Wow, ever since I started a responsible blog, this one is free for immature whining!
Awesome!
I hate it when people put phrases like this in their blogs:
Read the whole article.
Or:
Read the whole thing.
I mean it’s like they’re saying:
Do what I tell you because I told you.
*shakes fist*
I was talking to my mom tonight about Blogamundo. She is interested in the idea, and she is actually quite the geek herself — a wiz at quite a few desktop apps, an email addict extraordinaire, and lately even a instant messaging afficionado… I don’t hesitate to ask her questions about what’s where on Windows or OSX, for instance. (Though I haven’t converted her to Linux… yet!)
So she’s no Luddite.
But she asked me this:
“How do you get on to the blogs?”
And actually, I thought that was a damn good question. The word “blog” has seeped into popular usage, and most people will no longer stare quizzically if you use the word.
But still, what’s the answer? I told her that what you have to do is find a blog you like, and then you follow the links in the blogroll. But she asked me how she was supposed to find a blog she likes. Which is also a damn good question. Anyway, I ended up saying something along the lines of “t-e-c-h-n-o-r-a-t-i dot com, or blogsearch dot google dot com, yeah, you just sort of start searching at one of those…”
But it still didn’t feel like the right answer.
It’s easy for someone who has been blogging in one way or another for maybe 4 or 5 years (like myself) to be weirded out by such queries. But it’s not surprising. I’m going to sit down with her and just give her a little tour tomorrow, some big name blogs and the blog search engines and stuff.
I wonder if in the future there will be a job description along the lines of “media filterer: someone who assesses the interests of a client, and then proceeds to filter bring media that meet the client’s interests.”
The bottom time is that it still takes a lot of time and effort to “get” blogs.
Just in time for Halloween, the Blogamundo Hacklog has come to life. Jonas Galvez and myself will be blogging about the trials and tribulations of starting up Blogamundo.com, our new project to help jumpstart translation in the blogosphere.
All the language & translation stuff that’s been showing up around here will be there, henceforth.
This blog will probably be dedicated to cats and teen angst.
Because there isn’t enough of that on the web, after all.
As for the lack of updates here of late, here’s the deal: I’m starting a brand new project pretty soon, and to go with it there will be a new blog. All the stuff having to do with language, translation, and programming will be in the new blog — this one will remain for everything else.
(Unfortunately, comment spam has forced me to turn on “registration” here, I’ll try to fix it.)
As for the new project: it’s a new kind of translation tool for the web . I’ve been working on it pretty much full time with the only other guy in the company the South American Geek Department, Brazil Chapter: Jonas Galvez.
The site’s called Blogamundo!
We haven’t set up a proper mailing list yet, but you can drop me an email with Blogamundo? in the subject line if you’re curious about the project!
More soon, not because I’m trying to be stealth-mode-y, but just because we haven’t set up the new blog yet.
☺
For information, visit:
Katrina PeopleFinder Project - Katrina Help Wiki
What is the Katrina PeopleFinder Project doing?
(1) Creating a technology specification for easily exchanging refugee information. A volunteer effort is working to assist online databases in implementing the specification.
Volunteer here: Organizing dissemination of data standards
(2) Coordinating volunteers that are writing software that takes information from online databases and putting it into a central database provided by http://Salesforce.com Foundation.
Volunteer here: Implementing data exchange from existing sites to central database
(3) Organizing a massively parallel volunteer data entry project to enter refugee data posted to online bullitin boards into a central database by hand.
Volunteer here: Organizing a massively parallel volunteer data entry effort
Note, please feel free to copy this post to your blog.
A few nights back I spent a while talk a friend of mine into starting a blog about her studies of Occitan and thereabouts. I even hacked up a personalized blog layout to persuade her… to make a long story short, I think we may have a new linguablogger on the block ☺
Check it out: Blòg d’Oc.
As she’s just dipping her toes into the blogosphere at this point, she’s adopting the penname of Jo, which is the Occitan word for “I”. Her recent work has consisted of studying Gascon dialectology as well as general theoretical linguistics. She tells me that the blog will be multilingual: English, Occitan (the Gascon dialect, right Jo?), German, and perhaps some French as well. So give her the official linguablog welcome!
Er… is there an official linguablog welcome? There should be. ☺
(By the way, anyone know of other blogs in Occitan?)
Seems to have become “languages of India week” here at Infundibulum.
Pankaj Narula dropped a friendly comment on my previous post on Hindi and Unicode, explaining that Hindi blogs are in fact almost universally encoded as Unicode, thanks in large part to Blogger.com’s good Unicode support. And so it seems that among Hindi bloggers at least, everyone is quite up-to-date with their language technology…
Just for fun I decided to poke around in the Tamil blogosphere to see if the situation was similar, and it turns out that Blogspot is equally prominent among Tamil bloggers:
Of the 613 blogs in Tamil listed at the directory at the Tamil Bloggers List, 513 are hosted on Blogspot–so we can assume that most Tamil blogs are encoded in Unicode.
After a bit of digging I could only find one blog among the non-blogspot crowd that seemed to have encoding troubles — “peyariliyin pinaaththalgaL.” At first I thought it was in some mysterious legacy encoding, but it turns out that blogdrive.com seems to have its servers set to send Windows 1252. This one, on the same server, specified more fonts and ended up being visible to me. So it was mainly a font thing. (Update: That blog is now utf-8 now as well.)
(Incidentally, poking about in the occasional English comment in Tamil blogs, it seems to be the case that the language name is often transliterated as Tamizh rather than Tamil.)
The rather magnificent-looking Tamil letter up there in the corner is TAMIL LETTER I (U+0B87). It looks fun to write. ☺
By the way, am I weird to be obsessed with figuring out how languages I can’t speak a word of are encoded?
I’ve been following the story about Microsoft’s latest adventure in China with some interest, but it really wasn’t until I read the latest post at Global Voices that I saw that this story is directly related to a topic I’ve been sort of obsessed with lately, what I think of as “ the wall of translation .”
If you missed the story, basically what’s happened is that Microsoft is cooperating with China’s censorship of MSN Spaces blogs and blocking words like “democracy” and “human rights” in the way some blogging systems block words like “fuck.”
I’m glad mine doesn’t. 
Anyway, what I mean by the “ wall of translation ” is that this is a story where a dialog could take place on a large scale between Chinese-speaking and English-speaking bloggers (or speakers of any language, really), if there were an effective mechanism for that translation to take place.
But the conversation hits a wall, because the connections and routines that make translation happen aren’t public.
Presumably some day machine translation will solve that problem. But that day isn’t today. And despite what Google says, I don’t think it’s going to come within in the next few years.
People need to think about this problem, a lot, because it must be solved.
I think about it.
A lot.
Am I the only one who’s starting to feel like Bloglines is becoming, uh, work?
I appreciate the fact that I can get through a lot of sites with it, but lately it seems like all I’ve been doing is going there to see if sites are updated and middle-clicking in Firefox so I can read them in the background. Yeah, it saves time, but I used to use Bloglines to read stuff.
The frames interface drives me bonkers. It’s easy to forget which blog you’re reading once you’ve scrolled down a few posts, and the left-hand frame gives you no indication (no highlighting, nothing). Plus, the font they use is awful. Tiny.
And half the time stuff wrap within the right pane. What to do then? There’s just no way to read the content, aside from mousing about like nuts, scrolling back and forth. So again, I end up opening the site in the background.
I love Bloglines, I’ve used it for over a year, and let’s face it, you can’t beat the price — but I think it’s time they thought about a design overhaul. NewsGator Online is a bit nicer in layout terms (no frames!), but they have the same blog-title-highlighting issue, and anyways, my 200-feed’s worth of Bloglines inertia isn’t likely to budge any time soon.
