Danah Boyd on the change to account levels // New dw_news post

As you may know, Danah Boyd is also on the Advisory Board.

She's also posting an entry on her take on the recent changes. Executive summary: she wasn't consulted (or rather, she was asked what she thought a while back and said why she thought it was a bad idea and thought that was the end of it).

She also made the point that without a lot of readers, she wouldn't be motivated to produce content, in which case why bother keeping up her paid account. So even if Basic Account users only read but rarely write, they can still indirectly affect the choice of Paid Account holders to stay and to keep renewing their accounts. It's all an ecology, and you can't look at people as individuals, because their decisions depend on many other people and not just what's in it for them.

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There's also a new entry in news in reaction to the whole thing.

I've read over it twice, but I still can't find the bit where they say, "We're sorry for not telling you in advance". Perhaps someone can point it out to me. The closest I could find was, Overnight you also raised legitimate concerns about how this change was unveiled - message received, loud and clear. We're still working out how to strike just the right tone when communicating with such a diverse and complex collection of communities.

I also can't find the bit where they say, "We were less than direct [or: we're sorry we lied to you] when we told your our motives for this change, when we said it was about reducing confusion for users signing up for the site". What they say is, Over the past 24 hours many of you have asked whether the changes to the account structure (removing the option of creating new basic accounts) is a business decision. It is, emphatically.

And finally, they talk a lot about how they'll be building on LiveJournal's heritage and asking for the support of their users without going into details such as what influence the Advisory Board's input will have on their decisions (or whether they'll even be consulted). Go read leora's comment on the entry.

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And see also this comment on the recent news entry for someone else's take. Funny reading, though it'd be funnier if it didn't sound so true.

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An interesting entry from rho comparing the SUP approach with a cartoon villain's. Go read that one, too.

Pi Day!

On a lighter note, happy Pi Day everyone!

Gosia

I had wondered whether Gosia was short for anything, since I thought the Poles were at least as fond of using nicknames as the Russians, and that it was, therefore, likely to be a nickname rather than an "official" name.

A bit of Googling pointed to the full name Małgorzata, which I had never heard before, either. Searching enwp for that brought lots of hits, though, so it seems to be a fairly popular name.

Searching for it on pl.wikipedia.org finally told me more; I first looked at the interwiki links and then at the text, both of which indicate that it's the Polish form of Margaret.

(The article also listed twenty other nickname forms besides Gosia... those Poles really seem to be creative in their nicknames. Though I can imagine that it also helps to distinguish if you have, say, several Margarets in one school class.)

Baraku Oobama

I wonder what Barack Obama's name would be in Japanese... the family name just screams to be Japonified, and 大浜 seems like an obvious enough rendering (to be read "Ōbama"). And that name even exists as a surname, according to ENAMDICT! (And as a placename, which can also be read "Ōhama".)

Not quite so sure about the given name, though ENAMDICT lists 馬楽 for "Baraku" as a "given name, as-yet not classified by sex". So, 大浜馬楽?

(Before I looked it up, the first thing that came to my mind was 馬駱. "Horse camel"?)

...hm, after looking him up in the Japanese Wikipedia, I was pointed to 小浜, which is a placename (for example, in Fukui or, formerly, in Nagasaki) and surname and is read "Obama", which is even closer. (Also "Ohama" or "Kohama" or "Kobama".)

Obama, Fukui, in particular, apparently took advantage of this similarity in names; see the WP article, for example.

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I'm also curious about the etymology of his given name. Is it Semitic, and if so, is it from the root b-r-q "lightning" like the biblical prophet Barak, or from b-r-k "blessing"? (Hebrew Wikipedia uses the "q" spelling for his name, but that may not mean much, since I believe that's the most common letter to represent [k] in foreign loanwords, given that /k/ is pronounced [x] in some positions. Arabic Wikipedia uses "k", but that also need not mean much.)

The things you learn: Teich vs. See

Apparently, the difference between a "Teich" and a "See" (masculine) in German is that a "Teich" is man-made.

That's not something I think I ever knew; I think I made a distinction more along the lines of English "pond" vs. "lake", i.e. purely by size rather than by origin.

I also didn't know that a "Tümpel" is characterised by drying out occasionally rather than carrying water all the time; for me, it was also merely a word for a small body of standing water. (And part of my passive vocabulary, at that.) Then there are also "Weiher", which is even less familiar a word to me.