Oral Tradition, a scholarly journal by the University of Missouri, has published an issue fully devoted to Bertsolaritza, the Basque improvised poetry phenomenon. Several Basque contributors fill most of the number, but as an introduction for foreigners, perhaps you should also read the outsider view by John Miles Foley, the director of the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition and the Center for eResearch at the University of Missouri. That article, like all the others, is available as a PDF in the journal's website.

In this video from Bertsoplaza.tv, a site powered by Plone, one of the many versions Bertso-making can have: question and reply, in a bertso-dinner. The tall guy reads his pre-writen lines (around the topic of Streap-tease), and the bertsolari, Jexux Mari Irazu, improvises his replies immediatly.

Ten years ago, in a day like today, I found a service called Makelist while surfing the web. Create and manage your own mailing lists! This needs to be tried immediatly, I thought. I needed a motive (build the list around some topic) and some email addresses to add. Ok, some friends from my hometown Eibar. And Eibartarrak (Eibarreans, or so) was thus created, with this introductory message and thread, a mailing list with very simple moderation rules (you introduce yourself with name and surname, archives are public, discussion is in Basque).
   
It was not the 1st Basque-language list (there was one from 1996 that later disappeared), neither the 1st Basque list of the web: Basque-L, which was mainly in English, was born in some Listserv machine of New York in 1993. I was a subscriber to that list for several years, but I have lost contact, I don't even know if Basque-L is alive and if it is, if there's any practical way to subscribe, check its archives... Other Basque-language lists have been created over the past years, but of the surviving ones, Eibartarrak is the veteran, and it's also probably the most lively and interesting one.
   
The Eibartarrak mailing-list has been the basis of all my Internet activities over the last ten years. My company, my everyday work of today, raised from contacts made in the list. My confidence in the Internet as a communication and social tool has its roots in this list: we the users are the agents of change in this era.

Makelist evolved into eGroups which evolved into Yahoogroups. It's a fascinating story. However, we escaped from that locked-in environement, migrated the list to a Mailman-based platform (localised in Basque), and ported the archives to Gmane.

Eibar.org, this website, was created with the effort of listmembers. The 1st Basque-language blog community of the web was born here, pushed by listmembers, in 2004. As for the future, no doubts about the direction: to infinity and beyond. There will be tools to guide us in that navigation too. Some listmembers will meet this afternoon to hack the TomTom car navigation system and record Basque voices for the devices. And that will be made public afterwards.

Recently, I've joined the ranks of the Wikipedians. I've come to think that this project is important. Particularly, for a minority language like Basque. So I've started to edit a little bit in Basque articles, and somehow less in Spanish. Very minor anonymous edits in English, so far. But I'm a lazy editor, that's the true. However, there's more people around, so last sunday Basque Wikipedia reached its 25,000th article. Great!

I'm still trying to understand the rules and mechanisms of the Wikipedia. Regarding the licensing of its content, I received with hope the announcement of its future compatibility with Creative Commons. I need to investigate more about that. It seems that Wikipedia content might be used elsewhere with a CC-BY-SA license, but: will content produced elsewhere with CC-BY-SA be ready for direct and legitimate insertion in Wikipedia?

The rules for images in Wikimedia Commons are strict, and uploading of Flickr content is permitted in the open CC versions. This graph above shows it clearly, and it also helps to understand that ND (non-derivative) and NC (non-commercial) licensing are incompatible with free content. I am somehow disappointed with the low understanding of the NC thing among young Basque content producers: people embrace the Non-Commercial line fullheartedly, as if that meant rejecting commercialism, explotation and the trends of savage globalization. They don't realize it's just the opposite: the non-commercial prohibition is the basis of propietary software or content as dreamt by DRM zealots. It means the exclusive right to concentrate all posible benefits of knowledge creation in one point, instead of fostering the spread of wealth among everybody, everywhere. Anyway, I wonder if that model found in Commons for images is appliable to textual information at large. Or geographic information. For instance. Tagzania, OpenStreetMap or Geonames, they all have defined their info in free terms using Creative Commons; does this make their content fit for Wikipedia reuse?

We'll see. The new label that Creative Commons launched, Approved for Free Cultural Works, related to the Wikipedia announcement, is a positive step towards sheding light on the issue of licenses.

I've been two weeks in Japan in holidays. What a marvelous country: it's well blogged about, so I won't bother anyone with my accounts. We didn't find any Basques in our journey, just our hosts, the Teshima-Berriozabal family, who were so extremely kind to invite us to their country, and to their own home in metro-Tokyo. Paulo Berriozabal is a Basque blogger in Tokyo, blogs in Spanish and Basque, and it's through that blog, that we happened to know each other.

While in Tokyo, we did find a Basque flag, by pure chance. It was in a bar called Vinuls just at the Ueno JR station that presented itself as a Spanish tavern. I've checked the web, and it seems Vinuls started as a Spanish or Catalan bar in the Ginza area... Now it seems it has been expanded into a chain.

Peru is a good model for pictures. So is Lili, my daughter. And the setting, Japan, is perfect to click and click and click...

Zapatero got a second term in last sunday's Spanish general election. Results are quite indifferent to me now. Just three days before the polls, ETA killed Isaias Carrasco, a modest Basque worker who had been a councilman for PSOE, Zapatero's party, a few years ago. It's been a senseless crime. Made in our name, in the name of Basque freedom. Please, do not save me, you brave patriots.

And yet, I think we deserve a better future. An independent future.

Last year, in Björk's latest concert in the Basque Country, she chose one particular song to close the show: Declare Independence. Was it a political wink to the local audience? I'm not sure yet. But now I know that Björk does use the song with clear political intentions, at least in other countries.

This report states that in Japan recently, she dedicated the song to Kosovo. And in Shanghai, she cried Tibet, Tibet, after singing it, which will bring her problems if she plans to act again in China.

Besides, it seems that the song itself was written with Greenland and the Faroe Islands in mind, still attached to Denmark: as Iceland was until the 20th century. Formal independence was granted in 1918. Full independence (no further roles for the Danish royals there), with the transformation of Iceland into a republic, happened in 1944.

The song's lyrics say: "Don't let them do that to you. Raise your flag!" There's an interesting point there. Spain has refused to recognize Kosovo's independence in the basis that it is an "unilateral" declaration. Stupid argument, warmly received by Serb hardliners in Belgrad. Of course, Moratinos, the spanish foreign affair minister, is afraid that others may follow up. But, are there any other ways to declare independence? Not letting others decide by you. That's independence.

Recently, one of the prosecuted in the Egunkaria case was asked in an interview: How should Basque authorities and political parties protect you from the Inquisitiorial trial that you are going to face in Madrid? They should do as in Kosovo, declare independence. I think he's completely right.

We should, as well, declare our indepedence of mind from ETA. If we are to survive.

I'm not longer an employee at CodeSyntax, but at Tagzania Services, a spin-off that has sprouted from it. We created Tagzania.com a couple of years ago, and that has led to its own dedication and has also brought new customers and projects to our web development company, a bunch of new activities that might be labelled geography 2.0.

So, there we go, with a couple of new domains (tagzania-services.com & tagzania-blog.com), and an extra blog in English about these new services. We remain in the same office space of CodeSyntax (which has been featured in this spanish blog just after they posted about start-up office pics of international fame). Anyway, we are expanding to the office space behind that green wall. Someone's got to digg a hole there. Then we'll have to decide which part of the double-office gets ownership of the company motto: KISS, Keep It Simple Stupid.

Today, it's five years since the Spanish authorities closed Egunkaria, the 1st continuous Basque language newspaper of history. I've begun a Spanish-language blog about Egunkaria.

Donostia, this city I live, is a very provincian town, although some authorities think it's New York. Let's face it, it's not. However, there are some nice and somehow isolated spots of non-conformism in the social and cultural landscape of the city. Giorgio Bassmatti is one of them. One of the many incarnations of blogger Love of 74, Giorgio is a sui-generis musician, very able to compose an instant ode to the guy that made french bank Societe Generale lose zillions of euros.

There was a small concert by Giorgio near home the other day. It was in the branch offices of a bank! You see, good taste sometimes has to find refuge in the most unexpected places.

Giorgio began with one of my favorites. Morrissey. He chose Everyday is like sunday. So fitting words: This is the coastal town that they forgot to bomb, come, come, nuclear bomb... Everyday is like sunday, everyday is silent and grey. I would have suggested another song as well, Sheakespeare's sister, for its poignant lyrics: I thought that if you had an acoustic guitar that it meant that you were a protest singer ;-)

Another isolated spot of local excellence: Flickr user Yosigo. He's printed some of his works for a local exposition that opens today.

If there needs to be some Basque style definition, I wish it were more in the line of Yosigo than the Kelly Family kitsch. Pseudo-spamming chain-letters are crossing among Basque mailboxes these days referring to some Kelly familiy videos where they're signing in Basque. It seems that Maite Itoiz, one of the members of the extended family, is Basque. Anyway, look at their site and looks.

That horse lacks a horn, doesn't it?

Robert Capa's lost negatives have finally come to an institution, the ICP. Great report by the New York Times, including a pic of one of the cases full of negatives, complete with its numbered tags. Among those tags, my hometown Eibar (see how it ended after the war), Bilbao, Dolores Ibarruri Pasionaria...

The mention about Amorebieta close to a campaign mass makes me suspect that these particular photos are not by Capa himself, but by David Chim Seymour. That's how ICP itself describes Seymour's work in the Spanish Civil War: (...) Basque soldiers enjoying moral support from monks at the Monastery of Amorabita (sic) and attending an outdoor mass before going into battle. The Basque chaplain pictured by Seymour, that must be it.

Anyway, I hope the ICP follows into the steps of the Library of Congress and its usage of Flickr to document thousands of pictures. How will they tag and identify all the Capa negatives in ICP's Manhattan headquartes? Bring them all to the Internet! There's people alive around that suffered the Spanish Civil War in those scenarios. My father was in Elgeta, Eibar, and other places around that front, in the same republican side of the photographers. I can sit him in front of the screen and we'll tag the pictures gladly.

I've updated the image of the Cemetery. The Plone CSS templates are too complicated for me, so I've put just a header image. Two different headers, really, for the Basque and English versions. Those cemeteries are not English, really. They are military burial grounds that we visited last summer in Normandy. The one in the Basque side is the American cemetery of Normandy, in Omaha Beach, and this one at the English side is the nearby German cemetery of La Combe, an image that a co-worker, photographer and designer Zaloa Etxaniz adapted for the header. 

The title line of this blog refers to the English Cemetery of Donostia, the city in which I live. Donostia is a bilingual city, and has this English spot on it, a nice little historic cemetery for some forgotten war heroes of the 18th century. When my blog launched, this was a trilingual experiment, so I thought the English Cemetery was a fitting metaphore for it. Then El Cementerio de los Ingleses, the Spanish version, migrated to another site, the Mapamovil.

The original blog was orange, it had an image with the map location of the English Cemetery. Then in 2006 I changed to a black and white design, with some misterious girls in the header: some friends told me that header made me look like a pervert. Who cares? Anyway, now I finally show cemeteries.