Monthly Archives: July 2007

UK Regional Dialect Dictionaries Now Available

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Concorde - Still longing to flyOne of the most popular posts on this site is the one about hacking Windows Live Writer with a UK dictionary.

While Windows Live Writer lags behind, Microsoft have issued a set of Office dictionaries for some of the UK regions:

From Microsoft:

To celebrate the launch of the 2007 Office system and the richness of the British language, Microsoft has partnered with the British Library to develop a series of online dictionaries made up of local dialects…and we want you to contribute!

How many people talk about ‘hoying’ a ball or even taking a ‘crib’ when they have a cup of tea? With an ever increasing mobile population, Microsoft and the British library and keen to preserve local identities and heritage.

Jonathan Robinson, curator of English accents and dialects at The British Library says: “Britain has a rich heritage of different accents and dialects and, contrary to popular opinion, there is still a great deal of lexical diversity across the UK – where else would you find the words ‘cob’, ‘batch’, ‘bun’, ‘barm cake’, ‘stotty cake’, ‘scuffler’ and ‘bread cake’, all meaning bread roll?” said Jonathan. “But the English language is constantly changing. Due to a complex combination of influences, local words occasionally disappear from common usage or are replaced by others which become absorbed into our everyday vocabulary.”

The downloads are here:

This new fangled stuff is gradely!

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Office XML gets Massachusetts Green Light

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Jimmy and Grandad survey FarnhamThere is some history to this story. A while back (2005) Massachusetts decided that all of the document sit dealt with would be open XML formats. At the time this meant ODF because the view was that the Microsoft format wasn’t open enough.

Many people expected others to follow the Massachusetts lead.

Today it seems that Microsoft have indeed done enough to make Open Office XML (OOXML) a suitable format.

Similar to my last post, this is a fight about primacy. In this case this is Microsoft fighting to retain primacy in the office application space by retaining primacy in the file format space. Microsoft wasn’t going to hand over it’s primacy without a fight. they may have had to become more open to retain it, but they have probably gone a long way to securing the file format primacy.

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Online Music Still in Flux – The Fight for Primacy

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Jimmy and Grandad watch CricketThere have been a couple of events over the last couple of days that show that the online music industry is still in flux.

The struggle that seems to be at play here is the struggle between content and content delivery; who dominates? Is it the content owner that has the primacy, or is it the content deliverer?

This struggle is one that we are going to see in many areas.

Many web sites owners have already handed their primacy over to Google as the content deliverer. Some of them have lived to regret this as they fall down the search rank and their business suffers.

Many retail businesses have already handed their primacy over to eBay as the content deliverer. Again, some have lived to regret this as eBay changes its policy and their business suffers.

It’s difficult to know whether the advertisers still have primacy over Google, or whether it’s Google that now has primacy over advertising.

The music industry seems to have decided that it is going to fight to retain primacy. Whether they are successful or not remains to be seen.

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