Saturday, June 30, 2012

why we blog

I had been wanting to write blog for a long time. People blog for many different reasons. Some for professional reasons, and some as hobby, and other as a form of self-expression and to share our skills and creativity with others.

Besides a bit each of the above but also to share my life with my relatives and family afar, some at half a world away. Many of my Chinese relatives do not know a word of English or have ever travel to the West. Google's blogger translator feature make the blog an excellent and efficient way for me to share my life with them. Many of them know very little about me and my life in the West. Now I write in English and they can read it in translated Chinese, or any other languages.

One of my biggest beef with a lot of internet content is the smallish sizes of pictures in many sites, especially those of for profit organizations. It is such let down. I want my pictures to be large and they are.

I cannot tell you how please I chose Blogger. The web based tool set is incredibly good. It is so easy to upload pictures and videos. The language translation feature is un-parallel. I am so impressed with Google. From the start to my first blog it took a mere few hours. While I initially just chose one of the simple template, I could tweak it incrementally along the way without losing anything. By the second blog I was totally at ease with the tool.

In the earlier days of internet I have created my own web pages. You had to spend so much time and effort managing the nuts and bolts and you have trillion folders. The blogging tool make those chore of the past, and one can concentrate on creating the rich content instead.

There is one minor down size with translated Asian languages. Because my often inclusion of Chinese the translated version has repeated words and can be confusing.

Obviously the translation is only as good as the translation engine. Google's translation is kick-ass good. You would see what I mean if you compare it against the babelfish from Yahoo. Yahoo had many years of head start ahead of Google and people wonders why Yahoo is in such dire strait as a company.  I stop using flickr and vimeo...

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