Folha de São Paulo, one of Brazil’s top daily newspapers, today had several articles about weblogs (all in Portuguese):

“How to set up your weblog”, a step-by-step article using the Brazilian Blogger clone;

“Virtual diaries become popular on the Internet”, discusses several Brazilian alternatives to Blogger;

“Check out a selection of 50 Brazilian Weblogs” mentions several friends, such as Mario AV, Cora Rónai’s InternETC, the Boëchat Brothers’ Telescópica, and Tony de Marco’s Nada. Congratulations!

“Many still view weblogs with scepticism” cites several webloggers’ and journalists’ views;

“Users approve weblog’s simplicity” has more webloggers’ opinions.

All in all, it’s good to have weblogging noticed by mainstream news. The articles linked above are short and somewhat simplistic, practically ignoring non-hosted publishing methods. The Brazilian weblogging community is surprisingly large but somewhat insular, and the percentage of computer geeks seems to be lower than in the US; many webloggers are students or have advertising or publishing backgrounds. Most webloggers here can read English but few write it well enough to contribute effectively to the international community.

A disparity can be noted in some weblog indexes. There are no Brazilian webloggers in TechnoRati’s Top 100. On the other hand, although many of the BlogStreet’s Top 100 are found in the TechnoRati list, about 20 Brazilians are there too…