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26 Oct 2009 10:36


By cathbad

Our CuChulainn comics aint good enough for French Wikipedia.

(could the French be snobs ?)


NB1 : please, read this article, it's important to us, reTweet, talk about it on Facebook, link to this article on your website, spread the word. We'd really appreciate that.

NB2 : and you'd do us a favor by answering the poll you'll find on the right column of this page. Thanks in advance, dear readers.

After some amongst you suggested it, we decided to add an entry in Wikipedia, relating to our webcomics. In French and English.

Wikipedia in English language has, on each page dedicated to Cúchulainn (and related characters), a section dedicated to the works from "pop culture" (music, movies, comics) directly inspired from the character and the myths surrounding it. You'll find mentioned the excellent works of  Paddy Brown, and from now on, ours.

Yet, in France, it seems that it's still considered rude to quote from a pop culture "by-product" at the end of a learned article of the online encyclopaedia. To tell you the truth, we're not that surprised. We know the culture in which we were raised quite well, and if it wasn't for you, English speaking readers worldwide, Oghme Comics would simply NOT EXIST. We thank you once again for your support.

Proof of what I just said follows. Suppression, without forewarning nor discussion, by user Ollamh, under qualification of  "spam" of the one-liner entries added to the three pages :
Here is the message I wrote to  Ollamh on his wikipedia page, asking him for some sort of explanations (this is a translation from French, for the original, switch to French language on this site) :

Comic Books and Mythology, let's talk about it

- message to Ollamh : Hello. I don't exactly understand why the addition of the following mentions in the articles  Cúchulainn, Cycle_d'Ulster, Setanta, have been deleted by yourself, and labelled as spam.

  • Setanta (Cúchulainn) is the main character in the series of Comics published online by Oghme Comics in French and English language.1

and the reference :

What is incorrect here, formally speaking ? Is the reference irrelevant ? I truly hope this is not a litteral application of this sentence by Mr. Guyonvarc'h (main translator in French of the Irish epics) : ""Therefore, there are only two ways of spoiling a myth : either, as the greek sophists did, one doesn't much believe in it any more and understands or imagines the adventures of the gods as a series of bawdy human-like jests ; or one sees the life of gods as a succession of trifling adventures, hardly good for children. Myths end the course of their deterioration in comic books"" ("la Razzia des Vaches de Cooley", page 44, édition Gallimard l’Aube des Peuples)

The corresponding articles in English language (Ulster_Cycle#Adaptations, Táin_Bó_Cúailnge, ...) all include a specific section for adaptations, listing, among other things, adaptation in comic books format, in English language.

Awaiting your answer, cordially.


The original message can be found here. Don't hesitate to read it, and comment it. Wikipedia is a collaborative tool.

We're now waiting for an answer, and are truly curious as to whether it would address the causes of such a cultural specificity, which would account for the differences in practice between the French and English versions of Wikipedia.

We're also awaiting your comments.



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6 Sep 2009 18:23


By cathbad

Cath 'N Mirlik - Mrs. Cathoway

To our Non-French readers, who might be confused :

- Mylène Farmer is a French singer, Cathbad is fan of, and Mirlik doesn't care of. Mylène makes a lot of references to Virginia Woolf's works in her songs, and even dedicated one song to the English feminine author. Hence the title.

- this strip is the fifth in a series on the same theme :

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3 Sep 2009 15:00


By cathbad

Interview with Amir Helzer - creator of WPML - a mutlilingual/localisation suite for the Wordpress and WordpressMU platforms

During the past three weeks, we've been interviewing with personnalities from the French Social advertising and Webcomics scene. This Monday, we meet with Amir Helzer, the author of WPML, a very powerfull plugin for the Wordpress and WordpressMU platforms, which enable users to build fully localized / international websites, and brings together the simplicity of Wordpress with the powerfullness of other CMSs like Drupal or EZpublish. We are particularly interested in platforms like Wordpress or Dotclear, because a lot of webcomics use them. Amir is the founder of OnTheGoSystems, which is the owner of ICanLocalize and WPML. He's been in business since 2007.

Oghme Comics : Hi Amir, you're the man behind the WPML project, a plugin for Wordpress and WordpressMU (or should I say a suite?), which gives users, for the first time, means of using Wordpress as a true mutlilingual content management system. But just before we dig into this, can you tell us about your background ?

Amir Helzer :  I'm fairly new to web programming. Have been working as a VLSI designer for 10 years and then changed course and started my own business. Now, I'm running a do-it-yourself translation business. We found out that people (rightfully) prefer using content management systems for building websites so we created WPML. Besides its multilingual features, WPML also makes it easy for people to order translation work from us and this is where we get most of our work today.

Oghme Comics : Where did WPML emerge from ? Did you design it from scratch, or did you build on other examples ? What made you take up that challenge ?

Amir Helzer :   WPML was actually born from Drupal, an established and excellent content management system. We used Drupal for several projects and also created a translation module for it. We were familiar with several multilingual plugins for WordPress but nothing measured up to what Drupal offered, so instead of waiting for it to rain, we decided to bring the clouds and built our own multilingual plugin from scratch, based on Drupal's architecture. Our feeling was that it's going to be easier to build it correctly from scratch than take something that started the wrong way and try to patch it. I think that this decision proved right. But, we're not there yet. We're working on additional functions for WPML which will allow running multilingual business websites with WordPress. There are more news to come...

Oghme Comics : Now that you tell us, WPML's structure sure has a Drupal feel. Could you nail down for us the most important features a multilingual CMS must have, in your opinion ? What other Wordpress plugins lacked that you provide, or intend to provide in the next updates ?

Amir Helzer :   A good plugin (or solution for anything) is not really a collection of killer features. More important is the basic problem that it needs to solve. In WordPress the issue is that the system is not language-aware. There's content but that content is not associated with languages. We decided to approach it by assigning languages to 'things', such as posts, pages, tag, categories and now also comments. This solution allows it to work with other custom data types as well. In WPML, each 'thing' has one language and translations are linked together using a translations table. Other WordPress plugins, like xLanguage and qTranslate take a different approach. They combine all the contents in all languages in a single page. Then, when displaying, they filter just the required language. I can't say that the other solution is not valid. It has it's advantages and disadvantages. I think that for running a simple blog, both would do fine. For running a complete site, WPML's approach seems better, as it can handle everything and not just the title and body as qTranslate does.

Oghme Comics :  One of the most interesting features in our opinion, is that WPML can hook with quite anything : themes, plugins, WP itself. What does it take to localise a plugin or a theme ? Can you detail the process ?

Amir Helzer :   There's actually an excellent page in WordPress.org for that: http://codex.wordpress.org/I18n_for_WordPress_Developers . We have also written a shorter post about it a while ago: People often confuse between making a plugin or theme translatable and multilingual-ready. If it's translatable, it means it can run in a different language. Multilingual means it can run in several languages. The difference can be quite significant. WPML helps create multilingual themes and plugins by making its string translation mechanism available to them. In short, what this means is that other plugins (or the theme) can input texts from the user and WPML will let users enter translation for them. We "borrowed" that feature from Drupal too.

Oghme Comics : Which users are you targeting for WPML ? Who can benefit from it and on what level ?

Amir Helzer :   Entering multilingual content is clearly not for everyone. 99% of WordPress users don't need it, but the remaining 1% still make up a large number of people. We're trying to address anyone who needs to run a multilingual website, not just blogs. Since we're making our living from people who also use our translation service, we try to make it appealing for business users. For this reason, WPML includes the CMS navigation functions, so that it helps build full websites.

Oghme Comics : Prospects : Apart for big companies websites, the web still has a long way to go before it's fully - truly internationalized ? You can't ask people worldwide to all master the same language. What do you think the standard internationalization pipeline for could look like for middle/small sized websites, in the near future ?

Amir Helzer :   I truly think that WordPress has the potential of becoming a de-facto standard for a wide range of websites. You can build a very small and basic site with it in one day and it will also serve you for building a corporate site. WPMU takes it one level up and helps build blog networks using the same platform. If it's good enough to power wordpress.com, it's probably just fine for any website on any scale. For WPML, our main concern is how to keep making it more complete but still simple. We don't want to get to the stage where Drupal is now, where it's so powerful that even its core contributors have a hard time using it ;-)

Oghme Comics : Can you tell us more about ICanlocalize.com ? How does it related to WMPL ? Who is your average user ?

Amir Helzer :   ICanLocalize.com is our translation service. It's an optional service which is tightly integrated into WPML that allows people to order translation work from us. WPML can open accounts in ICanLocalize and then send documents to translation. All this communication is done behind the scenes. Users just select what they need to have translated and pay for it. The contents are sent to our server, get translated and stored back in WordPress. Almost all of our clients are actually web-designers who build websites with WordPress. Their clients requested a multilingual site and they discovered they can do it using WPML. The most common response we get from new customers is that they had to discover our translation service by chance and that we're not promoting it well enough. We're working hard to change that!

NB1 : Here is a link to a very thourough tutorial (in French) to the process of building a multilingual WPML site.
NB2 : The Oghme Comics portal uses the French Dotclear platform, and the translation plugin DCTranslation developed by  Jean Christophe Dubacq. On the other hand, our new portal BabelComics, which is a collective of 6 webcomics authors (in both French and English languages) is built upon WorpressMU, with WPML, so as to ease the interfacing with our collaborators. Wordpress has de facto become the standard platform for webcomics publishing with themes like Comicpress and Webcomic+Inkblot.




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29 Aug 2009 02:10


By cathbad

Cath 'N Mirlik - Never tell a Breton he's being provincial.

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24 Aug 2009 14:49


By cathbad

Interview with Matt, landlord, creator and DJ of BlogsBD.fr, the french portal for webcomics' instant news.

This week I welcome a local celebrity, Matt, who's been selecting Blogs BD (this is what we call webcomics in France : BD = Bande Dessinée = Comic Strips) for you back when your grandma was still reading Brer Rabbit (since 2006, as a matter of fact, which, on the internet scale, ehh). For those among you who never heard about his website, know that Matt is the sole analogical human being behind the highly numerical website BlogsBD.fr, a webcomics aggregation machine of formidable efficiency. We'll step a little more on the geek side, this week, just a little bit :)


Oghme Comics : Hi, Matt. You're animating BlogsBD.fr, the first French portal of webcomics news. Before we begin, could you tell us who you are, what is your personal and professional background ?

Matt BlogdBD.fr : I'm an old, almost 30  geek, software consultant, loosely trying to shun the "programmer" etiquette sticked on his forehead.

Oghme Comics : What are your relationships with the comics industry in general ? What brought you to investigate webcomics ?

Matt BlogdBD.fr : Reading for my own pleasure is my main relation to the comics industry ! Since I was a kid, beginning with my parents comics collection, then with my own, which never stopped growing over the years. I first discovered online comics with the English webcomic MegaTokyo, and didn't really read many others, until several years later, when I came upon French Blogs BD, which sent my online reading time sky-rocketing, then I created BlogsBD.fr which didn't help me to slow down, to my greatest pleasure.



Oghme Comics : Can you quickly retrace the history of Blogsbd.fr : from the beginning to the present state of star of the French webcomic scene ? Which were the up and downbeats in the process ?

Matt BlogdBD.fr : A friend of mine designed a news aggregator for referencing of "intimist" bogs, system which I enjoyed on a reader's point of view (it was a little bit more visual and comfortable than a RSS feedsreader), then on a blogger's pov, as I began measuring  the system's impact on my site's daily visits, for each new post. This acted as an incentive to publish new content, which was encouraging for the writer, and at the same time, there was no traffic drain because the article couldn't be read directly from the portal. I reproduced the same pattern, only for webcomics, first because I felt a personal need for it (the "email-like" RSS interface for text based blogs didn't well suit illustration based blogs), then because I often found the same blogs in webcomics' blogrolls, which provided a convenient base to start building a common list, which in turn would benefit from being shared publicly.

Little by little, the number of visitors increased, hence the site's influence as it drew visits back to the referenced blogs. On the negative side : criticism relating to the blog selection. On the positive side : bloggers thanking me for the visits I redirected to their place, and readers pleased with their discovering of new blogs. Then, as the system evolved, I refined the functionalities (more editorial notes, or less..., multiple selection lists...) but the base principle really haven't changed that much.







Oghme Comics : Let's talk about the editorial process : this is where the very special appeal of BlogsBD.fr comes from in our opinion : you can feel the human being behind the blog. Do you maintain all this by yourself ?

Matt BlogdBD.fr : Yes, all by myself, even if I ask readers/bloggers for advice on a regular basis. The editorial process is quite straightforward, really : I come by blogs through others' blogrolls, or through emails and comments, and I add them in if I believe they do fit. With the latest version of the BlogsBD website, released in January 2009, you can choose between multiple selection lists, and the editorial process also became less "stressful" (before that, when a blog was dropped from a list, it could loose 90% of its traffic all of a sudden), as this added a way of buffering more blogs without overcrowding selection lists.

Oghme Comics : We believe that in the French online comics scene, there still is a lot of room for expansion. Since you began observing the French blogosphere, did you see trends building, changes ? In terms of themes, quality, creativity ?

Matt BlogdBD.fr : I didn't remark specific trends. We have quantity now, but as for quality, proportions seem stable enough to me. There's some pseudo stardom/glory buzz from time to time too, but they relate more to the blogging process than to Comics specifically.


Oghme Comics : Let's go on the "geek side of the force" for a minute :) Can you tell us (without revealing your secret recipe) how your web platform operates ? Did you design it from scratch ? How about your typical "Webcomics Night" ? The linuxian in me is curious !
 

Matt BlogdBD.fr : Secret is... there's no secret. I've always willingly answered technical questions I received. Not for the sake of "forced transparency", but rather because any geek likes to talk about his baby, rather of only discussing comics. Yes, I designed it from scratch, except for the RSS parsing which uses SimplePie (and at the very beginning, MagpieRSS). Principle is an aggregation of regularly visited feeds, which, in return, feed a "quick posts" database.

There isn't a "typical Webcomics Night", really, as my evenings tend to be packed with so many different activities. One of the great benefits of this agregator over the standard blogging I practised before, is that it doesn't need constant attention from my part to be able and live its life, which enables me to focus on the part I feel like doing at a precise moment (programming, editorial activity, design), except in times of bug-triggered-crisis, of course. The latest, yet unrealeased, still unfinished feature I'm cooking up right now, will enable users to build their own playlist (between the 600 or so referenced blogs) and stop being subject to the webmaster's dubious tastes !

Oghme Comics : On last question : the webcomics sphere is beginning to really go internationnal ; this is one of the internet's greatest asset : the translating process of printed comics is a coslty process, which is not the case when it comes to webcomics. BlogsBD.fr both lists French and English sites. Got some thoughts to share ?

Matt BlogdBD.fr : I'm no specialist on the subject, but wasn't the webcomic world international to begin with (I doubt the idea originated in one place) and then evolved as bridges were built between languages and creative sources ? I don't know, I' haven't made my mind up on the matter.

Oki doki. 'Nough for today :) Thanks to Matt for giving me some of his precious time, and as a conclusion, let's dig in some stats !

WTF are Belgian doing ?!? (Where are They?)

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17 Aug 2009 19:46


By cathbad

Interview with Jean François Ruiz & Sébastien Rousset, creators of the WidgetBooster social marketing system.

Today we're interviewing with Jean François Ruiz & Sébastien Rousset, the two French guys who designed WidgetBooster. Back in 2008, the French social marketing field was a barren desert. In 2009, several French marketing facilities have seen the light of day, enabling French bloggers to benefit from services so far available only to the English speaking communities.

   

Oghme Comics :  A warm welcome to Jean François Ruiz & Sébastien Rousset, the creators of WidgetBooster, a division of the PowerOn company. Could you sum up for our readers, in a few words, what WidgetBooster is ?

WidgetBooster : WidgetBooster is a fair visibility exchange system for webmasters who share a common interest. It totals 16 different themes as of today, more than 750 editorial members, and more than 20 000 000 displayed banners in the past 30 days.

Oghme Comics : Who are you, can you tell us more about your professional and personal background ?

WidgetBooster : We both are computer engineers. We've been into computers since our childhood. And there's no coming back from there ;) It's not just the two of us on this project : Olivier Moreau is very dedicated to WidgetBooster. He's simply one of the best programmers we ever met so far.

Oghme Comics : how did you come to work together on this social marketing project ?

WidgetBooster : Long story, we began working on it together during high school, as a Junior Enterprise. We've always worked together since. We created the webdeux.info blog in 2005. We came to understand better how online communities interacted, and what unsatisfied needs bloggers could have.

Oghme Comics :  How do you account, given a very active French blogosphere, for the lack of promotional means available to French bloggers ?

WidgetBooster : There can be several reasons :

  • unawareness that such partnerships do exist
  • none of the models proposed meet the bloggers immediate needs
  • no adequate technical solution is offered to meet these needs

Oghme Comics : The WidgetBooster Galaxy includes several solar systems : ComicsBooster, GirlsBooster, GamesBooster,... Let's tour the Theme Park !

WidgetBooster : Indeed, we've chosen to build different theme based sections for users. The most important thing for a website is to be able to benefit from a targeted audience generated traffic. More often than not, the existing networks haven't yet integrated that notion.

We'll cover a large number of different thematic universes, each available on the www.widgetbooster.com portal.

Oghme Comics : Project Wonderful, your American alter ego, offers a monetized based system. Why choosing an alternative which doesn't directly monetize traffic from your network's members ? Which are the advantages and drawbacks of such a system ?

WidgetBooster : Project Wonderful is a facility / marketplace offering advertisers means of buying traffic from editors. Our system is based on free exchange because it's the easiest way to facilitate the implementation of partnerships with other webmasters.

Oghme Comics : how do you operate your add targeting ? Do you intend to give your members means of targeting their own campaigns in the near future, or is this incompatible with the WidgetBooster philosophy ?

WidgetBooster : Add space targeting is based on the ability to provide more visibility to others. If your website helps other websites in one of the themed sub-networks to gain visibility, then your own visibility on these websites will increase. It will be proportional to what visibility you bring to others. It's a straightforward way of initiating fair-trade partnerships between websites with very different audience sizes, as long as they share a common theme.

As you've understood, we want to give everyone his chance to participate. Users already have the opportunity to target their adds by entering one of our theme based sub-networks.

Within a specific subnetwork, exchanges are not limited. We're in the process of designing a way for members to target their adds more specifically, but we can't yet tell you about it until we've officially released it ;)

Oghme Comics : Can you tell us more (without giving up your secret math formulas), how do you compute the users' credits : are they proportional to the number of clicks, the number of displayed banners, or other criterion ? How do you fight « click fraud » ? In one word, how do you guaranty the system's equity ?

WidgetBooster : Our system builds on the number of displayed banners and then evaluates the displayed banners' performance, based on the click through rate. Our system accepts multiple add formats : a 125x125 banner isn't equivalent to a 300x250. Our algorithm helps us balance a member's contribution according to the performance of his add spaces. We also take into account the performance of our members' adds, as they draw on their credit bank.

As for click fraud, as soon as it's detected, the responsible editor is shown the door.

Oghme Comics : let's focus on ComicsBooster, the WidgetBooster sub domain we're most interested in here at Oghme Comics. Ryan North designed Project Wonderful, initially, for the webcomics community and then enlarged the system to other branches of the blogosphere. How does comicsBooster position itself within the specificities of the webcomic community ? Do you intend to open the system to the international ?

WidgetBooster : Sure, we begin with France because this is where our base network is. Our platform's interface is already internationalized. However, we have to work some more on the valorisation part, because a visitor from the US on our network, on an advertising point of view, isn't equivalent to a French visitor. We have to figure the way of becoming the first international fair-traded banner exchange platform.

Oghme Comics :  What evolutions for WidgetBooster in the near future ?

WidgetBooster : Our road map is long, and grows longer with every piece of feedback we receive from our members.

Oghme Comics : Last, if you if you had to convince a blogger who didn't know anything about the WidgetBooster Exchange system, what would you tell them to prompt their decision to join you ?

WidgetBooster : We'd advise he reads our short introductory comic (in French), and hopefully he should fairly quickly understand the advantages of joining the themed sub network he's interested in.

As we're still in a launching period, we offer 5000 credits to all new WidgetBooster members.

Oghme Comics : Thank you !

WidgetBooster : Thanks a lot and see you soon !

RESOURCES :

WidgetBooster.com : Introduction to the themes of the Widgetbooster network

ComicsBooster.com : Widgetbooster's sub-domain for Comic Books
PowerOn.fr : The agency's main site, specialized in social marketing.
WidgetBooster explained in a short comic strip (French) :  http://widgetbooster.com/Home/BD

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