Nowadays, people’s lives often take them far from the land of their birth, right? And the internet is supposed to be able to help diminish the problems arising from distance, yes? We will see if Apple and iTunes are up to the challenge.
Dear Sir or Madam,

My sister, who lives in the United States, sent me [...]

On the other side of French politics, as I promised, the internal conflicts are if anything stronger. To start with the most important ones, the Socialist Party is about to do something quite rare in its history - have a contested primary election. The only other was that of 1995, when Lionel Jospin beat [...]

Bitch PhD has a long post warning bloggers of the perils of signing up with a syndication service called BlogBurst. Essentially, what BlogBurst does is take an RSS feed of your blog, then sell the feeds to big-traffic websites. Now, we can already see one thing wrong with this picture. Why would anybody pay for [...]

Well as everyone who reads Afoe assiduously already knows this is my opininion: demography does matter. And now this is doubly official as some of us demography enthusiasts have just set up the demography matters weblog. This does not mean that you, gentle readers, will now be completely spared, but it does probably [...]

Stefan Geen’s simple anti-spam Turing test hack is fantastically efficient - you’ll almost never get any spam. Unlike MT’s anti-spam measures, it saves bandwidth (and, of course, it actually works); unlike Blogger’s turing test, it’s not unbelievably tedious. I’ve put together a tutorial for people who use MT 3.x. (An improved version of the one [...]

February in Paris, 1983. A group of student leaders are ushered into the presence of President Mitterand by huissiers. They stay slightly more than an hour, discussing Marxism-Leninism, youth, and society with the ever-inconsistent, sometimes brilliant, sometimes crooked, sometimes socialist and sometime fascist president. Years later, one of them, Jean-Claude Cambalebis remembers the three questions [...]

Over on almost a diary, I’ve recently mentionend a survey of German blogging called “Weblogs 2005 - Bloggen im deutschsprachigen Raum”, conducted by Jan Schmidt at the University of Bamberg. While the German blogger himself is a relatively unknown species to date, the relatively small size of the German blogosphere as a whole has [...]

You will all remember the Satin Pajama awards with great fondness, I trust. Lots of new blogs for everybody, staggeringly opulent prizes for the favoured few, and a juicy whiff of scandal into the bargain — good clean fun for the whole family.
Well, if you like that sort of thing, you’ll want to check out [...]

Global Voices has a story (Hat Tip Financial Times and Simon World) about how China dissident Shi Tao has more than a little cause to be angry with Yahoo. Reporters Sans Frontiers, on analysing the text of the verdict in Shi Tao’s case (he was sentenced to 10 years in April for “divulging state [...]

This Slate article on what the IRA statement means by our own Scott MacMillan is quite excellent.