Strategy Books Available Online in English

• The Art of War by Sunzi aka Sun Tzu, China, 6th century B.C.
• The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, Greece, 5th century B.C.
• The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli, Italy, 1513
• A Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi, Japan, 1645
  

Imagine all the countries…

Can you imagine UN and EU to be persuaded by…

• Mexico - to use the reference the Former British Colonies of United States of America for the USA, because the "America" part of the regular name implies territorial pretensions to the whole geographical area of America?
• DR Congo - to use the reference the Former French Colony of Central Africa for the Central African Republic, because the "Africa" part of the regular name implies territorial pretensions to the whole geographical area of Africa?
• USA - to use the reference the Former Spanish Colony of Mexico for the United Mexican States, because the "Mexico" part of the regular name implies territorial pretensions to south-western state of New Mexico?
• USA - to use the reference the Former Soviet Republic of Georgia for the Republic of Georgia, because the "Georgia" part of the regular name implies territorial pretensions to their southern state of Georgia?
• Azerbaijan - to use the reference the Former Ottoman Possession of Albania for the Republic of Albania, because the "Albania" part of the regular name implies territorial pretensions to the geographical region with that name in the Caucasus?
• Macedonia - to use the reference the Former Yugoslav Republic of Montenegro for the Republic of Montenegro, because the "Montenegro" (in original: Crna Gora) part of the regular name implies territorial pretensions to the Macedonian region of Crna Gora Mountain?
• Sweden - to use the reference the Former Russian Province of Finland for the Republic of Finland, because of the claim that Santa Claus is the "most famous Finn," while Sweden considers this cultural figure as its own?
• France – to use the reference the Former Norman Possession of Great Britain for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, because the "Britain" part of the regular name implies territorial pretensions to the geographical area of Bretagne?
• Russia – to use the reference the Former Ottoman Possession of Bulgaria for the Republic of Bulgaria, because the "Bulgaria" part of the regular name implies territorial pretensions to the geographical area covered by the historical country with the same name along Volga River?
• Macedonia – to use the reference the Former Yugoslav Republic of for Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Serbia, because all of them were indeed republics in former Yugoslav federation, and it's unfair only one of them to carry this identity burden.

No?

Then please raise your voice against the continuous discriminatory use of the "temporary" reference the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia by both UN and EU when they refer to Republic of Macedonia. Help putting and end to the surreally ridiculous, but very damaging "name dispute" instigated by Greece.

UN and EU to Impose New Name on Finland

STOCKHOLM (Rewters) - Using the precedent set by Greece, which persuaded the international community to punish Macedonia for daring to claim the heritage of Alexander the Great by forcing a provisional name, Sweden decided to use the same remedy on obstinate Finland.

At the Eurovision Song Contest 2007, Finland raised the stakes in an age-old dispute by promoting Santa Claus as "the most famous Finn," which Sweden labeled a grave provocation. This Finish neighbor—claiming that the world-famous figure has their citizenship—retaliated by starting an economic embargo and requiring the EU from now and to all eternity use the provisional reference "former Russian province of Finland" or the short form "FRP Finland" in all international bodies and Europe-wide TV broadcasts.

All over Sweden, angry crowds took to the streets, chanting "Santa Claus is Ours!" and "Nokia, stop collecting people!" proudly waving their Sony Ericsson mobile phones in their clenched fists.

Using the Greek argument that only a part of the territory of Ancient Macedonia now belongs to Republic of Macedonia, Norway, Canada and Russia entered the fray, claiming that they possess far more acreage of the Arctic Circle than Finland, which invalidates its claim. They support the idea of UN arbitration, and require that the matter should be put forward to the Security Council.

An unlikely alliance of diplomatic representatives of Turkey and Serbia also condemned the Finnish "hostile" act. Turkey put forward historical evidence that the historical Santa Claus, who at the time was known as Saint Nicolas, in fact lived in Demre, in the Antalya province. Serbia based its objection on the fact that many Serbs celebrate Saint Nicolas as their family patron saint, and expressed fears that Finnish copyright on the day might lead to increased costs for the members of the Orthodox Christian community aggravating their already grave economic situation.

Coca Cola corporation spokesperson was unavailable for comment on this issue of outstanding international importance.

Emperor's Daughter and the Healer (Macedonian folk story)

A bad thought is a full-fledged disease - Macedonian proverb

Once upon a time, an emperor's daughter suffered from a bad thought she had. All imperial healers and physicians attempted to heal her, but nobody could find a cure. From day to day she grew worse, and her face was dying out.

An old healer heard about her plight. He was forgotten by the world forgot a long time ago due to his old age, and nobody ever sent for him any more.

"Ah, wait," the healer told himself, "I should go to the emperor's daughter, and see what kind of illness she has, so I can heal her."

He went to the castle and presented himself in front of the emperor's daughter. After he questioned her from all sides on what ails her, he found her cure.

"Many healers," the old healer said, "attempted to cure you by way of herbs, but they failed to make you well, daughter. I will cure you without herbs, so you will remember me and always mention me in your prayers 'may God have mercy on the old healer who cured me without herbs.'"

"Oh, gradpa," the emperor's daughter said sadly "If you can cure me, I will tell my father to make you the first healer of the capitol, and give you great riches."

After the healer heard this words, he went to the goldsmith and had made a golden ring, with a stamp on top. In the stamp, he wrote these words: "All that was – has come to pass, and all that will be – will pass also." He brought the ring to the princess and put it on her finger.

"Here's you cure, o imperial girl," said the healer. "Every hour of every day, when the bad thought comes to torment your heart, read the inscription and think about it a little bit. This way, if you read and think, in forty days you will be healed. Do this, I beseech you, and I guarantee with my own head: cut it off if you don't get well."

And in truth, the emperor's daughter recovered from the illness in her thought, in even less than forty days. She was cured, and the healer got great honors.


Written by Marko Cepenkov (1829-1920), translated into English by Filip Stojanovski.
Source: Царската ќерка и екимо.

How to Get Over 10000 Visits to a Webpage in a Day (Case Study)

In the night between December 4 and 5, 2006, in the twelve hours between 7 pm and 7 am, one article of the Science Fiction Observer blog received over ten thousand visits. The lessons of this success are useful to all interested in online marketing and promotion.

This blog was opened for the reasons of testing the new Blogger software, learning about social networking as promotion tool through practice, and--of course--to present news and opinions about science fiction and related subjects, by the blog members.

1. The website should be appropriate for the purpose

Blogs are good tool for web marketing and e-publishing experiments because the initial financial expenses are minimal, while the very nature of the medium enables quick linking among the sites, which are already optimized for search engines (if they use Latin alphabets). Large portion of their audience consists of other bloggers, who by default surf more than the usual internet users, so the results are obtained quicker, in comparison to the overall internet-space.

2. Present Relevant Information

During the previous weekend I came across a news item that I found fitting into the concept of the blog, and could be tied in to some previous posts. In the presented form it did not provide complete information. The topic was updating the legal framework on copyright in the U.S.A. in some special cases, enabling access to abandonware, including some old DOS games mentioned on the blog. Besides a link to the news, I also found the original text of the new regulation and posted a link to it, alongside with a quote of the most important article. By this I provided a complete information, enabling further research for the readers who would like to pursue it.

3. Invest in Promotion over the Internet

Few days before that I already promoted the basic website of the blog over the StumbleUpon, generating over 1000 visits. I decided to use Digg's Gaming News channel for this article, because its readers would be most interested. The platforms both social networking services, but Digg's advantage is that it's completely web-based, while StumbleUpon requires users to install toolbar. (StumbleUpon's advantage is the ability to initiate direct communication among users, which is somewhat complicated on Digg). Digg articles receiving enough votes appear on the extremely popular front page.

This happened with the article in question. After getting initial support by dozens of voters, the visits skyrocketed to a few hundred. It ended its stay on the front page with over 1440 diggs, leading to over 14.000 visits from all over the world in the next couple of days. Links on other websites and blogs continued to supplement the Digg effect. Most of the visitors came from locations where potential foreign investors reside (North America, Western Europe, East Asia, Australia).

4. Follow the Situation Closely and React Accordingly

During the evening, I stayed on the particular Digg page used for voting, responding to comments by other users. This also helped the promotion, because their friends can see if they are active and post comments to certain topics, and get curious about it. Also, I invited my friends who were online at the time to join the party via IM.

In this case, the financial investment was minimal, and most of the investment consisted in applying experience and knowledge of operation of systems used.

5. Analyze and Make Room for Further Development

According to the results by the blog aggregator Digimak, which uses the data from the public counters of around 88 Macedonian blogs, an average Macedonian blog has about 40 unique visits per day. The most popular Macedonian blogs seldom top 200 visits per day, with the exception of porn blogs, which remain a separate world anyway. Judging by the available public counters and some insider data, Macedonian business-oriented websites probably do not stray much from this pattern.

This case remains important not only because it contributed to world promotion of the product in question (the article and the blog), but it contributed to raising the average visits level of the whole Macedonian blogosphere. If the Macedonian firms and institutions require business promotion over the internet, they must necessarily take into consideration the need for proactive web-marketing, and hire relevant experts.

Source: Како до над 10.000 посети на ваша веб-страница во еден ден (студија на случај). Filip Stojanovski for Razvigor in Macedonian blog, Jan 15, 2007.

PS
If you like it, please digg this article ;-).

SEO for Blogs – Harder for Other Alphabets and Scripts

Blogger.com, Joomla and other popular contemporary content management systems (CMS) provide a feature that creates URLs for each article based on the words in the title, but this works only with Latin alphabets.

So for instance, if you have an article titled "10 Top Things", and instead of an URL based on its ID in the CMS database, such as

• http://www.yoursite.org/show_article.php=23

you will get an URL such as

• http://www.yoursite.org/2007/Jan/10-top-things.html

The article's URL is one of the most important elements to the search engines and the more keywords it contains, the higher the rank of the actual article. Unfortunately, this HTML dump technique is currently non-applicable to websites using scripts other than basic Latin, because the domain names are allowed to use only English Latin characters.

For instance, for an article written in Macedonian Cyrillic, with a title „Граѓаните имаат право на избор“ (Citizens have the right of choice) you would get a generic link such as

• http://razvigormk.blogspot.com/2007/01/blog-post_16.html

because Blogger.com has no ability to include the words from the title into the URL.

One temporary solution would be to include a feature for transliteration, or converting the text written in other script into English Latin alphabet, and then using it in for the URL. For instance, the title of the above article would be "Gragjanite imaat pravo na izbor".

This SEO technique would at least help surfers who would search for Macedonian content but have no ability to write in Cyrillic at the moment, and would be especially helpful with search engines who do automatic conversion and cover both original Macedonian Cyrillic and English transliteration, such as Pogodok.

Timeline of Macedonian Blogosphere

The interactive Timeline of Macedonian Blogosphere depicts the most significant events and developments about Macedonia-related blogs.


Available in Macedonian and English languages.

Christmas Atmosphere in Zagreb, Croatia

A shot I made on the Ban Jelacic Square in Zagreb, Croatia, 22.12.2006. The people prepare for Christmas, and the shops expect an invasion.

Which Website are You?

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Which Website are You?


Snopes.com

USA Legalizes Abandonware

According to PCS Intel, the U.S. Copyright Office has issued new rules, effective November 26, enabling public access to commercially unavailable software.

New rules officially permit the use and distribution of so-called Abandonware, or software that is no longer generally available to the public (in the form it was originally released). Meaning, you can now legally use MAME to emulate classic arcade games on your phone (assuming it's powerful enough... and the game is no longer available).

The above article speaks specifically about phone software, and the good news from the original text of Rulemaking on Exemptions from Prohibition on Circumvention of Technological Measures that Control Access to Copyrighted Works is:

Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and that require the original media or hardware as a condition of access, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of preservation or archival reproduction of published digital works by a library or archive. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.

Meaning, your use of classic science fiction games for DOS, such as Dune and Elite, from sites such as Abandonia is officially decriminalized!

Source: Science Fiction Observer, 02.12.2006.