Mathemagenic

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

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/07/25.html#a1302; comments are here.

• Learning in the rain
• On the role of theory
• Rethinking apprenticeship

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