Maki at DoshDosh is introducing a new regular feature: Weekend Media.

I consume a lot of information every week through all forms of media: Apart from blogs and online magazines, I regularly read books and watch films. I love to learn new ideas and I thought why not share what I read or watch with my readers?

It’s an interesting idea, which brought to mind a problem I see for bloggers in two situations:

Bloggers whose mother tongue is not English

Despite the exponential growth of non-English Internet users and bloggers, the language of commerce on the Internet continues to be English. There must be some serious challenges to bloggers who write in English but for whom it’s a second-language.

This has been brought home to me in recent years, since I became part of another group:

English-language bloggers living in non-English speaking countries

One of the downsides of my family’s move to Israel was the comparative dearth of English-language media. We all read voraciously, and used to listen to National Public Radio pretty much constantly; I miss that continual exposure to new ideas and concepts.

The Internet has softened the impact of this. Podcasts and streaming radio help a lot, and news is easily available online. But oh how I miss wandering into Borders or Barnes & Noble and just being faced with a world of books … and, more to the point; books that I can easily read.

Our kids have absorbed Hebrew pretty thoroughly, but neither my wife nor I would choose to read for pleasure in Hebrew, nor to learn complex ideas. Our Hebrew is on the practical level: “Open packet and microwave for three minutes,” or, “Warning - Steep Cliff Approaching”. Despite living in a country with an insanely large number of books published each year we are culturally pretty much illiterate (Israel publishes more books per capita than any other country in the world, in a language spoken by no more than fifteen million people worldwide).

So English-language media is vital to us, both for personal satisfaction and for business inspiration. The only magazine we continue to get is the sublimely wonderful New Yorker, since the cost of overseas subscriptions is very high. Otherwise we rely on bookswapping with friends; our blessedly excellent library here in Efrat, a trove of both Hebrew and English books; and of course the Internet.

I find a lot of niche-market inspiration in books, magazines and web sites that are unrelated to internet marketing, and I’m curious if other marketers do the same thing. What are the sources of your inspiration? Where do you look for ideas? And I’m particularly interested to hear from bloggers whose second language is English. What are the sources you use most often to stay connected?

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