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Yes, after a long while, I am back. And more human because I have found my ideal computing environment in the most human of all Linux distributions, Ubuntu, and the most human of all browsers, Opera.

There are numerous new softwares and web applications that have appeared or been upgraded during this weeks that I've been off. I will try to talk about all these in the next days, emphasizing on Opera, which arrived to its ninth version last Tuesday, and is better than ever. I will emphasize also on the use of Linux and Ubuntu Dapper Drake in particular.

Also, I wanted to note that on next Monday, June 26, it will be a year since my first post, which was originally made when my blog was blogger-based.

I recently got some feedback from Belkys, the author of one of the Cuban blogs I found, as reported in my previous post. She pointed me some other blogs, and even a directory of Cuban blogs. This is what I found in a quick glance. Unfortunately the results of my rapid research were not so good, but anyway, is better than what I thought a few days ago.

http://blogueroscubanos.blogspot.com/2005/02/directorio-de-la-comunidad-blogs-de.html
Pretends to be a directory of Cuban blogs, but many links are broken. There is no information about how some other Cuban bloggers like me can register their blogs in this self-claimed directory. Also most links don't match the text of the link with the URL.

These are the blogs I found, and the apparent current state. None of this data has been verified and no blog author has been contacted. This is purely visual information taken out of each of the main blog pages by me. Some blogs listed in the above directory do not appear in this list, mostly those that gave me broken links.

http://bettyculturales.blogspot.com/
No posts since February 17, 2005

http://ilberto.blogia.com/
No posts since April 15, 2005

http://cubatrabaja.blogia.com/
No posts since November 11, 2005 and previous posts very far from one another in time.

http://georginatorriente.blogspot.com/
Currently active, but is more like an echo of some newspaper rather than original writings of the author. All posts are like headlines and articles of news related to Cuba. Mostly political news. It doesn't have the natural flavour of somebody writing naturally about what he/she likes.

http://imaginados.blogia.com/
Currently active. Some posts like georgina torriente above, but it's more natural and fresh.

http://venezuelavive.blogspot.com/
Currently active and very young blog about Cuban doctors experiences in Venezuela.

http://cubanisimo2.blogspot.com/
No posts since April 11, 2005. It's like georgina's blog above too.

http://cubasiempre.blogia.com/
Only two posts, and the last one was on February 21, 2005. No comments.

http://mundocubano.blogia.com/
Apparently active, but is not updated so often. It's mostly about the Cuban five. The articles seem too lengthy though, and they seem to be copy-paste from news articles in cuban newspapers and news agencies.

http://havanaonline.blogspot.com/
A single post on February 17, 2005.

http://dcuba.blogia.com/
Three posts, the last one on February 24, 2005.

http://encuentro.blogia.com/
No posts since February 23, 2005.

http://denesleonardo.blogspot.com/
No posts since February 17, 2005. Three posts overall.

http://jrgreguera.blogspot.com/
Four posts overall, all of them the same day, February 16, 2005.

I won't claim this to be an exhaustive coverage but I draw two conclusions from all these. First and most important, didn't you noticed the great amount of blogs with just a few posts, and dead since around February 2005? Well, most of the blogs listed in this directory are the result of some seminar given in Havana around that date about blogs. The seminar was given to journalists and most of the authors of those brief blogs are Cuban journalists. It seems that they started with some excitement, but it lasted for short. This is not my idea of a blogosphere.

The second conclusion is that many of these blogs were limited to copy/paste news articles from Cuban media sources. This conclusion is subjective and not verified at all, but it's my perception.

Although it was more active than I though, specially a year ago, in the end is disappointing. The Cuban blogosphere has a long way to go.

Tim Berners-Lee, considered one of the creators of the World Wide Web, is now blogging. It seems that his original intentions are just beginning to be fulfilled, after more than fifteen years (too much time for this ever-changing world of IT). Anyway, happy blogging and welcome to the blogosphere!

I won't comment much more here so go and read for your self. This will surely be a blog worth of adding into my aggregator. I must also acknowledge my original source. I first heard about Tim's blog in another blog, Read/Write Web, a name that, according to its author, is related to Tim's original goals.

I think I will definitely move my blogger blog into this community, and stay. I wrote a few days ago, before making this decision, about the pros and cons of switching. I am also thinking about using Opera as my default web browser again.

I switched from Opera to Firefox almost a year ago, partly because of Gmail’s AJAXed interface, which didn’t work in Opera at the time. Also several modern services using some state-of-the-art non-standard technologies (AJAX mostly) work quite well in the Norwegian browser. Flickr, Yahoo! Instant Search, Google Personalized Homepage and Google News Customization are good examples of this.

Have you visited the Opera Community web site recently? If you have never been there, then you will like it, but if you are able to compare what I saw months ago to the new improved community, then you'll be amazed just as I am.

They've been doing some sort of personal web manager, in which users can create an account, with a homepage and several other services. There's a community around all this, with forums, sharing of information and what I liked the most: a blog.

I am seriously considering moving this blog to their platform, because Blogger doesn't give me some stuff that I like about blogs. I haven't decided yet, because I have to evaluate Opera's offerings, but in a glimpse I saw a couple of things that I liked: a calendar with links to the days in which I've posted, and the possibility to categorize my posts. All of these makes it easier for readers (and for me) to find the information they want.

Among the rest of the services they are offering, there is a bookmarks managers, which is good although it's not better than del.icio.us or any other similar. Links can be categorized, but categories work more like folders than like tags, so you cannot have a bookmark under more than one category. Anyway, for their purposes it is fine, because they're clearly not aiming at the big ones.

And to continue comparing to existing services, they also have a photo manager much like a mini Flickr, in which you can store albums of pictures. Pictures and albums can be tagged, and you can also share your pictures selectively to friends or to anyone, or you may keep it private. One of the Flickr-killer features is that you can have as much albums as you like for free, only limited by the account disk space, which is 300Mb overall (pictures and blog). In Flickr you are limited to three albums for the free account, and you need to purchase the pro account to be able to create more albums.

It might be an illusion, but I see Opera going in the right direction: becoming an online service provider with deep integration, and a browser, which could become a second place in their business strategy. Then they could afford to give the browser for free, which would probably boost its percentage of the browser market share.

Let the competition begin!