Google has made its blog-publishing system, Blogger, officially available in Arabic, Persian and Hebrew, bringing to 40 the number of languages supported. Blogger now supports right-to-left writing for those languages.
The announcement was made on The Official Google Blog, on 27 January. Blogger was launched by Pyra Labs in August 1999 as one of the earliest dedicated blog-publishing tools, and was acquired by Google in February 2003. Blogs in Arabic and Persian have been hosted by Blogger from its pre-Google days, but the service is only now officially supporting the languages.
Technology blog TechCrunch commented: “The Middle East presents strong growth opportunities for Google and other companies, as younger generations embrace the Internet. Even in more closed countries such as Iran, blogging has long been popular and Blogger has often been the platform of choice. Bloggers in many Middle Eastern countries blog at their own risk, with sites regularly becoming blocked or, as is the case in countries such as Saudi Arabia, bloggers are arrested and jailed.”
(Source: BBC Monitoring research 27 Feb 08)
