Editor's note: Over at Small Business Trends, we do a regular weekly series of reviews of business weblogs. This is the forty-second in that series, called PowerBlog Reviews.
Opportunity Wales is a blog serving small and medium sized businesses, (SMEs), which make up 99.9% of the businesses in Wales. The site is a European-funded initiative designed to help SMEs with eCommerce.
The blog was launched in the spring of 2003 and is one section of a larger site. Anyone can register to post on the blog. The site gets registered users from all over the world.
This is not your everyday, run-of-the-mill blog. It is unusual, even unique, in several ways.
First, it is bilingual, with most of it written in both English and Welsh. The bilingual aspect is a legal requirement in Wales. As Paul Squires, the Head of Web Services, tells me:
"...our site is almost completely bilingual in terms of original content - several thousand pages. This makes our site one of the largest Welsh-language sites on the Internet. Where we don't translate is in content sourced externally - including Weblog entries written by users. This is due to both resource impact our side, and the possibility that certain mannerisms (inflections, humour, slang etc) that one uses everyday in English may be mis-interpreted in Welsh - or indeed vice-versa. We overcome this by our 'Best of the Weblog' which is a commentary on the best postings each week, which we write up in both languages.Another unusual attribute is that the weblog engine was built completely from scratch — something you don't see everyday. The weblog was also a finalist in the UK government Web awards 2003 and finalist in the Information Management Awards 2003.So, whilst the interface of the Weblog can be swapped around, we leave it to the user to decide what they want to write and in what language, and then round up the best stuff in a commentary style for everyone to read each week in both English and Welsh."
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