Having lost my great-grandfather on the Western Front in 1917, for the rather strange notion of liberating France from modern day bed-fellow Germany, I have often wondered why the blood of soo many Australians, Commenwealth and American troops were spilt over 2 world wars, when all the gratitude we received was increased French arrogance, a refusal to fight the good fight (they were probably afraid of losing to Iraq, rightly so since they havent won a battle since Napoleon crossed Europe to oddly enough be defeated like every Frenchman since) and the odd nuclear test in the Pacific. There is however two blogging stories to this article, one involves arrogance, and so does the other :-)
Scanning the online blogging news one discovers that the “Council of Europe” is about to pass laws on blogging, stating that blogs must offer a “right of reply” to those who have been criticized.
With clinical precision, the council’s bureaucracy had decided exactly what would be required. Some excerpts from its proposal:
• “The reply should be made publicly available in a prominent place for a period of time (that) is at least equal to the period of time during which the contested information was publicly available, but, in any case, no less than for 24 hours.”
• Hyperlinking to a reply is acceptable. “It may be considered sufficient to publish (the reply) or make available a link to it” from the spot of the original mention.
• “So long as the contested information is available online, the reply should be attached to it, for example through a clearly visible link.”
• Long replies are fine. “There should be flexibility regarding the length of the reply, since there are (fewer) capacity limits for content than (there are) in off-line media.”
The Blog Herald asks: When will the French stop!
I will give a gratitutous plug to my partner who said to me today “What is the difference between a Frenchman and a peice of toast?”
Answer “You can make soldiers out of a peice of toast”/
I also heard the following on the radio, I would love to take credit for it
“If the French were really that smart they would speak English”
But on to more pressing matters, and that of the Blog mediaTIC, which have provided me with minutes of fun with the Bablefish translation software who wrote this on the Blog Heralds recent peice entitled “Europe goes to the Blogs”
“An article anti-French enough shingling which relate to the blogs and 20six Which relationship between the blogs, the French policy (even the French policy if one reads the text well!) and 20six? All this is an amalgam which is not very healthy and in any case an irony a little badly placed frankly”
I think this means they dont support the article.
Despite the fact that this blog contains more updates then CNN on steriods there is soo little English as to be surrending policy and other such poor usage of grammar. To the author of MediaTIC, a new favourite saying:
“Keeping on blogging for tomorrow you may be German, or Dutch, or Polish”.
Postcript: Think Im to hard on the “surrender monkeys” let me know, think Im too soft, put the boot in :-)
