Month: August 2006

I cam across an interesting discussion on multilingual blogging via this BloggingPro post. The question is: what’s the best way to do it?

I’ve thought about it more than once. I’ve even had to make this decision more than once. You see, my native language is Russian. My written Russian is horrible, but I still prefer it in certain situations. My English, I hear, is almost good. And being from Computer Science background, I prefer English for all my technical communications. English language is the father of all technical terms. Or at least those that I care about. There’s also another benefit to English for me – for the last ten years I’ve lived in Cyprus. English is like an official language here – everyone speak it. Oh, and one day I hope I’ll learn enough Greek to use it for blogging too.

So, what’s the best way to go about it? Everyone decides for themselve.

I personally leaned for separation. For this blog I use English only. As I do for some other blogs. And for some other blogs I use Russian, but exclusively as well. Usually, I blog about different things in different languages. But at those times that I use different languages to talk about the same thing, I still write it differently. It’s not a translation. It’s a totally other story. Because language is not the only thing which is different between people. The whole cultural part is. Russian-speaking people communicate differently from English-speaking people. As do Spanish-speaking people. And French-speaking people. And multilingual people. And everyone else…

So, I say – if you have to go with two or more languages for you company’s blog or just because you want to – separate them. Have a blog for each language. You’ll have more freedom this way. And your audience will be less fragmented. And more focused. And that’s what we all want, isn’t it?

One of the things that annoyes the hell out of me while blogging is a missing name. Scrolling through the feeds, following the links, I often end up reading an interesting post at someone’s blog. I read it, I think about it, I want to blog about it. Naturally, I might want to provide a quote from the original post and a link back to full post, so that readers of my blog know what I am talking about and have a way to go and read the full post at the original location, if they feel so inclined.

And it’s when I am trying to be civilized that I often have a problem. It’s either an anonymous blog, or it just doesn’t have a name, or there’s no hint of how to address the author of the post.

As an opposite example consider my blog. It might be a bit too much, but I prefer too much to too little. The title of the blog is “Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov”. It’s up there on the header image and it’s also in the title of the browser window. And every post has an author’s name attached to it. That’s just in case I’ll allow someone else blog here or will some day write a way too smart Perl script that’ll post instead of me. Anyone quoting from this blog has enough information to write “Leonid Mamchenkov said…”.

But what do you do when you want to quote from a blog that doesn’t have any title and has not information who the author is. Sometimes it’s just empty. At other times it’s so general that it’s useless. For example: John’s blog. Which John? There are at least a couple of millions of them in the world. Or even worse: sexy baby’s diary. Right. Like we haven’t seen any sexy babies before.

So, for the sake of quoting sanity, I beg you to make it dead clear who is the author of the text. Either put it in the title, or sign with the author name, or have it somewhere on the sidebar saying “Quote this text as XYZ Cave” or something.

Thank you.

I’ve spent a whole lot of time on Flickr during these last couple of days. As usual, it was very inspirational, so I just couldn’t leave my camera at home when we went for our daily evening walk with Maxim. Mostly, of course, I was taking pictures of Maxim, but a few other subjects made their way through.

The results can be seen here.