At the height of Russia’s invasion of Georgia, I tried to decipher what the very active Russian blogosphere was saying. I took a gander at the blogs (mostly Live Journal) carried on Yandex. I do read and speak a bit of Russian, but I find Russian bloggers incredibly hard to understand. They express themselves in a round-about way laced in irony, and often with obscure and obscene slang. It’s not easy for a non-native speaker to follow, but a typical remark was that “The Western Mass Media” (understood as a single, unified voice) might say that this was violation of Georgian territory, but who in their right minds believes that Georgia’s borders mean anything?” Another line was that Georgia was simply mad to take on the might of the Russian army and was getting the beating it deserved.

Well I’m biased. I love Georgia. In fact, I challenge anyone to visit that wonderful country in more happy times and not love it. I was delighted recently when the two men fitting our granite kitchen counter (product of Estonia) turned out to be Georgian. They chatted happily with my Russian wife in Russian. Even our Polish builder speaks Russian. Our Ukrainian cleaner chipped into the chatter. In fact, sometimes our house sounds like a sort of East European enclave.

I think it’s pretty hard to visit Georgia without sampling its wonderful wine. In fact, it’s pretty hard to visit Georgia without drinking rather a lot of it. Last time I was there, a few years ago, at the end of a very long night’s drinking, and at the dawn of quite a boozy breakfast, I was invited to toast Joseph Stalin. Somehow I managed to avoid offense by changing the toast to “great leaders”.

I read that one of the things invading Russian and Ossetian troops were doing was to break into the wine cellars of the villages, drink what they wanted, and destroy the rest.

I was more pleased to read the Russian speaking Condoleezza Rice and her Polish counterpart, Radoslaw Sikorski, toasted their controversial missile treaty with Georgian wine. And then I was even more pleased to discover an English language blog dedicated to the worthy subject of Georgian wine, with a bit of history and culture too. There’s a blog about everything.

I saw an author friend yesterday. She had a few interesting grumbles about her website, and although I would like to link to it, I suppose for discretion’s sake I had better not say who she is.

Her website looks beautiful, and at first she was very pleased with it, but now she’s beginning to see the limitations. First of all, the font is very tiny and almost illegible. The colours don’t help. The designer doesn’t want to make the letters any bigger because that would spoil his design. Secondly she gets hardly any traffic because although her book has been widely reviewed, and she speaks at all sorts of good meetings, there no real reason to link to her site. It just has a biography and a sample chapter which is hard to read. She would love more feedback from her readers, but she gets hardly any emails because the website is hard to find on Google, and in any case the contact details aren’t obvious. Finally she doesn’t have the FTP details, and even if she did, it isn’t based on a Content Management System, so she has to ask the designer every time she wants to update it.

I’ve heard many of these complaints before, and I would say they are pretty common. There’s only a limited use in having nice looking but lifeless website hanging out among the billions of pages on the web.

She told me that lots of bloggers had reviewed her book - and some had drummed up all sorts of political controversy about it often vehemently disagreeing with her. She had chosen to ignore them. Of course I immediately said that she should be politely replying on those blogs so that next time they mention her, they will know where to link. Of course if she had a blog herself, they would be even more likely to link to her, and she would build up Google ranking and traffic. If she was using WordPress she would have control over her site. And a blog designer would hopefully have legibility foremost in mind.

For websites, the most important questions are

1. Can you find the content?
2. Can you understand / read it?
3. Is it interesting?
4. Is it useful?
5. Would you like to come back again to visit it?
6. Might you like to link to it?

Is it beautiful? is of much less importance. Sorry designers.

I finally joined the Open Rights Organisation. It certainly wasn’t the chance of winning the book that they are currently offering up as a prize in their membership drive (though I’m sure it makes fascinating reading if you are into that sort of thing ). In the end it was the tireless efforts of Glyn Wintle that finally got me. He turns up to almost ever techie event going, and last night was at the WordCamp London drinks. We talked a bit about WordPress and a lot about everything else, especially rights issues. Glyn told us all about the BBC’s attempt to bully a lady who published a Dr. Who Knitting pattern. And Hansard’s failed attempt to leap down the throat of They Work For You. I think the Open Rights Group should give Glyn six signed copies of Ross Andersen’s Security Engineering Book, because Glyn’s anecdotes must have drawn at least half their members. Anyway they do good work in the name of freedom, so I am proud to finally have become a member.