At a recent session I attended on site design one of the paticipants told of his experience coaching a group of high school kids who were preparing a site for their school. He reported that he couldn't convince them that, since the web gave them universal exposure, they should prepare their site in English instead of in Hebrew. As I heard his story, I became more and more convinced that the kids were right.
The session participant explained to us that since the web created a worldwide community it would be counter productive to produce a web site in Hebrew that would be understood by only a miniscule percentage of that community. High school students in the United States wouldn't be able to find anything in common with high school students in Israel if they couldn't read the web pages.
And I found myself asking myself: do I really want to establish contact with the entire worldwide web "community"? Is community possible when it's all-encompassing? Yes, having tons of people visiting my web sites isn't something that I'd complain about, but I think that I'd be more pleased if they were visited by a smaller group of people who found that the topics discussed in those sites somehow touched their lives.
For a group of Israeli high school students, other Israeli high school students are their frame of reference. It's with them that they seek to establish contact, and thus they reach out in Hebrew. They may not yet be web savvy, but they seem to be more "community" savvy than their coach.