As Paul drafted me to participate in this World Blog Day thing, I assembled a list of blog-types outside my normal blog-pale. However, I restricted my search to blogs of direct personal interest to me based on my life experiences. As an anti-chain-letter type, though, I decline to pass this along.

I have lived in both Mexico and Chile, and my wife is Cuban. Therefore, poking about for some Spanish-language blogs struck me as worthwhile. Now, I’m pretty much illiterate in Spanish, which means I am limited in my ability to follow the content. Be that as it may, I set out to locate a blog each of interest based in Cuba, Mexico, and Chile.

Tojomik appears to blog from Viña del Mar, Chile, where I lived in 1969. I had no luck tracking down a Havana-based blog (Google results for anything related to Havana are hopelessly junked up with political ranting and fingerpointing of both left and right). freak.monkeysensei.net originates in Guadalajara, as does the French-language Blogue du Colegio Franco-Mexicano de Guadalajara.

Speaking of French, I have also lived in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, and in this instance, the language stuck. Every now and then I wander through the Francophone side of the blogosphere, generally returning with a chastened sense of my own ignorance of the language. Given recent events, I thought it would be interesting to find an American blog in French published down Louisiana way. I also figured I should be able to dig a few up from Lausanne, the town I lived in while in Switzerland.

From Lousiana, we find Mais oui, la Louisiane! Il apparait que la Louisiane peut-etre inundeé et qu’elle a referé aux Google Actualité “pour lire de ce qui se passe en Louisiane.”

According to the geographic locator site above, climbtothestars.org is Lausanne-based, among 19 results. Random sampling revealed three abandoned or abortive blogs among the 19.

Finally, my family has had a long-standing and intimate relationship with an Algerian Berber family who sent one of their sons to the US fro graduate school. We visited them high in the Kabilye, a mountainous province to the south of Algiers, while we lived in Switzerland. Algeria has had a hard row to hoe over the past twenty-odd years, and thus I was uncertain that I would find anything from the country. The Berbers are a Muslim people that are distinct from Arab, and who have struggled within Algeria for the right to pursue education in their own language and script in addition to the predominant official languages of French and Arabic. It’s thought that the Berber presence in North Africa long predates the Roman. Interestingly, this language was also found in the Canary Islands, the part of Spain my father-in-law’s family emigrated to Cuba from around the turn of the century.

Of course, there are multiple resources to locate Algerian bloggers. To my frustration, though, I struck out on locating an Algerian Berber blogger; I did locate a sporadically updated blog, blognnegh…, identified as in Tamazeight, however.