this blog has moved to a new url

It turns out that epea pteroenta is one of the one half percent of all Blogger blogs that used FTP publishing to store the files on my own server. This style of publishing is going away on may day. I have not really been blogging much, but I was dreading converting the existing blog to the new scheme, but Google documented the process and wrote a web application that made the whole thing rather painless.

The new URL for the blog is epea.bisso.com.

gdansk for the memories

I recently found what may be the world’s first, and perhaps only, blog in the Kaszubian language. It's called Czëtnica. Kaszubian (along with Czech, Slovak, Pannonian Rusyn, Lachian, Polish, Silesian, Slovincian, Polabian, and (Upper and Lower) Sorbian) is a West Slavic language. I first learned about Kaszubian reading the Tin Drum. And, of course, there is a Kaszubian version of Wikipedia (Wikipediô).

[Addendum: It seems I was all wrong about Czëtnica. It isn’t really a blog, even though it uses WordPress software. Thanks to Mihoł for setting me straight. It’s a vortal for literature, both Kaszubian and worldwide. He suggested a couple of other Kaszubian sites, Kaszëbskô Wëdowiédnô Starna and formæ formarum. which really are blogs in spite of their using CMS software. Now I guess I have no excuse but to learn Kaszubian.]

I note that there’s a German Minority (Mniejszość Niemiecka) party in Poland. I wonder if there’s a Silesian dialect of German that’s still spoken there? There is a German-language newspaper in Silesia: Schlesisches Wochenblatt.

monetize your buzzword

On Tuesday, I went to a brown bag talk (reviewed) at work. I hadn’t heard that Jakob Nielsen was going to be visiting our campus, but, after Richard told me, I looked forward to hearing from the guru of Web page usability. According to the forwarded email, Nielsen would be discussing his Alertbox column of July 9, 2007, provocatively entitled “Write Articles, Not Blog Postings”.

To demonstrate world-class expertise, avoid quickly written, shallow postings. Instead, invest your time in thorough, value-added content that attracts paying customers.

My initial reaction was what does he consider his Alertbox if not a blog? A regular (bi-weekly) column listed in reverse chronological order. It seemed to hinge on his definition of a blog as something scattered and not very well thought out. I opine; you pontificate; he bloviates. It’s a little like the poor craftsman blaming his tools. There are plenty of good, great, mediocre, and horrible blogs out there, but it’s not a blogs-generic problem. And, not many blogs are linear for that matter. That’s what folksonomic tags and cross-referential links are for.

mind you, literally literal-minded

The blogoshphere just got a little smaller. Today I was going through my blogroll and—long story short—I noticed that there are two language blogs out there with the same name (Literal-Minded) and the same sub-title (linguistic commentary from a guy who takes things too literally). One is hosted on Blogger and run by a guy name Mack is a spam blog and that ripped off the IP of the other one which is hosted on WordPress and run by a guy named Neal Whitman. Neal also has another website called Literal-Minded Linguistics. The former has been online since June 14, 2007, and the latter since January 18, 2004.

[Addendum: Neal noticed this entry and was kind enough to explain in the commentary what’s up.]

litterae catenatae

You know, I am of two minds about this whole blog-meme-tagging thing. On the one hand, I like to be constrained in my writing, but, on the other, it seems a bit like unsolicited email or faxes.So, I’ve been toying with using these memes, whether tagged (as in this) or not (as in this or that), and then not playing by their rules of further tagging somebody else.

caron, wrapped in mystery

bubul, over on bulbulovo, has an hilarious entry on how his family name, which is of Hungarian origin, gets mangled by the bureaucratic and the clueless. (My favorite was a French reading of an escaped XML entity of capital Č as Č on a written form copied from some email or online form.) This bittersweet anecdote brought to mind the how and why behind Unicode calling č a Latin small letter c with caron, rather than c háček (which is what I learned in my intro phonology class).

bloggarum thesaurus

According to this blog entry over on The Guardian, the Oxford University Press is conducting a study on the vocabulary of the blogosphere. Ipse dixit John Moore. Who? He’s a guest journalist for The Guardian who used to be a drummer for the band The Jesus and Mary Chain.

Next time you convey your velocipede along Walton Street in Oxford, spare a thought for the poor souls suffering behind its elegant facades. I am not referring to the mortal coil shufflers at the John Radcliffe, but to the researchers at the Oxford University Press, charged with the life-sapping task of monitoring the use of English in weblogs.

Secundum Moore, the OUP has determined that the top fifteen words used in the blogosphere are: “blogger, blog, stupid, me, myself, my, oh, yeah, ok, post, stuff, lovely, update, nice, shit.” Quite a list. I sat, and I pondered. I googled around for some news story on the OUP and its study. I found something on The Chronicle (by Jennifer Howard) which linked to a Telegraph article (by Mark Sanderson). The same old kernel of a story (except for a quaint em-dash in medias dirty word because—no doubt—of the The Telegraph’s style guide) but no links to an OUP press release. Then, I surfed on over to MySpace, and I took the first entry on Moore’s blog there, and then I ran the text through a word count program. Here’s Moore’s top fifteen words: “the, to, I, and, of, a, was, he, it, in, my, his, with, that, shop”. The first thing I noticed was that the little function words like the and and weren’t there, but then I was absent, though me, myself, and my weren’t. I realized that the boys chez OUP probably know a thing or two about counting words and what constitutes one, too: lemmatization and all that.

[Via Taccuino di traduzione.]

8 factoids about this bloggista

I've been blog-meme-tagged by Goofy of Bradshaw of the Future.

There are rules:

1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged need to write in their own blog about their eight things and include these rules in the post.
4. At the end of your post, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
5. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

These are my eight factoids:

1. Once upon a time, I lived in Denio, Nevada, and attended a two-room primary school there: the first through third grades were in the original one-room school house and fourth through eighth grades were across the road in the post office building.
2. All the male students in first through third grades in said one-room school house, except for me, had the same surname and where all siblings or cousins.
3. Denio is on the border between eastern Oregon and north-western Nevada. We students played in Oregon but studied in Nevada.
4. My best friend Quinn was named after the Quinn River which ran through his family’s ranch.
5. We had an abandoned gold mine on Alder Creek ranch, which is where I lived during my time in Denio.
6. While playing with a friend, who was not Quinn, I discovered a box of dynamite above the walk-in freezer in our ranch compound. My first instinct was to exclaim cool and grab one of the sticks. My second instinct was to leave the attic area quickly and quietly and tell my father and uncles what I had found. We were both seven years old at the time, and we chose the latter course of action. The box of dynamite was quite old.
7. We had an old air-raid siren to call the forty or so ranch hands in to lunch and dinner. My grandmother did all the cooking for them, and they lived in a bunkhouse on the property. I learned how to play poker from them.
8. I have never been to Burning Man.

Okay, here’s the multilevel marketing scammy part of the blog entry. You play with bloggers, you run the risk of being meme-tagged. I must now choose eight blogging buddies to inflict:

1. All I Know
2. Balashon
3. Blogging from Berkeley
4. Drax Blog
5. Eye of the Goof
6. Gramarye
7. The Mad Latinist
8. Erling Wold

post claiming the blog

Part of signing up for a Technorati account and claiming one’s blog invloves posting the following link: Technorati Profile.

back to bloggin'

Well, yesterday Erling chided me for having abandoned blogging, so I decided to start up again.