Edelman, Technorati and Asia

There are a complicated series of posts around the place about Technorati's relationship with Edelman. See Om Malik here and Edelman's Steve Rubel here and here about how the project is coming to an end.

I was interested in Steve's comments about the Asian versions. He says:

Work on the Asian language sites - Korean and Chinese - has ceased. In China there are access issues and Korea data quality is less than desirable because most blog platforms don't ping. That's the nature of the culture.

The objective of the programme was to produce "localized versions of Technorati that can understand what a user inputs in their native language". This was previously not possible, Rubel says, noting that "the one exception here is Technorati Japan."