Who is the King of Blogging? Ok, maybe not the King of blogging by a King who blogs. Unfortunately, it is not the monarch of the fine country in which I now reside, but our next-door neighbor, His Majesty the King NORODOM SIHANOUK OF Cambodia has thrown his hat (crown?) into the blogging world.
Now, he might not use Movable Type or Blogger. And maybe he is posting non-searchable image files instead of text. And perhaps he writes everything in French. But he is a blogger all the same. He even has his own domain name norodomsihanouk.info.
Take a look at his entries for January, 2004. Today is the 28th, and he posted 51 letters that he has written and received. Amazing. For example, there is a New Year's Greeting from our very own His Majesty (M.R.) Bhumibol R., King of Thailand (in English, no less). Another fine example, written in his own handwriting is Mon texte pour le 26 Janvier 2004. The text says something about Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Too bad I don't remember any of my French from my school days...
You know about BabelFish don't you? I like it just because of the allusion to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Anyway, I chatted with my fiancee's sister in Florence Italy for about an hour using this tool. What was interesting, though is it only works if you don't convert slang. Slang does not cross cultural boundaries very well. As a result, when she talked to her sister, they had a good laugh about some of the ridiculous things that I said in my pseudo-Italian. I just countered with, "Ahm Southern...it's *ALL* slang y'all scalawags!"
Yes I know about BabelFish (and I also love the Hitchikers reference which is a Bible reference :) One fun thing to do with BabelFish is to type a sentence in English, translate it to another language, then translate it back to English.
For example that paragraph above to Korean and back to English comes out as:
"Like that I is BabelFish Iss and (with in me regarding also bible reference love the Hitchikers reference: ) The fun thing of 1 thing will do in the BabelFish the elder brother in order to translate it it faces each other the English back in different language translate as for the hitter, with that time English."
Always have to throw in the "Elder Brother" in Asia! And is Elder Brother a baseball player?
But, alas, with the King of Cambodia's website, his French posts are jpg files, which of course BabelFish can not translate...
- Stuart