- Michael M.: Too much going on. Life in flux, etc..
- Sunshine: Wow, I was soooo happy to see a new post in my rss reader. I was hopping this is already the comeback! :(...
- gandalf: Did you only get caffeine through Dr.p or did you drink coffee as well? I’m interested, since...
- neeka: nine kilos… wow… :) happy holidays to you, michael, and to all your loved ones! veronica
- m: It was a bargain. No strings attached.
Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Maribor, Slovenia.
Portoroz, Slovenia.
• AlienMelon
• Burger.si
• Heck
• Izklop
• si.blogs
• Sloblogi
• Blogorola
• Natalija Verboten
Monitor’s story about blogs in Slovenia. Click for BeeBee’s (illegally) scanned pages.
Nikolaj PeÄ?enko has put together a long and well-written story about local blogs for the computer magazine Monitor.
There are a few things worth noting about it: First, it’s very
complimentary and never once uses the phrase "burn in hell, geeks."
Second, the man really did his homework. Not only does he manage to
get all the biographical details of my life correct (something even I
can no longer do) he even uncovers the identity of the notoriously
secretive BeeBee. For those of you who don’t know, she never blogs from
the same computer twice, moving instead from spider hole to spider hole
under the cover of night. It took me six months to find out what her
real first name was.
But from what he writes about Vidmar,
for example, it’s clear that he did what many journalists wouldn’t do in his case,
which is make the effort to actually read his blog. (On that note, it
was nice to see David’s great TV guide published there.)
If you can read Slovene, the complete story is here.
(Thanks BeeBee!)
Comments
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How totally cool. My wife, Reza, is Slovenian. Her parents came from
there. It’s very interesting to me that blogs in Slovenija talk about
the same stuff we talk about in America. I will have to pass the link
to this along to her. I have been trying to learn the language, but
it’s very hard for me. So far, I have mastered how to say, "Oprostite,
ne govorim dobro slovensko." No, I have no idea what this has to do with what you were writing about either… Just felt like saying it. Dober Dan!
I’m not sure about the illegal bit, but hey, no one asked me if they
could publish my (whole and very unusual) real name either. And it’s
not like I’m making money from the scanned pages. Ha, I wish!
"For those of you who don’t know, she never blogs from
the same computer twice, moving instead from spider hole to spider hole
under the cover of night. It took me six months to find out what her
real first name was."
LOL.
Hmmm…I can’t see anything about te drinkers blog!?!?! Guess I have to
work better on it…but me likes it as it is ::lol:: ! BTW is anybody
here interested in buying shares of the world biggest drinking website?
C yA
I know Slovenes will keep using the English “blog” (”po domace,” as the writer says - “familiarly” - I always find it amusing when Slovenes use “po domace”, which literally means “as one does it at home”, to refer to their use of borrowings from other languages as opposed to the “real” Slovene word), though it might be fun to coin a native version (”blok” is one good suggestion from VoljaBlok, meaning “notepad”); another might be (along the lines of the portmanteau word “blog”) “splevnik”, from “spletni dnevnik” (”web diary”), which the Monitor writer says is the “official” Slovene term. Any more suggestions?
Since the article mentions AFoE awards and my humble endeavours… I
checked the ratings of fistfulofeuros.net and cruel.com and cruel has
far more traffic. So you might really start thinking about making and
"awards" section somewhere. Here’s the graph.
Heh… just because Andrej can’t list more than 78 si.blogs it doesn’t mean there aren’t many more
3delavnica.com has a semi active blogging user base but no RSS feeds, there are a couple on MK portal (one of them my own)…I’ve actually started about 6 different blogs myself since 2000 so if you think about it… I could be one of the first bloggers in slovenia ;)Three of them were hosted on blogger.com, 2 of them waaay before google joined the party and there were 2 or 3 lousy templates to choose from. I made my own.1 (I think it was my first) was actually what you might call a photoblog with very little text (started in 2001, handcoded in html, no feed 
I kept it up for two or three months then quit because I hated coding in html and there was no easy way to do these things back then.Don’t remember hearing about RSS untill 2003 or so, after that blogging really took off.
Re: “splevnik” — surely people will laugh at this one because it will remind them of plevel = weeds? I think this is the main reason why we often prefer to use foreign loanwords instead of home-coined ones — the latter often sound ridiculous to a significant percentage of the people.
Otherwise, those interested in more suggestions for a Slovenian word for blog might want to read the discussion on the slovlit mailing list around 18th of January 2005.
on splevnik: the association with “weeds” occurred to me too, but it seems somewhat appropriate considering the way blogs are sprouting up all over the place, with only a few flowers (incl. the Glory of Carniola) among them.
Regarding the word "blog," I just wanted to throw in a link for the i-Slovar, a technical dictionary run by the Slovenian Society Informatika, which indeed proposes "spletni dnevnik" for blog. Splevnik doesn’t sound bad; but would bloggers then be "splevniki"?
crni: I really would have laughed if he had included your
name in parentheses after the line about the "strasti" of Slovenes. He
certainly should have.
Jernej: I had no idea. It’s really difficult to get a
good grasp of the murky beginnings of blogging in Slovenia. I do know
that there was a kind of proto-carniola as far back as 1997 called Pogoer,
written by an American then living in Ljubljana. He’s since returned to
Texas, but his site is still up and makes for interesting reading.
rolig; "blok" sounds kind of ok, but that word also means apartment
building, doesn’t it? In Swedish, it’s called "blogg", and the longer
version, weblog, is "webblogg". Swedes have a tendency to add an extra
consonant to loan words to make them fit the pronunciation rules (long
vowel before one consonant, short vowel before two or more cons.)
Enough with the Swedish lessons, sorry.
Pat: Thanks for the Swedish lesson; I was wondering about all those double consonants - quite the opposite of Slovene, which prefers single consonants (e.g., inovativnost). “Blok” does mean apartment building (usually the squarish ugly sort), but it also means “pad” (curiously parallel with the double meaning of the English word “pad”: “notepad” or “apartment”).
Mike: a person who had a “splevnik” would probably be a “splevnicar” or “splevnicarka” and a general site giving links to all those “splevniki” would be a “splevnicarna” (imagine a roof over the “c” in all cases) LOL.
So blogosphere would be splevnisfera? ; )
If you follow N.P.’s legendary work for a longer time, you could write such review without reading his article