Tuesday, March 29, 2005
(10:17 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
International Blogging
Scott McLemee writes today about blogging in Iran, primarily relying on the work of Alireza Doostdar, an Iranian graduate student in Middle Eastern Studies. Persian is now apparently the fourth-largest language in the wider blogosphere, and Persian bloggers refer to their circle as "Weblogestan," which may help to explain why "The Weblog" was linked in so many Persian webrings when I first put it up (for real).In other foreign-language news, I recently received Armando DiCarlo's textbook "From Italian to English," apparently the only textbook on earth focussing on Italian for reading knowledge, in the mail. It was regularly $56 on Amazon, so when I found a used copy for $20, I jumped on it, despite the fact that I was only looking for such a book on a whim, with no concrete plan to use it any time soon. When I opened it up, it soon became clear that this was basically something that had been printed off of Microsoft Word -- it was even double-spaced. But it's around 250 pages, though, so it would have been more expensive to photocopy it, assuming 10 cents a page.
You've probably seen this by now, but I've been meaning to link to Mark Kaplan's Notes on Rhetoric, a compilation of one of his regular features at Charlotte Street. It fully actualizes all the potentials of the metablogging genre.
Finally, I highly recommend that you download Fiona Apple's never-released album Extraordinary Machine. It'll go more smoothly if you download Bit Torrent, which is nice to have on hand in any case. If you're still sick of her from back in the late nineties when she was a big hit for a couple months, get over it.
