I don’t want it to be right but it probably is: ULN at chinayouren predicts Google Buzz will be harmonized and fast, the only question being how quickly.

Personally, I had to invoke my own personal Buzz firewall the first day the service appeared in my gmail. As I squandered precious brain time on update-after-amusing-update, I suddenly realized the Buzz Unread count was growing faster than I could read, let alone actually get other work done. So I turned it off — i.e. dug deep into gmail options and eliminated the Buzz category from my sidebar.

Still, I’d rather not see it blocked, since I agree that has ominous implications for gmail itself.

Language connection? Oh, that’s part of ULN’s predictions in Step 6 of the Google Buzz doom sequence:

More than 50% of the words on GBuzz worldwide are in mandarin characters, and about 10% of them are some form of 妈/逼 word construction (mother /cunt).

For readers new to the ribald world of mā and bī (妈/逼), suffice it to say they’re plentiful in the less harmonious regions of the Chinese internet. But I wonder if there’s a way to turn ULN’s facetiousness into a testable hypothesis. There was no time to do an actual corpus count on BBS vs government media content of naughty words, but that would be a no-brainer result anyway. Maybe the more interesting comparison would be similar contexts in different countries. Let’s say you compare the nether reaches of US political discussion with that of China. Is the ratio of foul language different? Unfortunately this is a lot tougher than simple word counts, say, “fuck” vs “cào 操”. Maybe some enterprising grad student has a paper to write…