“la parole exportée”

A while ago, I discovered the WordPress Photo Dropper plug-in. Basically, what the plug-in does, it finds photos that have been uploaded to Flickr and are available for some limited uses. Many bloggers seem to use it now.

I thought it was a good idea to leave a comment on the photo page, thanking that person for the picture and telling them where I had used it. I got good responses from most members, and everything was fine.

Until a couple of days ago, when I received a dry comment from a third-party telling me that one photo had been stolen (from him), and to please delete it. I checked all the links provided by the third-party to support that claim and deleted both the photo (a nice one, I must say) from my blog and my comment from Flickr.

The owner of the photo is exercising his rights (I’ve decided that he’s he), and that’s absolutely right. Except that I had used that photo in good faith, and his tone didn’t encourage me to either congratulate him for a good picture, or even give me any desire to buy it.

I deleted everything, photo, comment on Flickr and comment to my blog, e-mail and all. I’m out of the loop now.

People who have their contents or products stolen are right to be mad about it. I’d probably be murderous if I found this happened to me. But reflecting upon it, and seeing how things are developing on the web, and everything in life is a lesson, I see this as a sadly missed opportunity for the owner. Given that the idea of that picture was really a good one, I think he could have handled this in a better way, at least as far as I’m concerned. Like: invited me to buy his photo, to look at his other photos, etc., still asserting his rights to them. Had he allowed me to side with him, I would have bought his photo. Instead, I feel as if I’ve been labeled as part of a gang of photo thieves.

A good lesson for the future, maybe…

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That’s it. I’m not allowing Twitter to hog this front page anymore, I’m moving all my tweets to a separate page in the sidebar.

Why am I doing this?

1. In the interest of design and esthetics: I like the clean look of the initial posting page. I quite like a white page too! Because I’m using the default WordPress theme, I’m frustrated by the untidy look of bullets, but I’m not changing the theme until I’ve had time to explore other ones, i.e. until the Summer.

2. In the interest of clarity of content: I want to reserve the posting page for more content- or opinion-oriented stuff. Things that I’m sharing with readers, with at least a semblance of logic. By their very nature, tweets are a collection of often disjointed statements.

3. For ease of publication: Twitter updates are fed automatically around midnight (local time here), and I usually find them the next morning only. I edit them (deleting those which I consider as outside the realm of this blog). Now I will simply move them en bloc over to the new page, where they will be free to go to sleep forever in their actual state.

4. To reduce the pressure: Looking at a list of untidy tweets gives me a bad conscience when I’m not updating the blog. As if I had taken the lazy option of throwing at my readers a list of haphazard (although sincere and genuine) statements as a stop gap. Not good for my morale, not good for my readers too.

Do I need to continue with Twitter at all?

In the beginning, I quickly became bored with the ‘push’ nature of Twitter, and frustrated over its lack of interactivity. Over the weeks, though, I’ve come to realize its very specific benefit, namely the building of a core community of professionals around the theme of language(s) and small business.

For instance:

@zjjtrans, @EHegenberger, @matthewbennett, @spokk, @pikorua etc. are translators and we have conversations/opinions around products, projects, and so on. I value this immensely, and it’s much more responsive than comments to a blog post.

@amypalko, @joannayoung are my guardian Angels of the English language. I value their opinions on the importance of words and they help keep me on my toes with English.

@judithstephens, @kreschke, @thetimediva, @karensmith, @drsallywitt, @marismith, @LindaZimmer are just a few of my business women ’support group.’ I should include @jlturn here, except that he’s a man, but he is very supportive. @GoodAdvice is also a good friend from the Facebook universe.

I follow many more people, but unfortunately I can’t list everyone, so I hope I’m not offending anyone. If you feel that you have been unfairly overlooked, please let me know, and I’ll add you! If you don’t fit one of the above categories, I can always add another one. I also follow tweets from Le Monde, The Guardian, The New York Times, CNN and, yes, even 10 Downing Street!

Are you on Twitter too?

I’m http://twitter.com/NadineTouzet. See you there?

I found the video below on Dawud Miracle’s blog (go there to read the entire post) and it resonates so much with me that I decided to refer you to it too.

Admittedly, Christine Kane is a musician and an artist. Yet I believe that the points she makes also apply in any profession where the blogger is performing, or delivering a service for something in which they are a vital component, even though they might have to stay out of the limelight.

Why does this interview resonate with me then?

Because a majority of people around me are a little confused, even suspicious:

“Tsss… Why do you blog?” “Is it really going to bring you new business?” “Shouldn’t you be concentrating on more traditional ways of approaching clients?” “Aren’t you wasting your time?” (understand: “stay where you are, don’t do anything that wasn’t done before”)

“Aren’t you revealing too much of yourself?” (understand: “keep quiet”)

“Who are those people who read your blog, anyway (*frown*)” (understand: “serious people, potential clients, don’t read blogs”)

My answers are:

“The world is changing around us, it’s as simple as that. We might as well acknowledge it, instead of holding on to old ways (old ways are good too, but not the only ones anymore.)”

“I carefully select what I want to reveal. This is not very different to what you have to do in real life, and I am aware of the necessary restrictions on disclosure.”

“All kinds of people are following this blog, including spammers… My blogging experience, in the widest sense of the word (I include here all the social networking and reading on marketing, etc. ), has allowed me to meet more diverse people than I had ever been able to before.”

Christine Kane - Broadcast your self LIVE

Do you come across similar roadblocks? How do you deal with them? Why do you blog?

A few years ago, when my younger daughter was very much into web design, she offered to set up a website for me. We discussed it sporadically, but my list of requirements (it had to be in English and in French, to start with) grew so long that it would have taken years to complete, so we ended up doing… nothing.

I started this blog in the meantime, and to tell the truth, I don’t think that I needed a website at all. I am not overly interested in the institutional side of translation websites, there is something too impersonal and static for me there.

Yet when I started this blog I was well aware of the shortcomings in terms of official information, which is why I was glad to discover this Problogger’s post a couple of weeks ago, because it seems to match exactly what I had in mind. Darren Rowse lists 20 different types of pages to use in a blog, and I’m thankful to him for publishing it, even though not all types will find their way here. The Web is like one big library and if you browse long enough, you end up finding exactly what you were looking for.

So I’ve started experimenting with a page about my areas of specialization, and I will probably continue to customize the blog along those lines.

If you’ve been through this kind of inner debate, what kind of pages would you consider essential to a translator’s blog? Any ideas?