Just an announcement. I’m excited to say I’ve been contracted out to Street Smart Brazil’s blog as a weekly columnist where I’ll be writing about Brazilian culture. That means I’ll be linking to those posts from here every week, to tell you all about the newest post!
And for anyone in the SF Bay Area who is looking for Portuguese lessons here or even via Skype, get in touch with Luciana, the owner of Street Smart Brazil at info@streetsmartbrazil.com (or via her site).
Here’s my first column!
Over the last year or so there have been plenty of studies and graphs on the level of Brazilian participation on social networks. Here’s yet another, which I spent a minute or two on to put a bit of it in English. There’s more to it, but not much (here’s the link to the original).
Deep Brazil has a post with quite a few links for anyone who wishes to watch Brazilian TV. Check it out for some useful links…and while I usually steer clear of TV, I do have a secret link which I will now share.
So pick your poison, click away the ads and full-screen it. These are shows that are going on right now in Brazil.
At Rio Gringa, there’s a post with a study by a marketing guy named Rodrigo Polacco on 100 Brazilians who made it in New York. I have yet to really go through it but it looks interesting. Check it out!
It’s been two and a half years since I started this blog. I’ve tried to keep it focused on topics of interest to both my readers and myself, and more importantly, to not fall into the trap of only posting stories of all too common topics. I passed 300,000 views not too long ago, which means 16,000/month currently, and I’m hoping that number only climbs higher. Not too shabby, eh?
I thank everyone for their contributions, both to my blog and to the world of Brazil-blogging in English. I can only say that things will just get crazier from here on out since Brazil is now a major player in many areas and everyone will want their piece (or at least a taste). Hopefully in the not-too-distant future, I’ll have my own small piece (of land, that is).
Time to down that last shot in my bottle of cachaça from Minas. Here’s to a new bottle and another 1,000 posts!
Tin-Tin!
Brazilians have, on average, 231 friends on their social networks, only behind Malaysians who have 233, according to a study put out this Sunday by the international research company TNS. The study, done with 48.8 thousand people between ages 16 and 60 in 46 countries, shows that the Japanese are still the least ‘friended’ (with 29 friends on average), followed by the Tanzanians (38) and the South Koreans (50). – Source (in PT)
No surprise there but this whole idea of what a friend is has lost all meaning worldwide. There was a time when one reached the end of their life, if they had 4 or 5 real, true friends, that they were lucky. Now, everything has been ‘carnivalized’ to stupidity and we ‘like’ things instead of discuss them and add ‘friends’ instead of make them.
I came across a post by a guy named Gustavo on Tumblr about how Brazilians are geoblocked on many services. Geoblocking is blocking an Internet service based on where you live. I’m not sure on the specifics behind this practice or why it even has to occur because, for example, if backend agreements are already in place with major record labels, why can’t Brazilians listen to or download songs from those labels? We aren’t talking about giving Brazilians access to music from labels that don’t have agreements with certain services yet, so what’s the problem?
Gustavo says,
“Here in Brazil I can’t use Playstation Network, Hulu, iTunes (for media), Spotify (just like in the states), Last.fm (actually I need to pay for that) and the Kindle store just won’t allow me to download the newest and best stuff. And the list just keeps getting bigger and bigger as new services are launched.”
Anyone know why this is so, especially when Brazilians are heavy Internet users?
Over the weekend, I came across Talk 2 Brazil, a weekly English-language radio show with expat Tom Reaoch who lives in Campinas, Brazil. The show features interviews with important people in the Brazilian business sector. Each interview is about 45 minutes and you can choose and pick which episodes you wish to listen to by going through their list (which includes show descriptions).
I’ve heard a few shows so far and they are pretty good for gaining an understanding of what kinds of things are happening in a country which is also pretty ‘happening’.
“Today at our TechCrunch Disrupt
conference in San Francisco, Google’s Marissa Mayer took the stage to talk a bit with our own Michael Arrington. After she revealed a couple new Google Instant features, she went right into another topic: social.
Michael (of course) asked Mayer to disclose Google’s plans for their upcoming social strategy. Mayer (of course) would not do that. But then Michael turned the discussion to a social product Google does currently offer: Orkut. To hear Mayer tell it, the service never caught on in the U.S. simply because it was far too slow after its initial launch.
Orkut launched in January of 2004, and as Mayer remembers it, it attracted “several million users in a few days“. This caused the network to slow down to a crawl, Mayer noted. And that, in turn, turned a lot of users away from it — at least in the U.S. “It’s all about speed here,” she said.
In Brazil, where Orkut is still dominant, it was a different story. Those users didn’t mind the slowness, Mayer said (though she didn’t elaborate as to why they didn’t care). As a result, it took off, and even today it’s still the dominant social network.
Mayer noted that it took a little bit of time, but eventually Google was able to scale Orkut for its traffic surge. But by then it was probably already too late in the U.S., Mayer indicated.
Michael kept trying to get Mayer to say that in Google’s effort to play catch up in social in the U.S. they should buy Twitter or even Facebook. Again, she wouldn’t do that. She gushed about Twitter (which she said she uses daily), and she said she thought Facebook has a different mentality than what Google is trying to do with social.
Mayer also said that Google remains committed to Orkut — at least in Brazil and India where again, it’s big. “We’re pretty happy with it,” she said.” – Source
So I gave Google Street View in Brazil a try today and retraced my old stomping grounds in Rio. I have to admit, it was pretty cool to click around Botafogo and see the streets I used to walk on everyday. The one thing I would change? Ok, so there’s two things. One is the glitches that happen when you click around and the screen alternates between Street View and a wider city view without you wanting to do that. The second thing, the fact that the places I “visited” in Rio where labeled a landfill (depósito de lixo or lixão in Portuguese). Click on the photo to amplify and see another example here. What I think happened was that the word “aterro” (land reclamation) as in Aterro do Flamengo (the land area on the bay from the airport to Botafogo) was translated instead of being left alone and then they applied that to all of Rio.
Resumo: Por algum motivo, o Google Street View diz que o Brasil é um “lixão” (landfill, em inglês). Bem, pelo menos no Rio de Janeiro.
Oh, and for those of you who want to see what their cameras caught people doing? There’s already a few sites for that!
