Postcard from Bishkek

I have to admit that, although I understand why they were developed and people use them, I hate spam filters. Please, don’t misunderstand me – I hate Spam!, but I probably hate spam filters even more!  They are like computers and technology in general … they offer so much and when they work they appear […]

I was surprised the other day to receive an email from a firm based in the UK offering professional translation services … it said: We had a message from Google about unnatural links pointing to our site, and we are currently in the process of cleaning our link profile. We believe the link from your […]

Love it or hate it … “Wikipedia has drastically affected how we access and share information on the internet” … so says Justin Franco in his brief History of Wikipedia (in two and a half minutes”) on youtube. Wikipedia was launched on 15th January , 2001, although it was based on a concept and technology of […]

During the week I had an interesting lesson in the power of the internet.  One of my friends on Facebook posted the following status on their wall: It’s international book week. The rules: Grab the closest book to you, turn to page 52, post the 5th sentence as your status. Don’t mention the title. Copy the rules as part of […]

I am sometimes asked about my “sources” for these postcards – including being asked by the author of one of the standard guidebooks to the country … the answer is simple: I have been here for sixteen years with so much more access to information than people have back home: books, TV, newspapers, websites … […]

The other day IO was talking to someone and we exchanged email addresses.  Mine, for example,  is ianclaytor@gmail.com and so I duly dictated it to him, in Russian: “ian claytor, (all one word), sobachka, gmail dotchka com”. He asked me, “How do you say in English, ‘sobatchka’?”  I answered, matter of factly, “at”.  He smiled. Although […]

Google Alerts are an interesting service provided by the internet giant Google. They use their search engine to monitor new pages posted on the internet and send an email when they find new results, (such as web pages, newspaper articles, or blog entries), that match the search term. For general queries like “Kyrgyzstan”, the email […]

I had a meeting with a representative of a a local business who had asked me to check some translations into English that he had done with the help of Google.  Needless to say, although it was possible to understand what the text was trying to convey, there was a certain amount of revision needed. […]

It has been announced that the week from from March 28 to April 1 will be Wikipedia Week here in Kyrgyzstan. It is an initiative by the Soros Foundation – Kyrgyzstan, (SFK), which is an international, non-government, private foundation that was set up by the Open Society Institute in 1993, headed by George Soros, the financier and philanthropist.  It is […]

Twitter is officially five years old.  The first tweet was sent out on 21st March, 2006.  The idea apparently grew out of SMS (Short message service) codes that people were sending each other on their mobile phones, and it is sometimes described as the internet SMS. Subscribers are able to send short messages, no more […]