Google maps shows India in English, Thailand in (?) Thai. Curious, for some reason I wouldn’t have expected it to be localized like that.

i18n.gif

My Google Analytics tracking stopped working (went down to 0) yesterday. I can’t for the life of me figure out what’s wrong with my tracking code on this page – any thoughts?

Documenting locales

I’ve been playing around with different diagrams that attempt to explain the various locales on a website. Here is an example:

i18n locale diagram

Does this make sense as a diagram? Does it help you understand?

Language codes: “Some of the most heated discussions on the request for new projects
are about the status of a language; is it a language a dialect and
often the arguments are of a political nature. The inclusion of
languages in the ISO-639 has been political in the past. With ISO-639-3
many of these arguments have an answer with the many new language codes
that have been created.”

2 observations today: Gmails’ antispam seems pretty good, and why hasn’t OPML taken off more as a way to share feed lists?

I have to very much agree with this: walled garden sucks, Facebook is just making us build stuff for another propietary platform.

However, they do have a good idea there: I can add my app to your app. There’s no open way to do that yet that works.

Actually, pingdom.com does provide mostly free response time stats. 2000 ms (2 seconds), is that acceptable or not?

Apart from actually measuring page generation time within the website’s scripts and storing that in a database, I still haven’t found a good way to track the speed of a website over time. I would have thought an outside service coudl do that, but I haven’t found one. Any ideas anyone?

There seems to be a theory that the busyness or clean-ness of websites is related to the personal distance (the “bubble”) of the culture that the website is for.

Rashmi’s slideshare just launched slidecasts: PPT slides + audio. It’s the logical next step in sharing slides, but it’s hard to do right, so they took some time to do it. It rocks, they’re way ahead of any of the competition now.

Europeans can be sooo ridiculous. I do truly admire the US entrepreneurial spirit. It’s incredible, especially compared to what people (don’t) do in Europe.

Names in the world: Icelanders prefer to be called by their given name (Björk), or by their
full name (Björk Guðmundsdóttir). Björk wouldn’t normally expect to be
called Ms. Guðmundsdóttir. Telephone directories in Iceland are sorted
by given name.

amazon s3 vs flickr for photo backup

I started backing up about 30 gigs of pictures to Amazon S3 using Jungledisk is taking about 20 days (on low priority). And that’s ok. The jungledisk software is free, the Amazon bill for storing this should be about 5 US$/month, ie 60 US$/year. That’s worth paying to safeguard my photos.

But then I started comparing: Flickr is 25 US$/year, and you get “unlimited” storage. If it’s really “unlimited”, that’s a much better deal. Should I try Flickr instead to backup my 30 Gigs of photos?

Eric Rice: “I think we might be afraid to say that yeah, we might actually like some walled gardens.”

Walled gardens have a LOT of advantages. It’s just that they’re so, well, damned walled. Nobody likes a wall around them with no windows and no exit doors. That’s called a prison. A walled garden with gates in the wall (and a low wall you can jump over) isn’t so bad. But, enough with this metaphor!

OK I finally understood the appeal of the “uglyness” of Myspace, of exactly why those pages are so damn nasty. It hit me when checking out the Beasty Boys blog. Took me long enough.