Everyone working on the web around the world would like to connect with people in Asia, but it's not easy to do. That dynamic and populous region is often focused inward and it's made inaccessible to outsiders because there is so little information about what goes on there available in the web's dominant language, English.
OpenWeb Asia is a new project that aims to change those trends.
Asian Tech
I just spent last week visiting startups in Japan (more on that later) and found a strong desire to connect with the outside world. Language was the number one barrier, followed closely by a concern that people in the US and Europe were inaccessible to the smallest startups in Japan.
There's a strong mutual interest in connecting Asian tech and the rest of the world, though. As a writer, for example, I feel like my writing is incomplete if I don't incorporate some knowledge about how startups in Japan are tackling the problems I'm writing about that US and European companies are engaging with. In one meeting in Tokyo last week, I met government representatives from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry who were working on open standards for geo-location services. How cool is that? I had no idea that work like that, so grounded in the same kinds of open standards conversations we're having here, was going on there.
OpenWeb Asia
Enter OpenWeb Asia, where English-limited readers around the world can learn about what's going on in Asia. I've imported the 15 blog OPML file into my feed reader and encourage you to do the same. (If you've never imported an OPML file into Google Reader, for example, save the file linked to on OpenWeb Asia to your desktop, then go to "settings" in G Reader, then to the Import option, then upload the file and you'll be subscribed to all 15 blogs at once.)
One addition that I think would be nice would be filtered feeds for the 15 blogs on the page, using AideRSS, so that casual readers could catch just the most popular stories from the OpenWeb Asia blogs.
We can, however, set up a Google Custom Search Engine easily - see below. I'll be using this whenever I can to check and see who's doing what in the Asian tech scene. Feel free to do the same yourself.
I hope that OpenWeb Asia succeeds in building bridges from the Asian tech communities out into the rest of the world.