Just returned from Brazil last Thursday. Saw some of that while there.
The caipirinha was good.
$710.96... The price of freedom.
Posted on 07/17/2004 1:11:53 PM PDT by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
SAO PAULO, Brazil (Reuters) - Brazil has butted heads with the United States this year on issues ranging from cotton subsidies to the war in Iraq.
But perhaps none of the battles has been so personal as the one being fought on the Internet.
Thousands of Brazilians have become devotees of Orkut (http://www.orkut.com), a popular new social-networking site from Web search leader Google Inc.
Orkut allows members to organize themselves into online communities of friends, and friends of friends, to discuss everything from chess to sandwiches.
But the rush of Brazilians to join Orkut and rival social networking sites has upset some online users, who complain of a proliferation of messages posted in Portuguese, Brazil's native tongue.
Some users have even started communities specifically for people to air their gripes on this issue.
The United States has at least 153 million Internet users, compared with Brazil's 20 million. Still, Orkut said Brazilians dominated its membership roster in June, outnumbering Americans for the first time.
The site says it has more than 769,000 members, making it one of the largest and most popular of its type on the Internet. About 23.5 percent of the users are from the United States, while another 41.2 percent are Brazilians.
Iranians are a distant third place at about 6 percent.
SELECTIVE MEMBERSHIP
Orkut, named after Google software engineer Orkut Buyukkokten, made its debut in January and is still in the testing stages. Part of its allure is its exclusivity -- one can only join at the invitation of another member.
"Orkut maps one's social prestige, and Brazilians are by nature gregarious," said Beth Saad, a professor at the University of Sao Paulo's School of Communications and Arts.
Although more than one-fourth of Brazilians live in poverty, those who can afford Internet access have become avid Web surfers.
In terms of time spent on the Internet, Brazilians edged out the United States in May for the second month in a row, according to Ibope/NetRatings. The market researcher estimates that Internet use for Brazilians averaged 13 hours and 51 minutes in May, eight minutes more than for Americans.
The number of Brazilian visitors to community sites and online diaries rose 14.6 percent to 3.5 million in May from January, Ibope/NetRatings said.
Tammy Soldaat, a Canadian, got a sample of Brazilian wrath recently when she posted a message asking whether her community site on body piercing should be exclusive to people who speak English.
Brazilian Orkut users quickly labeled her a "nazi" and "xenophobe."
"After that I understood why everyone is complaining about these people, why they're being called the 'plague of Orkut,"' she said in a site called "Crazy Brazilian Invasion."
John Gibbs of Mountain View, California, has founded a community called "So many Brazilians on Orkut."
"When the average Orkut user goes to look at community listings to see what's out there, he'll see a list populated with pretty much all Portuguese communities," Gibbs said. "This is highly frustrating since Orkut is not a Brazilian service."
But Mateus Reis, a publicist who lives in Sao Paulo, said users should be free to write what they want, in the language of their choosing.
"Since we can invite anyone we want at Orkut, and my friends are Brazilians, it doesn't make sense talking to them in English," Reis said in Portuguese. "I use the language I know."
His compatriot Pablo Miyazawa has a more moderate view.
"Brazilians have the right to create anything they want in any language they want," Miyazawa said. "The problem is to invade forums with specific languages and write in Portuguese. Brazilians are still learning how to behave in the Net."
AN INTERNET FORCE
The Brazilians' ardor for the Internet extends to other community-based sites, and Web entrepreneurs are catching on to the potential business opportunities.
Lisa Kopp, spokeswoman for Orkut's competitor Friendster (http://www.friendster.com), said Brazilians are "an important group, with millions" of participants among its 7 million users.
Meanwhile, Brazilians account for nearly 211,000 of the 453,600 users of Fotolog (http://www.fotolog.net), which allows people to post a visual diary of their lives.
The site is negotiating with Internet providers in Brazil to offer a Portuguese-language version, said Adam Seifer, who founded Fotolog.
But Saad, the communications professor at University of Sao Paulo, said some of Brazil's exuberance about Orkut -- and the resulting clash of cultures -- is just another fad.
"I think what will happen is what occurred when the Web arrived in Brazil," she said. "There was a huge boom of people creating sites and now the number of active sites being used by Brazilians is a lot smaller than those registered."
ping
I was in Woodland Hills, Ca with friends at a Dennys one evening and a couple of guys came in wanting to order and the waitress couldn't understand them, so she called a half-dozen Mexicans out from the kitchen and a few other diners got up and went over to see if they could translate; finally the guys ordered by pointing at the pictures. They only spoke Potugese.
Portugese.
I'd say something more here but... I... just... gotta... SAMBA!
I would rather "jiggle"
Orkut? Never heard of it. Third world 'net users are welcome to lefty_google.
The other Romantic languages are not terribly close to Latin ~
I once got myself out of a bind with an Austrian border policeman who didn't know English by showing him I could understand a bit of Latin ~ and lo and behold, he knew Romanisch! (This was 35 years ago). I also purchased some gasoline in Luxembourg a couple of years later at a place where the locals spoke only Dutch and a residual Gallo ~ probably why they were running a gas station rather than working at real jobs.
Odds are there are some quite entertaining discussion threads in Orkut whether they are in English or Portuguese. Folks with some facility in Latin should try working their way through some of them (with a dictionary at the ready of course).
According to Amazon jungle legend, the first guarana-berry bush sprouted on the spot where a lightning bolt struck a pair of star-crossed lovers from rival Indian tribes. While Coke has countered with two guarana brands of its own, patriotic Brazilian consumers have been less than rapturous about gringo guaranas. Coke's fiercest Brazilian rival, a guarana bottler called Cia. Antartica, which controls one-quarter of the market for the Amazon elixir, has been ridiculing the soft-drink giant on TV ads that, in effect, accuse Coke of guarana envy. Now, Antartica says it's merging with Brazil's No. 2 guarana maker, a giant beverage firm called Cia. Cervejaria Brahma SA, to form a juggernaut that will give Coke even bigger headaches.
Antartica's current ad campaign in Brazil is less about making love than making war - with Coke. In one television commercial, an Antarctica pitchman stands before a rain-forest guarana plantation and directs a pointed question towards viewers: "Now ask Coca-Cola to show you the Coke tree." That ad came in retaliation for a Coke spot in which taste tests showed Brazilians preferring Kuat. Unfortunately for Coke, Kuat fared better against the competition in the ad than it has been doing at checkout counters [perhaps Coke has a new product in line called Quat, after the hallucinogenic plant leaf widely consumed in North Africa and the Middle East -Ed].
And Coke is now facing a new threat from mom-and-pop beverage producers taking advantage of cheap, nonreturnable bottles - and Brazil's ancient love affair with guarana. Not long ago, Maria Leticia Sanchez de Oliveira put some new life in a failing family bottling company in central Brazil by launching a guarana called Ginga, which means "jiggle." "We wanted a name that represented Brazil," she says. "We weren't thinking about sex. But if people are thinking about that when they buy Ginga, that's fine."
But somehow, the cultural characteristics do not transfer to Brazil on the Internet. It is a spam cesspool of bulletprooof web hosts and mass mail for hire places.
Under fourteen hours a month?? They sure aren't Freepers.
Perhaps they really meant 13 hr 51 min per day.
First you let the Brazillians take over Orkut, now you're exposing your Samba shares to them?!?
Slightly more serious, this story triggers my oh-big-deal reflex. Some people post in a language other than English on a glorified message board on the world wide web and other people get bent out of shape over it. Bleh. They can go start their own message board and delete any posts they don't like.
Just returned from Brazil last Thursday. Saw some of that while there.
The caipirinha was good.
$710.96... The price of freedom.
Guarana is good stuff.
Yes. It's a tactic that's been finely honed on FR's immigration threads for years.
Makes me wonder how many globalist neocons are actually Brazilian infiltrators.
Al Gore set up the internet for multiple languages?
What incredible foresight!
I'm surprised there isn't an orkut site in English coordinating the 'invasion' of Portuguese sites in English. No matter what they're talking about in Portuguese, show up with a coupla English friends and start a conversation about something random. Then call them Nazis when they object.
hehehehe you got that right
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