April 6, 2003
Alright, I know all of you (3 readers including myself) want to be confused with more Internet lingo, so here is a new one: Klog. The word apparently comes from the combination of two words: Knowledge + Blog (sorta like me making ‘blortal‘ — ‘blog’ + ‘portal’).
I originally bumped into it after a friend from New York, Bobby Taunton, messaged me in reference to the German/Google translation topic (he sent me my site translated in Russian and oddly enough, it was the same translator I used back in the one semester I took Russian [and bumped into Dave at]). Among the links Bobby sent me was the word “Klog” and after a quick search on Google I found this Radio post (by Spike Hall) with an explanation and definition:
“A K-Log is a personal Web site that contains annotated links to other Web sites, Intranet resources, pictures, multimedia, documents, and other useful material. They are organized by time in a daily format (with the most recent posts first). It is important to remember that K-Logs are living sites that are authored by individuals. They reflect what a person is thinking about and doing during the course of the day. They are archives of experiences, organized in a way that makes it easy for visitors to understand. A K-Log is a tool that runs on your desktop. The interface for a K-Log is your browser. A K-Log combines a weblog publishing tool and news reader. K-Logs are used for knowledge sharing in corporations and nonprofits.”
Now that is from a blog Mr. Hall found on John Robb’s Radio site. Additionally, Mr. Hall thinks that definition can be Slimfasted, stating:
“First, A k-log (knowledge log) is a weblog, meeting the definitional requirements of weblog. Second, a klog also demonstrates/documents a knowledge claim and/or it documents and illustrates the dynamic individual process of a quest for knowledge.”
So I guess my blog can now be called a klog — yet another good buzz word to pat my resume with.
For more information on klogs and klogging, check out Phil Wolff’s site — extensive only begins to describe it.
I was on Blogshares yesterday (yea, I have been captivated by the idea, though a little disillusioned at its current results) and noticed a small ad banner appear in the top right corner of certain screens. It appears the owner have implemented BlogAds.com as a way to obtain a source of revenue. This fulfills one of the questions I asked Jason the other day, as I was wondering how Seyed Razavi would pay for the enormous amount of bandwidth he is probably burning through currently. BlogAds itself seems pretty simple, I might look into that as a way to sell my body-enlargement kits.
I clicked on the current ad and was taken to the blog of a German-based ‘e-consultant‘ named Martin Roell. Here is yet another reason I wish I learned German in college instead of Spanish (although, German would hardly assist my travels here in Texas). Anyways, if you look at the top right corner there are several flags which when clicked upon will use Google’s translator.
Now, I’m quite familiar with Google’s translators within a search (as in, I google a phrase and one of the results can be translated, I could just click the button and poof, no more BabelFish), but I wasn’t familiar with the ability to insert the script like Mr. Roell did.
So to have some fun, I plugged my url into where his domain name was up in the Address bar, flipped the en and de and got part of this page translated. So I’m not just 100% All Natural, I’m 100% Ganz Naturlich. Hoping that it wasn’t my Norweigan heritage that made Google’s translator upset, I ran over to their main translation page typed in my domain and still found the majority of text untranslated. So I went to Google’s Translation FAQ to find the answer, it was not there.
And I leave you with the German Weblog Community website (powered by Sunlog might I add). Clean design.
When I was digging up GNU-related projects for GNUblog.com I got reacquainted with a distribution of Linux called Debian.
If you scroll to the bottom of the main page you’ll see a large list of languages to translate the site into. One of them is esperanto.
Quick history of the language. It was created by a Polish eye-doctor, Ludwig L. Zamenhoff in 1887, to be a second language that everyone could use as a common international tongue. Well, not to judge too early, but I don’t think it caught on like chlamydia.
There are dozens of organizations around the world that act as education and coordination centers to help promote the part Romantic part Germanic and part Slavic language. Here is a link to the main one based in America.
Hehe, I got a kick out of the About section, stating:
“Of the many projects and proposals for an international language over the centuries, Esperanto is the only one that has stood the test of time and is being spoken today. It is in daily use by many thousands of people all over the world, and the number is growing constantly.”
Unlike the billions that speak English, French, Spanish, German, Russian or Japanese already – somehow one of the existing ones cannot become the international (or il8n) language.
I did think this was an interesting statement too:
“The second major reason for Esperanto’s success is that it is neutral. It belongs to no one country. [snip]…[snip] Esperanto is not the property of any one nation, group of nations, or social class. It belongs to everyone. It has no political or historical implications to hinder its acceptance.”
Ha, I thought I owned English, I mean, I got a trademark on it. Actually, that statement is pretty misleading, you own your own words, you can only speak for yourself and you alone decide what a word means. There is no collective “we” that can somehow speak for you (unless you’ve become a Borg). Anyways, if you have time and want to brag about something, learn Esperanto. I’d stick with English though, especially while using the Internet.
In addition to the European and American media, here are a few sites with continually updated alternative news.
First, is Al-Jazeera. I didn’t know what to expect when I visited it for my first time (I didn’t bother going there when it went live, because of the enormous traffic and hacking). The site layout and design looks decent enough and the translations are pretty good too. Up until the end of this week, Al-Jazeera was using the world-class server solution company Akamai — and then abruptly, Akamai cancelled their support contract.
I can see how the Board of Directors and executives could be nervous at having one of their clients be as high-profile as Al-Jazeera is, and under tremendous pressure at having to decide whether to give them technical expertise. Consequently, someone contacted me yesterday, to see if Collectrix would host “adult content.” Hehe, not quite the same thing as a geo-political war with 2,000 pound bombs and Abrams tanks, but still, it wasn’t the easiest decision for me to make.
For more on Akamai, here is the company history and the name is pronounced: AH kuh my – it is Hawaiian for intelligent, clever and cool (side note: my dad mentioned these guys around ‘96 when he was doing work for a now defunct dotcom called OnNet Solutions — he had only good things to say about Akamai and their services).
And here are two diametrically opposite (in how they report) sites. Iraqwar.ru is a Russian-based website that supposedly gets all of its information from various Russian defense agencies. If nothing else, you get an idea as to what Cyrillic looks like — Iraqwar.ru tends to cast a darker, iconoclastic picture of how the Coalition forces are doing. Read a couple of the reports in the Events section to see what I mean.
On the other hand, Debka is largely the Israeli equivalent to Robert Murdoch’s Fox Network. Supposedly, Joseph Farah (editor and founder of WorldNetDaily) owns a portion of stock in Debka — WND does carry exclusive Debka reports once a week. So, you’ll see some of the neoconservative philosophy espoused in the reporting from time to time (jingoism). At the very least, you get to see what Hebrew looks like and their stories are just as entertaining as the Iraqwar.ru site mentioned above.
Here are some more links I came across the last few days.
Another link Bobby sent me was this collection of weblog software, or rather a list of sites that have something to say about blogging software (RU stands for Radio Userland fyi).
To see if there was any blogging software I hadn�t seen or used, I went with door number one and found myself here.
Now that is what I call a list. Though, if you look closely, some of the links are to robust content-management systems than simple weblogging software (like PHP-Nuke and Slash versus Blogger or Cafelog). This is definitely one of the best compendiums I’ve found so far (even though it has just its name mentioned check out Pivot).
And here is Al Macintyre’s list of web syndication sites – I went through all of them and found the following sites useful:
This is part of the DMOZ project (the Open Directory) and you can submit your own personal weblog to be added (I do not know how long it takes). Mine still hasn�t come up and I submitted it on Tuesday evening.
I actually bumped into BoingBoing many moons ago and I might have even submitted my site this past week. Here is the suggestion form for you to add your blog to their database. Be specific, don’t be shy.
Bloglinker similar to BlogRolling, only I got it to work without any problems. If you do decide to try it out, click on mine and see how I modified it – the default version is very tacky, I just slimmed it down to a simple link to my stored list. The guys that made BL also are the brains behind mymedialist, which “lets you remotely manage a list of music, books, films or videogames on your blog or website. It can be embedded anywhere on your webpage and can be easily configured to fit the existing design of your site.” This seems pretty neat, however I don’t actively listen to much music or watch many movies/TV.
I didn’t add this greenspun link to the list because they don’t syndicate you, it’s just a large unorganized guestbook.
Blogster - these guys are really just trying to get hits out of you to spam you with ads (at least that is how it has come across). In addition, it was difficult to find how visitors could vote for your site without you running scripts to create popup ads everywhere (something I won’t ever do). Unless they modify how they operate or register a real domain (like blogster.net), I will remove them from my personal links (I’ll probably still keep them on the Syndication sites).
Blozom – Yet another weblogging software, however it’s for Mozilla and uses flat files (not database driven, ie: MySQL). I’m not quite sure if the developers meant to use a name so close to blosxom, but it could confuse others.
BlogaboutBlogs – I thought this blog would do as the title suggests, but as you can see, there isn�t much for material or resources within the confines of it. Hopefully that will change.
GeoURL – Haha, boy originally I did something very wrong with the GeoURL, as no one resided within a radius of 500 miles. I live one mile from UT Dallas, so something wasn�t quite right. My coordinates I inputted were S 6.8066701 E 33.003475 which places me dead center in the middle of R’lyeh, the Shub-Internet equivalent to Atlantis (as in, it does not exist).
As it turns out, I didn’t add the -9 part to the Longitude. A quick step-by-step for those of you wanting to know how to add this function to your site. Click here, for GeoURL’s resource page.
Use the vaunted TerraServer (my friends and I used to try and find houses of girls we had crushes on, talk about being losers).
Then, look up your location by address. Click the Topo Map under Available Images (the first one). It’ll load an image, then automatically reload again, but with the proper coordinates. If you are unable to read the numbers off the map, just look up at the URL in the Address bar, it’ll have the latitude and longitude.
And I leave you with this funny message from Weblogs.com:
“Thanks for the ping, however we can only accept one ping every five minutes. It’s cool that you’re updating so often, however, if I may be so bold as to offer some advice — take a break, you’ll enjoy life more.”
I received it after using Bloglinker to ping weblogs.com after I added a couple people to the address book.
