The first question, when starting a blog is the question about the audience (see lauri’s recent article). After admitting that this blog isn’t purely for myself, the next question is about the language (“First Post!!!1” vs. “Erster!!!!1”, “Hello World” vs. “Hallo Welt”).
Since at the beginning of this blog at least a minority of possible readers was not german speaking, this blog started in english, although it is not my native language. (Another reason was, that i wanted to improve my english skills when writing about non-computer topics). Of course there are sometimes topics I want to write about, but since I am too lazy to translate, they were never published (But maybe these entries are so banal, that they aren’t worth to be published anyway). Also, writing in english takes a longer time than it would take to write in german, so I sometimes don’t have the time to write. Maybe this makes my blog less personal.
Another point, there are most likely a lot of germanisms in my entries, that discourage the readers. The German language has already entered silently when I started to add my blogroll to the left side of the indexpage.
Several reports have been published, that the real borders of the “borderless internet” are languages, since very few people are able to express themselves in more than one language, and most people don’t speak more than two languages, or are interested in reading longer articles in foreign language. (And babelfish has still a lot of shortcomings to be usable on a regular basis)
I have seen several blogs on the internet, that mix languages, I don’t like that idea, the blogs look cluttered.
Another solution would be, to write two blogs in different languages. An interesting experiment. Which blog would have the more personal articles? Which blog would have more articles? Which blog would have more readers?
Unfortunately I currently don’t have the time to write two blogs, or to translate my blog entries, so this questions will stay unanswered.