Balkans
clock | December 18, 2008The Schutz Family recently arrived in Belgrade and are blogging the experience. Read the posts about Sounds of Serbia and Survivor, Serbian Style to begin with....
Hat-tip: Victor
clock | December 17, 2008That's interesting:
Croatia currently has over 400,000 users on Facebook and that is more than a 15 percent growth over last month according to our own internal statistics. Facebook tends to be one of the first locations that younger generations turn to for expressing their political frustrations. There is no doubt that Facebook will continue to be a center for political expression.
Svetlana Gladkova suggests that the primary reason he was arrested was not simply that he created the Facebook group but that, "he is actually the president of one of the local branches of the youth of SDP (social…
clock | December 10, 2008The (apparently un-embeddable) video of the cuties is here (I wouldn't do that with my hand, though, what you see at one point....).
Hat-tip: Viktor
clock | December 7, 2008...you need to find the useful information by following the links in this post.
clock | November 27, 2008Serbian Ministry of Health, as part of their fight against AIDS, inserted a condom inside a women's magazine this month. The condom is German-made, named "Bumper-Bumper" and in a fun-looking package:
[Image from]
The timing is unfortunate (I'm sure it was planned months in advance and was too difficult to pull back at the last moment) - this was mailed out just 2-3 days after a guy in Belgrade killed his wife - a pretty brutal case of domestic violence that everyone is talking about (this is not something that happens often there).
Question #1: Why are condoms not sent to men? Are the…
clock | November 23, 2008Macedonians plant six million trees in single day:
Thousands of Macedonians took to the hills and forests on Wednesday to plant six million trees in a single day as part of a mass reforestation drive in the Balkan country.
The main aim of the campaign was to replant Macedonia's forests after extensive wild fires over the past two summers, and organizers trumpeted the scheme's environmental benefits at a time of global warming.
"Our goal is to make Macedonia "greener" and make people more aware of the needs of this planet," said Macedonian opera singer Boris Trajanov, who initiated the project…
clock | November 20, 2008The last of the old Yugo cars rolled off the production line today.
Here is some history of it. Yugo cars, known abroad, never came even close to Zastava 750 for its emotional meaning for Yugoslavs. Hey, I learned to drive in one of those:
clock | November 13, 2008RSS Feed aggregators as sources of information and knowledge in medical sciences (in Serbian - PDF) is an excellent article by Vedran Vucic geared towards medical professionals in Serbia. He will talk about this at the Belgrade's Medical School this Saturday as a part of a symposium on electronic libraries, biomedical information, and Open Access.
clock | November 3, 2008This is a website worth spending some time on and looking at every page:
This website is linked to a British Academy funded research project on the post-World War Two memorialisation of one of the main sites of the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Serbia, the Semlin Judenlager. Established by Nazi Germany in December 1941 on the outskirts of Belgrade, Semlin (also known by its Serbian name SajmiÅ¡te) was one of the first concentration camps in Europe, created specifically for the internment of Jews. Between March and May 1942, approximately 7,000 Jewish women, children and the elderly (almost half…
clock | October 18, 2008For some reason, my (rare) posts in which I make direct comparisons between Serbia and the USA (usually about politics) tend to become wildly popular (as in: spreading like wildfire on digg, redditt, stumbleupon, etc.). See, for example: Bush is Milosevic, Comparative Wingnuttery, Darwin in Serbia, More about me, The Warriors, Never Again!, Sixteen years ago today, We are now officially living in a dictatorship and When religion goes berserk! for examples of my typically inflamatory prose on the topic ;-)
Let me take a stab at another one, connected to the current US election. I'll try to…
clock | September 25, 2008To Irena Ilic (see here) for winning the Junior Division of the Show Jumping Balkans Championship a couple of weeks ago in Istanbul.
clock | September 21, 2008Danica announced:
The third BlogOpen: meeting of all the participants in blogosphere (from authors, readers, IT workers to mainstream media) will happen on October 4-5 in in Bor, Brestovacka banja, Serbia. Main goals of this public meeting are:
1. Discussion about the topics and problems characteristic of this manner of public communication;
2. Realization of virtual communication in real, public space;
3. Calling wider public's attention to this mode of authors' presence and to the importance of an information society;
4. Promotion of an information society, electronic…
clock | September 13, 2008Vedran tells me that people from the Oncology Institute in Belgrade, who usually give women little brochures that describe breast self-exam in words, are now using - and loving - the two videos (originally from here) he has embedded into his Gynecology aggregator. Another win for Open Access.
clock | September 10, 2008Vedran continues to spread the Openness in Serbia:
"Anglo-American School Belgrade, a small private school in Belgrade, started its academic year with an opening ceremony celebrating the joy of learning.
Teachers who gathered on the first day of school learned about the intention of the school management to offer them a number of links to Open Access repositories and Open Access RSS feed aggregators for use in educational practice. Teachers learned about the freedom of knowledge and, with great enthusiasm, started to explore a variety of resources of information in order to enrich lectures…
clock | September 6, 2008Wild-Serbia.com looks like an excellent site:
Wild-Serbia.com represents the largest on-line wildlife photo collection from Serbia. All photos on this site are made according [to] wildlife code of ethics.
The basic aim of this site is to illustrate Serbian wildlife and biodiversity, current needs for nature conservation as well as possibilities for sustainable development of tourism.
clock | August 17, 2008On the right (use the left-right arrows to see more detail):
I hear the guy on the left is also famous.
And how does it feel to lose by 1/100th of a second!? If he won a bronze instead, he would have been happier.
clock | August 5, 2008I heard that this is how it happened: when I went to Belgrade and talked about OA at the med school at University of Belgrade, I mentioned that Vedran is the local Web guru for them if they need anything. Someone from the Oncology hospital was there and later she contacted Vedran and asked him to make a blog aggregator that pulls together what people are writing about cancer. So, he did it - the Oncology Blog Aggregator is now live. If you know of good cancer blogs that should be included in the aggregator, let me know in the comments.
clock | July 31, 2008Excellent article by Jasmina Tesanovic about the final gasps of the Serbian Radicals (the right-wing nationalists and war-mongers) :
A couple of days ago, journalists from various press groups were beaten up by Radical goons; at that point the new government declared Serbian journalists to be equivalent to Serbian police performing public duties, and severely penalized the street-thugs for attacking free speech.
Imagine that in the USA?! And what about Citizen Journalists? Can I haz my blue uniform now?