Arnaud

Am I coining a word ?
to weblink: to add to one's web content a hyperlink₁ to another web content.

I don't want to speak about the legal aspects of hyperlinks₂ but about "ethical"/"moral" questions.

Given a personal website lambda which design and content are under intellectual property but no copyright is visible.

Assuming the linking policy of that website doesn't prevent you from linking to it, do you:

a) ask before weblinking ?
b) inform the website then weblink ?
c) just weblink notifying nobody ?

a) doesn't seem to be appropriate ... why asking if you are free to link anyway ?
b) why generating noise/unsolicited email/whatever when you don't expect an answer anyway. And does your recipient really want to know that you have a blog, to know what its address is and ... to be implicitly invited to link to your blog too ! Who says "spam" ?
c) seems to be the best choice. By the way, isn't what everyone likes with the Web that's to say following links Web would not be so exciting, wouldn't be the web if there are no links anymore. Well in fact, links quality matters, quantity doesn't.

I don't like c). I have made some efforts for my blog but I still don't like it.

A website is a "oeuvre de l'esprit" (help ? spirit/mind creation ?) and even if there's nothing preventing me from linking to it, I prefer asking the website owner if I can "communicate" the address to a different virtual community.
I insist on the point I am speaking of personal websites, blogs, ...

A different topic is linkbacks₃... I don't like it neither !

"Hey guy, I have written a blog entry related to one post of yours and believe me, it's worth to be read !" or worse:
"Hey everybody who reads that post, come to this blog entry you might be interested in"

Exaggeratedly, I would call it "targeted publicity", "targeted spam". Mind that I don't speak of abuses like sping₄, I speak of any use of that technique.
After that, I must admit I don't know well how blog engines implement that. Technically, it may be possible to let the blog owner moderate trackbacks, ... etc.. But do popular blog engines have this feature ?


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1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink
2: http://www.linksandlaw.com/
3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkback
4: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sping

A short blog entry for a song of the band White Owl₁₂

edit(from jamendo):
"White Owl is a Russian folk-core group, created in Moscow, who play music of different nations adapted in various styles. Since the tastes of the musicians don't belong to the same genre their arrangements are mixtures of such traditions as alternative, indie, solid rock, folk tradition and even renaissance."

White Owl - Till I end my song
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1: http://www.myspace.com/whiteowlru
2: http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/white.owl

In my bookshelf, I have the "Dictionnaire des mots d'origine étrangère"₁ of Larousse and I have counted for each letter how many French words amongst the first five are coming from German, Italian, Spanish or English.

For the whole alphabet, out of the 130 checked words 29 were from English, 8 from Spanish, 7 from Italian and only 4 from German.
I have put the collected statistics into OpenCalc₂ and tried to acquire the chart from The Gimp₃ for converting it to a jpg file. I couldn't import all components (axis labels, legend, title, chart) at once.

Here's the chart:

Here's the legend:

The X axis is for the letters and the Y axis for the words number.

Everything isn't understandable, for instance who is able to tell what the first letters are for the 4 words borrowed to German ?
Of course, I know the answer:

'K' for "kaiser" and in German "Kaiser" means "emperor".
'L' for "laborantin" and in German "Laborantin" means "laboratory assistant".
'O' for "obus" and in German first "Haubnitze" then "Haubitze" means "howitzer".
'V' for "vaguemestre" and in German "Wagenmeister" ; "Wagen" means "wagon" and "Meister" means "master". "Meister" is from the French word "maitre".

It is hard to draw conclusions from that kind of figures for two main reasons:
First it's a tiny sample of 130 words and second we never can be sure of the true history of a word even if writings are still a good evidence of what was the past use ( assuming the person we have identified as the writer is the actual author of these writings ).

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1: ISBN 2-7441-4908-X
2: http://www.openoffice.org/product/calc.html
3: http://gimp.org/

France is famous for several things including its gastronomy and it is true that there are some tasty meals one can have in my country.

• fried lamb's brain with parsley and diced garlic
  
• calf's or lamb's head with sauce gribiche₁
  
• fried frog's legs with parsley and garlic
  
• "rognons blancs" ( i.e. lamb's or calf's testicles ) with pepper or salt
  
• "rognons rouges" ( i.e. kidneys ) with pepper or salt
  
• spleen with pepper or salt
  
• calf's tongue with a tomato & capers sauce
  
• pig's ears in a salad
  
• fried lamb's or calf's liver with pepper or salt
  
• fried snails with parsley and garlic
  
• hot or cold oysters
  
• fish's eggs
  
• "andouillette"₂ with a mustard/white wine & onions sauce
  
• "tripoux"₃
  
• boudin₄ blanc/noir
  

And a lot of delicious recipes with other ingredients.


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1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauce_gribiche
2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andouillette
3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripoux
4: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boudin

A starter can be that page:

Switching to GNU/Linux