May 2003

As an experiment I’ve reactivated my old antville weblog to do some posting in German. I imagine that my posts there will be a lot different than what I post here, since I won’t have to write a paragraph of background information for a 4 word punch line.

steffanie has the answer for overcoming language barriers in weblogging. Simply learn another language… and blog in it!. She’s Swedish, and she’s blogging in Swedish, English and German. So maybe she’ll now learn Polish as well?

To follow up on Smoking for Health Care, it’s being reported today that the proposed €1 cigarette tax will not be imposed all at once on January 1, but will instead be introduced in stages of 40, 30 and 30 cents. The government otherwise fears a drastic drop in cigarette use and an impact [...]

A number of folks (well, ok, two) at BlogTalk referred to me as a German blogging pioneer. It made me feel old, but it did earn me a number (two) of beers. My blog cred may not go back as far as that of Rebecca Blood (April 1999), who gave a keynote in Vienna, but [...]

I’m not sure if posting photos from a cell phone can be considered quick or easy, or even sensible, but it is at least possible.

Saturday in Vienna… a beautiful sunny morning, and we’re sitting in a dark hall with our notebooks. The title of Rebecca Blood’s keynote, Waging Peace: Using Our Powers for Good, sounded boring but her point was actually pretty interesting: that we tend to fill our blogrolls with blogs that think and write like we do. [...]

As promised, I’m in the back row at BlogTalk, wearing my dead fish cap, next to a power outlet so I can fire up my little ThinkPad. And the WiFi seems to work.

I’m skeptical of most of the points brought up by the panelists so far. How can bloggers internationally maintain any sort of meaningful [...]