As the spanish saying goes,
let them talk about us, even if it's badly, but that has not been the case for
this article written by Xeni Jardin on the spanish blogosphere. It has raised quite a ruckus, most of it in spanish, except
this one in HispaLibertas, which has been written in english.
The article basically says that this has been the year where the blogs have exploded in Spain (which they indeed have:
the blogómetro, a site that tracks links in the Spanish blogosphere, now contains almost three times as much as it did at the beginning of the year), and it attributes it to the fact that people look for alternative information on events such as the anti-war movement and the
Prestige wreck, and subsequent oil spill.
Most of the points raised by the Hispalibertas post are valid: it does not represent the Spanish blogosphere, or the Spanish IT and social situation at large. Besides, it would have done her no harm doing her homework using Google:
looking up Spanish Blogosphere will point you to
this presentation we did in the New Media Paradigms conference,
this paper we presented in BlogTalk, and several other articles, like
this one, which points to several resources on the spanish blogosphere.
Still, it's a fact that the spanish blogosphere has expanded, and continues to do so, but I would say it's mainly due to the creation of new spanish and catalan-speaking hosting sites such as
BlogIA and
Bitacoles, and of spanish-wide aggregators such as
Bitacoras.net and
Bitacoras.com. And of course, the quiet (and not-so-quiet) labor of lots of people who have made blogs known and accessible to lots of people.
