Important notice:

Negonation Blog English (the page you are looking at right now) is a timely translation of Negonation Blog Spanish. After the departure of our former translator, this blog is on-hold until we find a replacement. We are looking for a person who is:

• a native english speaker with a good knowledge of spanish.
• crazy enough to collaborate for free with a start-up whose mission is “to bring justice to the internet nation”.
• willing to translate posts from Spanish into English in 48 hours since their original publication (1-2 posts per week).

If you know somebody who meets this criteria and could be interested, let us know!.

In the meantime, please, bear with us. We are working to get Negonation Blog English back ASAP.

For the past year and a half, I’ve been translating the Negonation blog from Spanish to English so that you can read the thoughts and opinions of the Spanish contributors. After thinking long and hard, I recently came to the conclusion that I could no longer dedicate enough time and effort to do this job well, so this is my ‘goodbye’ post.

I’d like to thank David Blanco and the rest of the Negonation team for giving me the opportunity in the first place and for giving me the space to learn and mature as a translator. I have learnt a great deal about digital signatures, authentication and application design and development as well as vastly improved my Spanish. Thanks very much guys. I’ll definitely continue to follow the blog and wish you all the best of luck in the future.

Before I go, I’d like to share a few thoughts about translation. Firstly I have to confess: I am not a professional translator; I am a programmer. I also do not speak Spanish natively. So, when I initially took on the job of translating the Negonation blog, I thought the hardest part would be understanding the Spanish posts, and I was right; at least initially. But soon, my level of Spanish improved and I began to realise that the real problem of translation is one of representation.

What do you do when a Spanish sentence doesn’t have an exact translation to English? Do you translate word-for-word and stay true to the original content or do you stay true to the original meaning of the content? For example, in Spanish the construct ‘tanto X como y…’ means ‘both X and Y…’ in English, but the literal translation is ‘As much X as Y…’. Guess which one I used at the start?

What about if the original post contains something that you think is unclear or could be better expressed? Well, I think that you have to use your ‘artistic license’ here, but you have to use it very carefully because yes, you are making it clearer for the end user but you are also reducing the quality of the translation. People want to read what the original author wrote, not what you think he/she should have written.

It is not surprising that the posts I found most simple to translate were those that dealt with computing concepts. I knew the vocabulary in Spanish and I write IT documents on a frequent basis in English. By far the hardest were the posts that dealt with legal issues. Complicated issues, words I’ve never heard before in Spanish (and in some cases their English counterparts!) and (with all due respect to the authors), something in which I am less interested.

I hope that my mistakes along the way have not impeded your enjoyment of this blog and I hope that you have learnt as much as I have from each of the posts.

Thanks very much for following the blog.

Kevin McCormack

100 RSS subscribers

One hundred people have decided to add the Negonation Blog’s RSS feed to their feeds aggregator and the number remains stable. This is clearly the datum that we are most proud of. At the conference of The Next Web, Michael Arrington stated with conviction that the number of RSS subscribers was the only datum to which he paid attention: “Those are the loyal ones“. If you are one of the first 100 loyal ones, “Thanks with all my heart“.

8,100 visits

The Negonation Blog had a superb debut.

The graphic shows three visitors’ peaks:

• The first peak was on 21 June when Diego decided to tell in his blog minid.net that he worked at Tractis. As a result, we received over 600 visits through that way alone during the next 4 days and put the Negonation Blog (known only to the negonators until then) on many people’s radar map.
• The second peak was on 26 June. Enrique Dans was watching the project closely from WebDosBeta. When he knew that we were going to post regularly, he announced it on his blog, he included us in his blogroll and wrote a wonderful post here, becoming our first guest blogger; 400 people visited our site. However, the best was yet to come. On the day after Enrique’s post, we were listed on Menéame. Manuel Santos debuted in the blog with a very funny post, “If you can’t write, sign with an “X” mark“, which ended up on the cover of Menéame. In a few hours, we received around 1,100 visits. Since then, Manolo wanders around murmuring “I’ll never achieve that again, I’ll never achieve that again…”:D
• Things returned to normal…until we published a page with a list of links on getting started with Ruby on Rails. Getting started with Ruby on Rails ended up on the cover itself of del.icio.us popular and was responsible for the third peak.

In the first few days, several blogs heard about the project. My favorite posts are as follows (they’re all in Spanish):

• Tractis and the search for venture capital.
• Negonation, a start-up that I love.
• Tractis: an open justice system for the Internet.
• Electronic contracts and arbitration.

As a personal note, I loved the fact that Nacho from Microsiervos made the first comment on our (Spanish) blog. A very nice gesture. A few years ago I tried to make Nacho become a negonator. Although I was unsuccessful and he started Internality, I’m glad that he is on our trail . Nacho was the first person who told me about The Cluetrain Manifesto.

1,000 people subscribe to Tractis Beta

In reality there are 952 but we expect to reach 1,000 soon.

Many people who visit the Negonation Blog end up visiting Tractis. There are two versions of http://www.tractis.com. If the browser’s language is in Spanish, the visitor is redirected to the Spanish site. The rest are redirected to the English version. We maintain the two subscription lists separate. Subscribers are distributed 50:50 in the two lists. I think that this is good news since Tractis not only raises interest in the Spanish-speaking Internet world but also at worldwide level.

Some of you will smile and think that the numbers are small compared to…but it’s our first month!! A little patience…

Software used: For the graphics and statistics we used MeasureMap and Google Analytics. For the mailing lists we used CampaignMonitor.

Usually the person has a job, lives well from it and does not need to “pay hosting”, one of the most absurd excuses in this field. I’m not referring to commercial blogs either, dedicated to the world of legal news, where you can get bored reading a post. I’m simply referring to people who blog, who talk about what they do. Unfortunately, this phenomenon only happens in excellent doses in the US, where “payment for service” is the in-thing.

Continuing with the subject, finding specialized blogs from professionals who write about their subject and don’t digress to other stories is practically impossible. It looks like people are afraid of losing clients or stoking the competition. In the first case, for example, if I write about my subject, anyone could develop it (e.g. a contract editor), which would reduce the work. In the second case, the competition would be afraid of revealing talent for the benefit of others. But I believe that, in those cases, the best thing is a master at something; it’s difficult to sit down and write a document well, such as Wayne Schiess, or create an adequate contract, such as Ken Adams. However, both show their forms, without any restrictions, so that everyone else can learn and know. I believe that they’re both making money simply because they’re telling things.

I would like to see more of this in Spain, especially in legal matters, where the general public don’t have much idea. One person or more with talent in those fields, in terms of legal matters, composition, wording and negotiation, can have their own weblogs, create their business centers based on their services, and profit terribly from this field, which I compare with a remedy: everybody gets ill, so a pharmacy will never be a loss.

Wayne has a very entertaining weblog. He focuses especially on legal writing, which is not the same as what to write in a blog or that I start writing something when I lack the knowledge even if I have manuals explaining the subject point by point. But it’s interesting to know that there are many snags in the way we write a contract, especially if it’s for something big where often an incomprehensive text or bad writing can change the situation.
You should read blogs from people who work on this, in terms of both the writing in Spanish contracts and their composition.

The thing is I asked some of the most distinguished bloggers I admire to give me an opinion: Diego from minid, Enrique from El Blog de Enrique Dans, Mariano from Denken Uber and Nacho from Microsiervos. Diego read my first attempt and kindly answered: “it smells of business propaganda“. Just what I didn’t want. Don’t look for the post, I’ve left it for another rainy day. He also made other comments which I will include here because he’s right and they could be useful for other wannabe bloggers like myself:

Firstly, the post should reflect something you’re concerned about. You’re the one who’s writing it. However, when reading it, it doesn’t look like the person is annoyed. That’s the point of blogging: to talk about your own things as openly as possible.

(…) continue naturally. Don’t expect compassion from readers, many will even know more than us.

(…) Obviously, blogging is itself a personal act. No matter how hard publishers have tried to switch this to the publishing world, it doesn’t appeal. It’s not a question of spelling but of talking: whoever talks better will attract more people.

Nacho and Enrique confirmed what I already knew (“too long“) but they encouraged me sufficiently as to start anew.

In blogs, as in most other things, brevity is a virtue which often even the most experienced bloggers lack (including the three from Microsiervos ). Time and practice of course help a lot.

Therefore, time and practice. I’m sure I’ll achieve it, when I get something into my head…(laughter again).

For more information:

• Blogging Starter Checklist by Rajesh Setty.
• Blogging Style by Joi Ito. Advice for wannabe bloggers.
• When you can’t get started writing. Judy Rose recommends dividing the act of writing into microtasks.
• Tips for joining the A list by Robert Scoble.
• How to get traffic to your blog by Seth Godin
• The First 100 Days: Observations of a Nouveau Blogger by Guy Kawasaki, venture capital investor and former Apple Technology Evangelist. Guy has achieved a major feat: after only 100 days blogging, he’s ranked number 35 among Technorati’s most popular blogs.
• The 120 Day Wonder: How to Evangelize a Blog by Guy Kawasaki
• Ten Questions with David Sifry: David Sifry is the founder of Technorati. Question 4 provides advice on how to increase your blog’s traffic/popularity.
• 10 Techniques to Get More Comments on Your Blog with Enrique Dans’ comments.