Mathemagenic

Ton makes a list of professional weblogs "around Netherlands":

On several occasions I have complained about the fact that it seemd hard to find Dutch blogs with a professional orientation. Most Dutch blogs seem to be lifelogs or linkdumps. But over time I did come across several of course, and now I have put them all together in a list.

I hope some of you will be able to add more!

Go over to my Wiki, to see or add more professionally oriented bloggers (in Dutch, or by Dutch or written in the Netherlands) to the list.

So, if you qualify make sure you add your name :)

And, because we are in a small country, we don't have much excuses for not meeting face-to-face. I took the liberty of adding DutchBloggingEvents page to Ton's wiki for coordination.

And, to make it even more practical - I'm in Amsterdam tomorrow (Monday 26 July) late afternoon, so if you are there and want to meet for a drink or a dinner, let me know (e-mail or call at 0615304114; of course I know that you had to put it in your agenda two months back, but who knows? ;).

Finally my Russian weblog goes public: Edges (RSS feed). A few things to explain:

Domain name

It lives at edges.twowayweb.ru. I took the domain name thinking about the future:

• I believe in empowering people and being able to contribute actively to the online world is a part of it.
• Although I'm not in Russia now it's always there when I think about the future.
• I'd like to be able to share domain name with Russian colleagues who decide to start blogging or (who knows :) turn it into a business one day.

Weblog title

Actually, first I called it Boundary object, as a way to reflect the fun of building bridges across boundaries between communities, disciplines, countries, languages... But "boundary object" is a bit difficult to translate into Russian and it doesn't make short subdomain :) So, I called it Edges.

Why it took me so long to start blogging in Russian?

In fact I started it ages ago, but was struggling with difficulties of writing in Russian. I explained it in more detail in Russian, so just a quick summary for those who don't understand it - why I find blogging in Russian difficult:

• Technical problems
  • finding software that would allow me blogging in Russian and provide enough functionalities for a professional weblog
  • being reluctant to go public before domain registration and proper domain mapping (because moving weblog to another domain is not a good idea)
• Language of professional community
  • most of my professional community is English-speaking, there is not that much happening in Russia (and I'm not alone choosing English instead of my native language)
  • no critical mass of Russian bloggers with similar interests
  • difficulties of translating terminology
• Difficulty of writing for non-existed audience
  • starting "Mathemagenic" was easy because I wrote for myself and only later discovered social effects of blogging
  • I started writing in Russian thinking about "an audience" and reputation building only to find out that I can't write for "an audience" without having one
  • decided that writing for "an audience" kills authenticity, motivation and all other things important for good blogging and stopped caring about it :)
• Fear of schizophrenia
  • using weblog for personal knowledge management I prefer to have all ideas and notes in one place and one online identity, so having another weblog makes my life difficult
  • drawing a line between "in English" and "in Russian" is quite artificial because I'm a whole :)

Ideally I'd love to have one multilingual weblog, but I guess it's not that realistic at the moment (I need Radio for organising my PhD thinking and it doesn't support Cyrillic). I will see how writing in Russian goes...

This post also appears on channel multilingual blogging