the individual language pages.   The Indigenous Blogs pages for Aragonese, Aymara, Welsh, Frisian, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Haitian Creole, Māori, Chicheŵa, and Yiddish are already translated; great thanks to Juan Pablo Martínez Cortés, Ruben Hilaire, Carl Morris, Rhys Wynne, Wim Benes, Michael Bauer, Jean Came Poulard, Karaitiana Taiuru, Edmond Kachale, and Jordan Kutzik for providing these translations. There are just seven short messages to translate (in addition to the 13 needed for the Indigenous Tweets translation):

• Title
• Author
• Posts
• Last Post
• Words
• Any blogs missing?
• Subscribe to all posts in this language 

I hope you all enjoy this new feature, and I hope it inspires some of you to start a blog in your own language!