For anyone who wants to see them, I’ve finally managed to upload the slides from my SXSWi talk “Taking over the World: the Flickr way”, a broad-sweep view of some of the issues and solutions we encountered whilst taking Flickr from an English-only site to supporting multiple languages.

You can find them over at the talks page, along with the details of my next scheduled talk at XTech in Dublin on May 5th 2008.

(Photo of me by Gareth on Flickr, used by permission)

Bit quiet on the posting front this week - mainly due to my traveling around Asia for the second leg of the “24 hours of Flickr”/International promotion tour.

I’m trying to keep photos up to date on Flickr - the Collection will give you a good overview of the weird and wonderful experiences we’re having out here.

In the past week, I’ve…

• …attended 2 Flickr launch parties.
• …given a talk to Korean developers.
• …luxuriated in the second best hotel room I’ve ever stayed in.
• …been to a Crazy Bar.
• …visited to the Korean DMZ
• …frequented a bar where all the waiters are dwarves… with a guy who’s dwarf-phobic.
• …eaten Balut.

A quick bit of site update news - I’ve added a Talks page in the uber-optimistic hope that I’ll be giving more presentations on Flickr, Internationalisation and related topics in the near future. For now, it just contains one set of slides from the Korean talk, notable for the fact that the lovely folks at Yahoo! Korea translated all the text into Korean, to make things easier for those developers who didn’t have perfect English.

The talks page is here:

http://hitherto.net/talks/

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to fly to Kuala Lumpur…

*ahem*

So, this site fell a bit quiet again over the last… oooh, I dunno, nearly 8 months. Partly, that’s because I didn’t have much to write about, and (stubborn as I am), I refuse to contribute to the ever-expanding web of wiffle just so that my RSS feed contains some more entries.

But it’s also telling that the last blog post just about coincides with the time that I started planning the infrastructure needed to take Flickr from a 1-language interface to 8, a roller-coaster ride of a project which swallowed a lot of my thought-space and eventually time (I was working 16-18 hour days for the last 3 weeks), but which is finally done, and has been live to the world for a whole month now.

I’m proud to have done that, the minor glitches and post-launch issues (which won’t be discussed here, because this is my personal site) aside.

Immediately post-launch I was whisked away on a whirlwind tour (Paris for 24 hours, London for 5 days, Montreal for 3) during which I lost my luggage, had my camera and credit-card stolen, and spent a great deal of the scant “downtime” in interminable conference calls.

I wound up back in the Bay Area about 3 weeks ago seriously exhausted and disoriented, and have been slowly pulling my life back together since then. Which is where we come to this l’il update, and the (undoubtedly sporadic and random) resumption of me posting here.

In short, I’m back, baby!

So I know - this site’s been pretty quiet for the last 3 months or so. In part that’s because I’ve been too busy to write much.

Habitual visitors will notice that, as of today, there’s been a bit of a rebuild. It seemed like it was long overdue, for a mixed bag of reasons…