Accepting guest posts is an effective way to freshen up your blog, share various perspectives and build a stronger community (especially if you manage such a multi-author, multi-topic resource as SEJ).

Naturally, if you want to get the maximum benefit from guest blogging, you will need to give back. This post is about the most popular (yet, NOT the most important) benefit of guest blogging: linking: best practices and ethics of linking back to your guest bloggers (as well as allowing them to).

Linking as Incentive: Introduction

Unless you are ready to give back, you won't be able to build a strong community of guest bloggers who will contribute top-quality content, support each other and promote your blog. Giving back is a must. You can't expect people to be sincere in their intent to drive quality to your blog unless you are sincere in your desire to pay back.

First of, let me disclaim here that I express my own attitude in this post. I fully agree that as a blogger and web marketer you may have an opposite view and I even can imagine why: with so much spam around here it is easy to get suspicious and overly cautious.

My own take on linking is very straightforward: if you see your guest author deserves it, give him as much linking benefit as you are allowed to.

It doesn't take time or effort to tell if your guest author is really serious about that guest blogging opportunity you are offering him: diligent guest authors are easy to notice and appreciate: they email you several times with post ideas and various questions. They look for (properly attributed) images to attach to the post and link back to the content you have published previously. They may suggest different variants of the post title to let you choose the best one. They don't stuff their content with self-serving links.

That being said, if I appreciate the work and like the result, I will be happy give back.

But being too generous means being scammed in our world. This lesson has been learned (not once, I guess that happened to me too many times actually).

Linking as Incentive: Policies

Like it or not, linking is still the strongest incentive for people to guest post for your blog. It is the most tangible advantage as well. Therefore if you plan to allow people to guest post, you won' be able to do without allowing them to link back to their sites and projects.

I am all for linking back and forth as I believe this is the essence of the Internet. But in our non-perfect world you still need to be cautious. You need to have a set list of rules to be able to always base your decisions on. Being consistent in your linking habits means you will avoid any bad neighborhoods or shaky grounds.

The huge advantage of having linking guidelines / rules is that you are able to treat all your guest bloggers equally (no matter what level of relationships you have with them: friends, partners or just random acquaintances).

Here's what I see many bloggers do (and try to implement as well) in terms of controling what their guest bloggers link to:

• Links to the author's projects should be in the by-line: Ask your guest bloggers to only link to their personal projects in the author's by-line. Remember that the post will be published on your blog and thus all in-content links may be related to you. Links in by-line clearly belong to the author, so you are totally honest with your readers and yourself.
• Linking from within the post content: As a rule, I ask my guest bloggers to refrain from linking to their properties in the post body unless:
  • The link is tightly relevant (or the author can't do without it): like links to the mentioned events, conferences, etc;
  • The link does NOT point to the home page but to the relevant post or article (which elaborates further on the mentioned phenomenon or tactic). Links from content to content (NOT to landing or home pages), I believe, add quality to the guest post and let readers learn more about what has mentioned.
• Number of links: the general rule of thumb (I myself try to follow) is to let guest authors limit external link to 3 in the by-line (including Twitter profile link).
• Anchor text: You may adopt Daniel's rule and accept non-anchor text links in by-lines. This way you will save the trouble explaining your guest author why his loan consolidation link is not appreciated on your blog. Or you may go less extreme and only remove keyword-based anchors from the non-relevant links (because those can really hurt your blog reputation.)

Keep in mind though that having too strict linking rules will scare away your guest authors. Even if you have a high-traffic blog and people will still choose to guest post, limitations will discourage them to be a return contributors and community members.

You need to be both generous and careful: to encourage your guest bloggers to contribute high-quality articles while still maintain the reputation of the high-quality resource (with high linking standards).

Linking as Incentive: Tools

I've seen plenty of blogs accepting guest posts with varied policies and rules. Some of them have succeeded in both keeping high standards while offering enhanced exposure to their authors. Here's what they do:

• The author's box is the great way to both drive attention to the post author (and also give them exposure) and keep the linking limited to fit your policies. Here's an easy-to-follow tutorial on how to code and customize the author box (with no plugin needed).
• The enhanced author page (including bio, photo and maybe social media profiles) is the great way to encourage the author to both contribute more (to maintain the impressive online portfolio) and link back to that page (and thus your site) to share that portfolio with his community. Here's a detailed tutorial on customizing and enhancing your blog author archive page template.
• Linking to (most active) authors from the sidebar is another strong incentive. This newly-developed guest blogging WordPress plugin may be a great option: it allows to set the minimum number of guest posts (contributed over the set period of time) after which the author will be featured on the home page. Besides, you can set to show the widget on home page only or sitewide.

What are your linking policies and experiences? Please share!

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

#1 Guest Blogging Incentive: Backlinks (Guidelines and Ethics)

This morning's Washington Post reveals that the Department Of Justice has been pressuring Congress to expand its power to obtain records of Americans' private Internet activity through the use of National Security Letters (NSLs).

NSLs, you may remember, are one of the most powerful and frightening tools of government surveillance to be expanded by the Patriot Act. These letters allow the FBI to secretly demand data from phone companies and internet service providers about the private communications of ordinary citizens. The letters include a gag order, which forbids recipients from ever revealing the letters' existence to their coworkers, their friends, or even to their family members, much less the public.

The gag order and the lack of oversight make this power ripe for abuse. Indeed, the FBI's systemic abuse of this power was confirmed both by a Department Of Justice investigation and in documents obtained by EFF through Freedom of Information Act litigation. Yet, in the years since that abuse became publicly known, there has been no reform of the law governing NSLs.

Now, the DOJ is asking Congress to pass vague and broad new language meant to expand the kinds of data that can be acquired through NSLs. This morning's Washington Post article suggests that the new language could allow access to detailed web browsing history, search history, location information, or even Facebook friend requests.

Considering the FBI's dismal record on surveillance abuses, this is a stunning and brazen request. They're asking the Senate to reward bad behavior by allowing even more bad behavior. We're hoping that the Senate will have the courage and integrity to turn them down. Keep reading Deeplinks for more news on this as it develops.

Posted by randfish

As the worlds of web design and SEO merge ever closer, we've been seeing design-specific elements produce a positive impact on SEO for the sites that employ them. It's terrific news for SEOs who love design and are capable of and passionate about making it part of their repertoire. It's also great for designers who find that as they evolved from Flash designs to machine-readable CSS and separated markup from content, they've earned more links and more organic search love.

In this post, I'll walk through examples of those design practices in use and describe how they can help improve your opportunity for organic search rankings and traffic.

#1 - Designing that Elicits & Conveys Emotion

A phenomenal article from Aarron Walter of Mailchimp on ThinkVitamin - Emotional Interface Design: The Gateway to Passionate Users - deeply explores the trend of designers using their talents to imprint emotion on users. Personally, I love this practice, and professionally, I see it as incredibly valuable for SEO, too.

Rather than simply providing a user with information, these sites attempt to convey a sense of the companies, products and services they represent in a tangible way.

For McMiller's Sweets, below, the website expresses the brand's humor, whimsy and obsession with their product. I only wish I could buy online - there'd be a few boxes headed for the SEOmoz offices right now.

Box.net, an enterprise-focused software company, aims to achieve an air of simplicity and a feeling of the ease that comes from using a basic, consumer application but targeted at a business audience. Their redesign has me convinced - it's light and airy, it's up in the clouds (perhaps a double-meaning since they host in "the cloud") and it even calls out the "sexiness" of the application.

When users are emotionally invested in the websites they visit, they're more likely to:

• Link
• Share
• Contribute Content
• Participate
• Remain Loyal
• Invest in the Experience
• Browse more Pages

All of these have either first or second-order impacts on SEO in a positive way.

#2 - The Scroll-Triggered Call-to-Action

Sometimes, you don't want to overwhelm content with calls-to-action... At least, not until you're fairly certain your visitor has finished reading. That's where the brilliance of the scroll-triggered call-to-action comes in.

Browse any article on the New York Times website and you'll see this behavior in action, driving you to read the next article in the series only after you've reached the bottom of the current piece:

It's great for boosting page views, but also drives more awareness of those pieces, improving links and driving up visibility for previously less-well-publicized works. My guess is that clicks are quite high.

In the next example, the OKCupid Blog leverages precisely the same tactic:

This use case might be even more brilliant. After wrapping up a remarkable article about what statistics tell us not to do in online dating, my first instinct is to share the piece with some single friends. OKCupid's flawlessly timed, dropdown overlay synchs with this internal compulsion and makes it easy to tweet, like, stumble or buzz away.

Scrolling + triggers = more browsing, more awareness and more sharing (and I think the potential applications for SEO are far greater in quantity than just what's been shared above).

#3 - User Badges

If your users are passionate about your site and their experience or participation, why not make it easy to share?

For years, sites have been offering users the virtual incentives of points, badges and status to encourage greater participation. Andrew Follet from Concept Feedback authored a brilliant piece analyzing this precise behavior and exposing some terrific examples.

We've noticed an interesting behavior as it relates to user badges as well, and it's spurred me to whiteboard the following chart numerous times for those who have online communities considering SEO:

The lesson? Make great communities, encourage participation and reward your users with badges that will make their sites look good. It's the online equivalent of giving out high quality, well designed t-shirts - fans won't just wear them to bed; they'll actually show off your brand.

#4 - The Animated HTML Multiheader

I wrote about the multiheader a long time ago, and the evolution of design has made them tremendously more compelling and useful since then. Case-in-point, Unbounce, who has 5 different messages/features on their homepage all accessible to engines and all part of a single multiheader. I've screencaptured them elegantly "swooshing" in and out of the headline position:

The advantage is two-fold - more content on the homepage that's accessible to search engines (thanks to clever CSS/HTML usage) and everyone who links to any one version is concentrating the link juice singularly on the home page. In some cases, that could cause problems, but in others, it's a great opportunity to leverage design to focus the links you acquire where you need them most.

BTW - Speaking of Unbounce, If you have yet to read Oli Gardner's 12-Step Landing Page Rehab Program, you're seriously missing out.

#5 - Sexy, Embeddable Infographics

Infographic linkbait is certainly all the rage these days, and I think it's a well-justified trend. The brilliant part is that you benefit by producing the infographic and other bloggers benefit by sharing it and attracting views, attention and links of their own. So long as the embed works seemlessly and the infographic is compelling, you're off to the link acquisition races.

Some examples I enjoyed came from Smashing Magazine, who put together this piece on programming (and the how-to behind it's creation):

And this smart contribution from Visual Economics:

As with badges, the "beauty rule" applies - the sexier your infographic (and the most interesting/useful/compelling the content), the higher adoption will be.

#6 - Designing Around Illustration (with CSS)

It used to be that I'd see a website built around illustrations and artistry and shake my head in sadness, knowing that the beauty of the UI was unlikely to be experienced by anyone except those coming via type-in. Today, with the amazing progress of CSS, sites like Carbon Made can have their design cake and eat their SEO, too.

Google's "text only" cache shows every word you can see in the screenshot - we've come a long way indeed. And, darn it if that design doesn't make me want to just climb a mountain and jump off a cliff into an octopus-filled lake below... errr.. make an online portfolio (yeah, that's the one!)

For another look, check out Ruby on Rails developers, Pioneers:

Pretty, accessible and indexable, what more could an SEO ask?

#7 - Creative Content Formats Unleashed

Sometimes, you visit a site that stands out from everything else you've seen on the web in the past. Historically, many of those sites have also been tragically obscured from search engines. Nowadays, a new breed is emerging, showing off massive creativity, brilliance in design innovation and a compelling combination of link-worthiness and search-accessibility.

A few of my favorite recent stumbles into this realm include:

Above: Grain and Gram Gentleman's Journal

Above: Sanctuary T Shop (who knew a small e-commerce shop could be this pretty?)

Above: Heart Directed (a great place to find more remarkable creative formats, though lacking the machine readable content to be an SEO example itself)

It's a great time to be on the web, thinking about SEO, design and the brilliant things that can happen when they overlap strategically. Here's to hoping that more of us who invest in organic search traffic will bolster that task with the power amazing design can bring. It's not just more links - it's greater engagement and a higher liklihood that sharing of all kinds will occur. However the search engines evolve, you can be sure this is the type of behavior they'll seek to reward.

p.s. If design inspires you, I'd recommend checking out Drawar and Six Revisions list of 10 Fresh Galleries for Inspiration

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If there's one thing we know about Web authors it's that they are constantly seeking new sources of traffic for their content. It doesn't matter if you're a blogger, a marketing manager or a small business owner, there is simply no reason to invest time with content creation and Web design if no one is coming to read it. For this reason, it's important to figure out where to actually invest time for the greatest ROI.

As a blogger I routinely asked myself the same question, until I finally realized that I (as the CEO of Woopra, the Web analytics company) had access to all the data I needed to make an absolute determination about which areas deserve the most attention.

Sponsor

Guest author John Pozadzides is the CEO of the Web analytics company Woopra, organizer of the open-source blogger and developer conference OpenCa.mp, and the man behind OneMansBlog.com. Follow him on Twitter @johnpoz.

This meant looking beyond my own site's statistics and finding out what was broadly occurring across all domains. Only through a comparative analysis can we determine where our strengths and weaknesses lie as compared to the average.

The Methodology

Woopra monitors well over 100,000 websites, however, all of our client's data is kept separate for security and privacy reasons. This meant the first step was to set up a new specialized server that would poll all other servers in our network in order to aggregate the data.

After building this new platform, the Woopra team provided me with the raw information that I used to create the charts below. This report is based on hundreds of millions of data points collected during the month of June 2010.

Virtually every category of Website is represented in the dataset - education, news, government, SMB, Fortune 500, blogs, adult - and while it clearly doesn't reflect all of the sites on the Internet, my guess is that it is a statistically significant and representative sampling.

Top Referrers of Traffic

For the purposes of this analysis, referrers have been segmented into different categories in order to more easily compare traffic. For example, there is no use in comparing Google to Flickr since they are not categorically related. If we're making a determination which search engine to focus on, Flickr would not be in the mix - and if we're looking for a photo hosting site, Google would not be in the mix. The four main referral categories that drive virtually all traffic are: Search Engines, Media, Social Bookmarks and Social Networks.

Social Network Referrers

Perhaps the one result that was the most surprising is the Social Networking category. Although Twitter seem to be the talk of the town, Facebook is the 900 pound gorilla when it comes to actually driving website traffic, sending nearly 7 in 10 visitors from the Social Network category. LinkedIn comes in a distant yet still respectable third place.

There is one giant unknown in this area, however. Many Twitter users access the service through applications instead of via Twitter's website. These applications do not report http-referrer data to Web servers, which makes it impossible to tell where the clicks originate. The same can be said about traffic driven by mobile apps (including Facebook).

All of the other players in the Social Networking category cumulatively amount to less than 3% of inbound website traffic.

Social Bookmark Referrers

Social bookmarking sites are also extremely sought after sources of traffic, with the highest profile member of the group being Digg. Interestingly, this is another case where a smaller source seems to receive a disproportionate amount of attention, since StumbleUpon drives nearly double the traffic to websites.

Another surprising standout in the Social Bookmark category is YCombinator's Hacker News site, which drives 12% of the traffic in this category. Reddit and Del.icio.us drive 5% and 2%, respectively. Interestingly, SlashDot (the grandaddy of them all) drives close to 0% of traffic to the sites Woopra measures - although webmasters still call the rush of traffic that can take down a website a "Slashdotting".

Search Referrers

In the Search Engine space, perhaps the only surprise is the absolute dominance of Google when it comes to actually driving traffic to websites. For example, Experian's Hitwise published a press release setting Google's share of the search market at 72% in May 2010. However, Woopra is seeing 92% of search visitors originating from Google.

This begs the question: Where does the discrepancy lie?

• Is the Hitwise data set more representative of the whole?
• Are there more searches taking place on other search engines that don't result in click-throughs to websites?
• StatCounter's Global Stats seem to closely mirror Woopra's data.

Regardless of the reason, what we do know is that focusing attention on optimizing for Google search is absolutely the right thing to do. (Here's the official Google SEO starter guide.)

Media Referrers

The media referrer category is reserved for sites that focus on various forms of multimedia, including images, video and audio. These sites are often overlooked as a source of traffic because they are destination sites; however, media sites can also drive large volumes of traffic.

As an example, world-famous HDR photographer Trey Ratcliff posts travel photos on Flickr, and includes a simple link back to his site in the description of each image he posts.

This technique generated nearly 13,000 pageviews on StuckInCustoms.com in April alone.

What's more notable is that Flickr is not the dominant referrer in the Media category. YouTube drives 900% more traffic to websites than Flickr. This is accomplished the same way, via links in the description of the video.

Amazingly, 99% of referrer traffic in the Media category comes from only four providers: YouTube, Flickr, Last.FM and Vimeo.

Lessons Learned

The only question we are trying to answer with this analysis is where it makes sense to focus resources and attention in order to drive traffic. So here's what we know:

• Search engine optimization specifically targeting Google's index is key. Working hard to satisfy other search providers probably won't pay off as much as spending the time elsewhere - like Facebook and Twitter promotion.
• If multimedia isn't part of a site's strategy to drive traffic, it should be. Adding photos to Flickr and videos to YouTube will not only pay off in terms of adding content for your brand, but will also drive eyeballs to your site.
• Sites that are not seeing traffic from Facebook, Twitter, or both, are missing out on a major traffic-generation source. Additionally, if the balance is not in Facebook's favor, you are likely under-utilizing this channel.
• Don't waste time promoting your site on any Social Media network other than Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Your time is better spent elsewhere (like YouTube or Flickr for example).
• By all means, submit articles to Digg in the hopes of making it to the homepage, but more importantly make sure articles work their way into StumbleUpon, which can bring a larger, more sustained and less server-crash-creating stream of traffic.
• For those looking to more accurately track Twitter click-throughs, some service providers such as Bit.ly enable tracking of short links. The bad news is that the tracking is not aggregated into existing Web analytics provider data.
• This analysis doesn't take into consideration back-links (which Web authors should pursue whenever possible) because on the aggregate they do not drive global traffic. However, links from related or high-traffic sites can not only dramatically increase site traffic, they can positively impact search result listings.

Questions, comments or alternative interpretations? Drop a comment below and let us know!

Top photo by Lars Sundstrom

Those with access to Facebook's Questions feature are seeing a new design of the home page publisher used to share status updates and other sorts of content. Users must now decide whether they want to publish a simple status update, a question, upload a photo, or post a link and website preview. While displaying the different things you can do with the publisher, the design change hides the status update prompt What's on your mind? and the rest of the publisher behind an additional click, which could reduce sharing.

Previously, users were always greeted to the home page with the status update prompt, which folded out to reveal options to post photos, video, events or links. However, a user could simply input a Facebook event URL or a link to a website, and the publisher would adapt to the post. Video and event options have now been removed. If one tries to post an event URL into the status box, it only shows the URL, while posting it into the link publisher returns an error stating Application sent an invalid response.

When a user chooses to upload a photo, a status update-esque input field appears prompting them to Say something about this photo. You could add text to be published with the photos using the old publisher, but no prompt explained the relationship between the text and photo.

Using the publisher to post a question instead of the Questions application itself will increase the likelihood that it will be seen by friends, according to a Questions answer by Facebook's Zach Ritter. In an effort to educate users about the privacy implications of using the Questions applications, the Question input field with the prompt What do you want to know? is accompanied by a warning Your questions will be visible to everyone.

Splitting up the publisher may help remind users of the different types of content they can share. Facebook wants to strengthen their position as a portal to third-party sites, and placing a Post Link button on the home page may increase traffic driven. However, requiring an extra click to use the publisher could decrease sharing and increase spectating, stagnating the news feed.

Microsoft is in the process of updating the millions of Hotmail accounts to the latest version that runs faster and includes more features than before. Our account was recently updated, so here's a tour of the new features.

Windows Live Hotmail was one of the first free webmail services back when it was called HoTMaiL as a play on HTML. In recent years, Microsoft has rebranded their online services under the Windows Live brand, so now Hotmail is commonly used with @hotmail.com or the newer @live.com email addresses. You can even use Hotmail and other Live services with your own domain. Despite it's previous popularity, Hotmail has lost many users, especially techies, to Google's popular Gmail service. The new Hotmail brings many features that Gmail has offered, as well as some unique ones, so let's take a look and see if the new Hotmail has to offer.

Take a Look at the New Features

If you haven't visited Hotmail recently, you may notice the login screen has changed slightly with larger, Metro-style fonts and a clean design.

One of Hotmail's new security features is the new single-use sign in code. You can request a code which will be sent to your phone via text message. This is a great way to login to Hotmail from a public computer without potentially revealing your password to malicious apps on it.

Once you sign in, you'll notice a new Hotmail logo on the top of your browser window or tab. If you still see the old Windows Live logo, then you're still on the old version, so you'll have to wait for your account to be updated over the next few weeks.

The new inbox looks largely the same as the previous version, but there are tweaks all around.

Timesaving Features

Right at first you'll notice new View options in the Inbox; you can chose to view only the unread messages or those from contacts in your address book. You can even select Social updates to only see the messages from Twitter, Facebook, and other networks; this is a great way to quickly clear all the social network junk out of your inbox.

Another timesaving feature is the new Sweep tool. Select this on the top of the Hotmail page to quickly manage all emails from a sender.

You can have Hotmail automatically move all emails from a contact into a specific folder, or even automatically delete messages from a contact. This is one of the easiest ways we've seen to setup inbox rules, and it works great.

Hotmail includes the new Quick views underneath your folders on the left. Here you can easily view messages that are flagged, or ones that contain photos or office docs. You can even click the Shipping updates to see all shipping notice emails you may have received.

Hotmail's searching capabilities have been improved, too. Simply start typing, and Hotmail will suggest alternative options. You can also use standard search queries to search for emails from specific senders and more.

Reading Emails in the New Hotmail

Hotmail's reading pane has been redesigned with nice and useful headers. Click the bottom of the header to expand it.

Now you can see all of the info about this email, including the sender's email address and other recipients of the message.

If the email included attachments, you'll see some quick info about the files directly below the header. Click the Download link to download the files, or if the email included Office files, click the icon to open them in Office Web Apps. This is a quick way to read Word documents and preview PowerPoint presentations even if you don't have Office installed.

If Hotmail detects the email is from a mailing list, it will put an Unsubscribe link right at the top of the message to help you quit getting email you don't want.

On the header, you'll notice a new Actions button underneath the time the message was received. Click this to quickly reply, delete, forward, or more. You can also click the flag beside the time to flag the message for review later.

Our favorite new feature is Conversation View. You can now view your emails by conversation, and this works very much like Conversation view in Outlook 2010. To activate it, click the button on the far right of the reading pane, and select Conversation.

You'll now notice a number beside your email subjects showing how many messages are in that conversation.

When you're reading messages, you'll see other messages in the conversation above and below the message. You can read the preview, or click the message to see the full email right there in the same reading pane.

Composing Emails

Whether you're replying to an email or writing a new message, the new Hotmail includes tools to make it easier. You can add Office Docs via Office Web Apps, and send a nearly unlimited amount of pictures with an album on SkyDrive. Or, select the From Bing tab to add a variety of web content to your message.

You can add clipart, pictures, or even videos from Bing search directly from the sidebar. Just select the option you want above, and then search for something to add to your message.

Ads

Hotmail does still include banner ads on the right side when you're reading emails, but there are some new tools to help you manage them. If an ad is getting in the way of reading your email, you can click the X on the bottom right to close it. Note that the ad will open again with you switch to another message, but this can make it easier to read an especially wide email.

Or, if you find an ad offensive, click the Ad feedback link to let Hotmail know what you're thinking about the ad. This will help them make the ads less annoying for everyone. This works very much like the ads in Facebook, and we think it goes a long way in helping people feel comfortable with the ads they're shown.

Messenger

Hotmail and other new Windows Live apps now are fully integrated with Messenger web. You can chat with your buddies directly in Hotmail. If you open an attachment in Office Web apps or go check your calendar, Messenger will go along with you so you can continue your conversation.

You can see your online contacts from the Messenger tab on the top of Hotmail. Click a contact to start an IM session with them.

You can also see your friends online status from your email headers. Click to start chatting with them, or if you're hovering over your own contact info, you can click to change your profile picture.

More Features Coming

Hotmail has some more new, great features that will be added in the near future, including full session SSL encryption and ActiveSync to sync your Hotmail email, contacts, and calendar with popular mobile devices.

Conclusion

Whether you're a longtime Hotmail user or are considering switching from your current email provider to Hotmail, the Wave 4 updates make Hotmail a much nicer email service than ever before. We liked the new Conversation view, but also appreciated that you could turn it off if you don't care for it. The new attachment options make it easier to share pictures, links, and more. The social network integration into Contacts makes it easy to keep in touch with all of your friends. There are still some areas that Gmail is easier to use; for instance, we prefer Gmail's in-message reply; one click, and you're ready to reply and send. Give the new Hotmail a try, though; we think you might find some stuff to like!

Please Remember: The new Wave 4 Hotmail isn't activated at all accounts yet, so if you don't see the new features, be patient; your account should be updated soon.

Link

Signup or login to your Hotmail account

Please enjoy Episode 8 of The Gameshelf's video series. It's about modern interactive fiction.

Interactive Fiction (a.k.a. text adventures), a curious cross-medium blending videogames and literature, defined computer entertainment at the start of the PC era. While it's been decades its commercial heyday, the web has allowed passionate fans and creators to revive the medium through a resurgence of groundbreaking new work.

However, few gamers even fans of more mainstream adventure games know that this movement even exists.

In this ten-minute video, Jason McIntosh demonstrates some examples of modern interactive fiction, ponders the challenges that the medium faces in today's digital-game landscape, and offers some starting points for players first discovering this unique kind of game.

Download it as a high-quality Quicktime file.

Additional credits, links and notes below:

Links

• The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction
• The miniature guide to playing IF, in various formats
• The Interactive Fiction Database appeared a couple of times in the video without overt fanfare. To find, download, or (if available) play online any of the IF games I mentioned in this video and hundreds and hundreds more pay it a visit.

Full Credits

Producer / Writer / Editor / Host

Jason McIntosh

Voice Talent

Lindsay Gonzales, Greg Reimann

Camera

Lee Stewart, Julia Tenney

Action Castle Players

Ruth Alfasso, Denis Moskowitz, Gavin Schnitzler, Karl von Laudermann

Music

The Gameshelf theme music is by Joe Johnston.

This episode's music also included:

• Human by Evrim Sen
• Recommencer by Do Kashiteru
• Twins by Do Kashiteru

Special Thanks

Besides sitting for an interview, Nick Montfort also let Lee and I film various clips in his curio-laden office. The Apple IIc, the retail-box IF antiques, and the various other relics of bygone electronic games are all part of his own collection.

Andrew Plotkin helped sanity-check this video's content, through its several drafts. (And also sat for an interview.)

Jason Scott didn't have any direct involvement in the production of this video, but we did have some nice conversations about video production between my last major effort and this one. Mainly, I wish to mention that his own breathtakingly ambitious, feature-length (and then some) documentary about interactive fiction's history, Get Lamp, is going on sale very soon, and it's beautiful. You should go buy a copy.

Somerville Community Access TV lent Lee and I the equipment we used to record Nick's interview and office footage.

Other Notes

Yes, I did in fact write an IF game that became the backdrop for my host segments. If you're very good I might make a short followup video about it, and about Inform 7 (the language I used) in general.

In the brief shot of the two of us talking, Nick holds a copy of this book. View its cover at full-size to properly appreciate the majesty. That clip's original audio (not present in this version) was part of a comedic segue between Andy's interview and Nick's, so he pulled this volume off his shelves to use as a wackiness-increasing prop. The entire gag ended up in the post-production trash heap after I decided to go with the shorter format. Luckily, the clip is too dark to make the book very visible, so I used a little of it as a lead-in anyway. Call it an easter egg.

My inspiration for cutting the video's length from 30 minutes to only ten came from my discovery of Put This On, an excellent, funny, and geek-friendly new video series about men's clothing and fashion by Jesse Thorn and Adam Lisagor. When I pulled up the first episode, I unconsciously looked at the countdown timer in the corner, saw 10:00, and thought, Well, I'm skeptical about a show about clothes. But it does look kind of interesting, and what the hell, I have ten minutes to spare.

And then a light went on: I've been asking too much. It made sense to shoot for 30 minutes when I thought of The Gameshelf as a TV show that I also happened to publish on the web. But, I realized, that's view proved both outdated and myopic. If I will only agree to sit still in ten-minute chunks, then why would I create videos demanding more time than that?

I came to this decision after starting production months ago with a half-hour script, so more time and effort ended up on the cutting room floor than I'd like. That said, I find this abbreviated format far superior for the web-based publication that The Gameshelf has evolved into. Expect most future video work from me to stay YouTube-sized.

I hope you enjoy both this new format and the video itself. Feel free to let me know what you think!

Link: http://www.last.fm/robots.txt

A robots.txt file is a way for a site administrator to give instructions to web crawlers (robots) that are crawling the site. They are not usually anywhere near this funny.

The Best Links:

1. Context!

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Free tips from an SEO expert. Tech entrepreneur Neil Patel has spent a large portion of his career helping big corporations like Viacom and HP make more money off the web through SEO techniques. Now you can gain the value of his expertise without having to pay the big-corporation price-tag. On his blog Quick Sprout, Patel has some tips to help your business rank on Page 1 of Google without buying a single paid link. As Patel explains, Google frowns on paid links and is constantly on the lookout for link spam. "The problem with buying paid links is, you'll rank really well in the short run, but sooner or later you will get caught," he says. The trick to great results is to build legitimate links. To that end, Patel has a handful of relatively simple techniques to help you boost your business's Google search results. According to Patel, his tips "aren't fun and sexy, but they work."

The right way to deal with employee ideas. Our Leigh Buchanan spoke with the nation's most employee-centric companies and this is what she found.

The "Hello, Ladies" effect. It might not exist. Despite 94 million views on YouTube of Old Spice spokesman Isaiah Mustafa's ads, sales of Red Zone body wash have declined 7 percent, according to a study by SymphonyIRI. Fast Company ponders why the immense online popularity seems to have failed to translate into influence, citing another - successful - spokesman. Remember Dos Equis The Most Interesting Man in the World? Since he signed on in 2007, sales have jumped every year. Why? According to Jonathan Goldsmith, the man who plays the Most Interesting Man, it's all about "life experience" that gives his character intrigue. He tells Fast Company: "If you don't experience life, you won't be a participant - you'll just be a voyeur. You'll watch it go by like a parade you're not involved in." We'll buy that.

Forgetting sunk costs is harder than it sounds. When you've invested valuable time and money into a new project at your company, say a product line or a marketing campaign, it's natural to want to keep wrestling with the endeavor until it at least breaks even (if not turns a profit). But Fred Wilson says that even if you've dug hundreds of thousands of dollars into a project, you shouldn't let that impact future investments. "Even though I was taught about sunk costs in business school twenty-five years ago, I had to learn this lesson the hard way. Most of the time that we make a follow-on investment defensively, to protect the capital we have already invested, that follow-on investment is marginal or outright bad," he writes.

Go ahead, take that vacation. Any entrepreneur can tell you how difficult it is to set their business aside to take a vacation, and Paul Downs is no exception. In a blog post for The New York Times, the founder of Paul Downs Cabinetmakers explains that he hasn't been away from an entire workweek since 2003. Downs just returned from a vacation, however, and it turned out that "the sky did not fall," he writes. "The bookkeeper paid the bills, and we didn't run out of money." While that's not altogether unexpected, he leaves us with a few insights on the underlying conflict many business owners feel when considering vacation time: "There are many times I fantasize about a life without daily obligations. That's supposed to be one of the prime motivators for entrepreneurs--the day you cash out and retire to a life of complete freedom. On the other hand, it's nice to be needed...I think it would be hard for me to start an existence separate from the shop." Perhaps the record-setting heat on the East Coast this summer convinced him a few days away wouldn't hurt.

The Facebook prejudice? First Facebook prohibited a rep from the Palestinian Refugee ResearchNet from creating a fan page with the word "Palestinian" in it. Now that the "error" is fixed, Valleywag reports that the last name Arab also gets automatically rejected during sign-up. The tipster who discovered the problem says Facebook allowed her husband to sign up using his last name, Arab, back in 2007, but now, neither she nor other members of her family are able to do so. Facebook responded to the initial glitch with page registration saying, "We have an automated system that checks for obviously inaccurate profile registration names. For a short time, this was inadvertently applied to Page creation names." According to Valleywag, this is likely the result of the same issue, but they write, "this shouldn't have been a problem in the first placeespecially if CEO Mark Zuckerberg really believes that his site can be a tool for building bridges across cultural divides."

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Mexican Fans by Celso Flores (image added by sombrero expert optimizer Tad of SEO 2.0)

The New SEO Search Engine Organization! is a guest post by Albert Gouyet, Vice President of Product Marketing, BrightEdge.

With the World Cup Finals in South Africa already becoming a distant memory, it's that time again to draw analogies between team sports and marketing activities. Today's topic: SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Disclaimer: if you are a soccer fanatic, still struggling to come to grips with your country's failure to win the World Cup, you probably should stop reading now! All others please read on

In this World Cup we saw the success of teams with a balanced structure that exhibited high-levels of co-operation

- think

• Spain
• Holland
• Germany

- and the failure of those that relied primarily on the brilliance of individual players think Brazil, Argentina, and England. (Italy and France were so bad, they fall into a category of their own!)

What does this have to do with SEO? In most enterprises, SEO tends to be more of an Argentina when it needs to be more of a Spain in other words, less dependent on an individual SEO specialist and more reliant on a team efforts, or a search engine organization approach.

You can have the most brilliant SEO mind in the world managing your SEO or you might have outsourced it to the premier SEO specialist firm. But if your web-developer updates your site without any understanding of the existing backlinks that are driving the authority for your natural search rankings, all their genius will count for naught! (For those of you who didn't see it, Germany, with their team-base approach, destroyed Argentina 4-0!)

SEO Team Line-up

So what is the optimum team line up for the search engine organization?

Goal Keeper Web Developer

If this guy drops the ball, you're in trouble (ask England!). Often forgotten unless he makes a mistake, the web developer needs to ensure all the key internal and external links that drive the SEO authority are pointing to the right content.

Defense Product Marketing

Very much a self-contained unit, just like the defense in a soccer team, the product marketing group lays the groundwork for a successful SEO operation. Leveraging the market intelligence generated by the SEO manager, this team incorporates the critical keywords into all marketing collateral and website material. They also need to avoid costly defensive mistakes; for example, breaking SEO by creating new content that targets keywords already covered by better pages.

Strikers Marketing Communications/Media Relations

If these guys are shooting blanks, you're not going much further than the group stages (again, ask England!) The life blood to a successful SEO operation is content that is relevant to your target market. Much of the content will be generated internally, but the real goal is to secure high profile articles in industry-respected media outlets with backlinks driving authority to your website.

Midfielder the SEO Manager

The Maestro! He/she is in the middle of everything and orchestrates the SEO play. For example, he/she ensures that the goalkeeper is aware of the impact of website changes, works with the defense to ensure the correct messaging is incorporated into all product marketing, identifies sources of backlinks that need to be targeted, and works with the strikers to develop relevant content and backlinks, etc.

Sports analogies aside, for SEO to really be successful and become an integral, revenue driving part of your marketing program, it takes a team effort that is well coordinated, balanced and based on cooperation and playing off the strengths of the entire team, not just one individual.

When it comes to being a Search Engine Organization, are you Spain or France?

Albert Gouyet is BrightEdge's Vice President of Product Marketing. He brings over 20 years of broad technology and senior management experience from Netscape, AOL, Sybase as well as venture backed private companies.

At AOL, Albert was Vice President of Web Clients and Services where he led the team responsible for developing and implementing a new strategy for Search for Netscape and CompuServe, which culminated with the game-changing partnership between AOL and Google.

For the record, Albert is a native of France and can be reached via email: agouyet at brightedge.com.

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3. Top 10 Benefits of Speaking at Search Engine Conferences

Shared by tamihania
Very interesting read, amongst other things showing correlation between language diversity and GDP per capita...

Language diversity around the world is decreasing and Razib Khan of the Discover science blog, Gene Expression, doesn't think you should care. I was going to let it slide because I don't like getting in little blog tiffs, but then Khan went and tried to co-opt Neuroanthropology.net into the whole thing, so he forced my hand.

I had started to do a quick survey of the obvious, easily Googled data that might support or refute Khan's argument, but decided that it was petty to point out the glaring logical, empirical and philosophical problems with his arguments, so I was just going to let it go. But then Khan took the liberty of demeaning my discipline and even linked through to my own site to supposedly support his argument, so I'm going to take the liberty of blogging while angry, which is kind of like drunk texting only more time consuming. I'm not really worried that Khan will actually read this post carefully, however, as he apparently didn't bother to read closely the post to which he actually linked.

Khan doesn't think linguistic diversity matters. After all, language diversity correlates with poverty, he argues. The evidence he produces for this is a graph that is apparently more of a thought experiment than any sort of actual data plot. So I thought I might just explore this question with a little anecdotal data like comparisons between nominal GDP/capita and numbers of indigenous languages in Ethnologue and how well these seem to correlate. I'm neither a statistician nor do I want to devote more time to this, but I want to just present some evidence in the discussion (especially because he implies anthropology is a kind of salon game for the intelligentsia and for fact-challenged jargon heads).

Normally, I try to be a pretty positive online presence, not prone to hurling invective or belittling other writers, but there are a few things that get me really hacked off, and one of them is conservative Social Darwinism thinly veiled with pseudo-science, as if this is just nature's' way of sorting out the winners from the losers. Razib Khan's example makes me particularly angry because he links in the direction of Neuroanthropology.net like something we argue supports this (please take down the link, Khan, if you read it we don't need your traffic if it comes from people who think we're in your corner). Moreover, Khan's argument demonstrates an extraordinary callousness, suggesting that concern about language rights assured in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other UN human rights documents are just a kind of bourgie latt sippers' hysteria that people concerned about the real world' don't share.

Linguistic diversity? Liberal conspiracy

Khan thinks all the concern about language preservation is an elitist projection:

The moral panic that many Westerners have over the extinction of small-scale societies is not shared by many members of those small-scale societies, who wish to opt-out, often for material reasons. And by material, I'm not talking McMansions, I'm talking having income above subsistence. The level of wealth of a Chinese factory worker, not that of an academic adjunct. (emphasis in the original)

On what does he base this statement? He's smelled Dhaka, and it smells like human shit. That's poverty.' Yeah, stinking poverty caused by their languages!

Everyone is ditching their local languages because they are abjectly poor and they realize that their little' languages are keeping them that way, so they wisely decide oh, I'm sorry make rational decisions in a world of constrained choices' (emphasis in the original): they want to get on that big global language bus to a solid paycheck and three square meals a day! And their choices are constrained, cause they're poor! Stinking poor!

I'm going to try not to be petty (it's hard), but I think Khan's post is extraordinarily callous, far outside his area of expertise (which is apparently blogging sorry, that was petty), and a bit of ideology parading as science (a problem which he ascribes to his critics). When confronted with criticism on the first post, Khan refuses to reflect or consider other options, but just doubles down on his original off-handed remarks (here and here), elaborating them into two more posts on why we shouldn't care about Indigenous languages, often with divergent and even contradictory rationales, and then insulting my discipline. I hereby accept the gauntlet, pitiable knave!

Diversity and resilience: the initial stimulus

The series of posts started with Khan's response to Seed Magazine republishing a 2008 piece by Maywa Montenegro and Terry Glavin, In Defense of Difference.' In the piece, Montenegro and Glavin highlight the convergence of thinking about both decreasing biological diversity and cultural diversity. Although the situation for global ecosystems is more widely known among scientists, in fact, the risks for the world's linguistic diversity are equally dire. As Montenegro and Glavin decribe, Of the world's roughly 6,800 languages, fully halfthough some experts say closer to 90 percentare expected to disappear before the end of the century.' The piece begins with the description of the funeral for Marie Smith Jones, the last fluent speaker of Eyak in Anchorage, citing a number of examples of a global epidemic of sameness': this epidemic carries away an entire human language every two weeks, destroys a domesticated food-crop variety every six hours, and kills off an entire species every few minutes.'

Montenegro and Glavin discuss how concerns about decreasing biological, ecological and cultural diversity have merged in studies of system resilience,' or the role of diversity in the continuing function of complex systems in changing conditions. We know well that some biological systems need diversity; for example, I doubt very much that Khan and other sceptics of language diversity would be quite so blas if we were discussing decreasing diversity in the antibodies produced by the immune system. Although I'm not fully persuaded by Montenegro and Glavin's arguments (and others') that biodiversity and cultural and linguistic diversity are linked, the occurrence of biodiversity and cultural diversity in the same areas is intriguing.

The danger is not simply that there's too little diversity, it's that we don't even have a handle on the diversity that's disappearing. Montenegro and Glavin:

While no reliable data concerning the level of documentation of the world's languages exists, a plausible estimate is that fewer than 10 percent are well documented, meaning that they have comprehensive grammars, extensive dictionaries, and abundant texts in a variety of genres and media. The remaining 90 percent are, to varying degrees, underdocumented, or, for all intents and purposes, not documented at all.

The problem in language diversity is that the vast majority of languages are spoken by a tiny minority of the world's population. As Montenegro and Glavin explain: more than 96 percent of the world's languages are spoken by just 4 percent of its people.'

Now I have to admit, I'm not entirely persuaded that language diversity does increase human resilience, although I do think cultural diversity in general does increase innovation. The resilience argument is not one that I would use to advocate preservation of Indigenous languages, but I'll get back to that in a minute

Razib Khan thinks it's no big thang

Khan starts off his series of statements against those who worry about decreasing language diversity in a brief discussion of various web links, including the piece by Montenegro and Glavin. He was of the opinion: If Eyak language was so awesome, why wasn't the article written in Eyak? I find the paeans to linguistic and cultural diversity tiresome and knee-jerk.' He then goes on to confuse the case completely, arguing that diversity' is actually bad sometimes because in the nineteenth century, people had diverse' views about slavery, but now we're better because we're universally against slavery. QED, diversity is weak. (Fortunately, in the two posts that follow, he doesn't continue along this rather tendentious argument by straining analogy.)

In the second post, departing in the opposite direction, Khan explains with a not-entirely-persuasive mathematical analogy, saying that hybrids of cultures actually increases overall cultural diversity (his example is half-Chinese & half-English devotees of Vaishnava Hinduism'): There are more combinations as the fuller possible parameter space is being explored, despite the decrease in the number of modes across the distributions.' Okay, let me see if I get this: cultural diversity is not of value, so don't care about it decreasing, but, by the way, cultural diversity is actually increasing because although the number of cultures (wasn't this about languages?) is decreasing, there are more hybrids. (Remember this as one example of Khan's off-handed use of academic jargon to dress up his ideas we'll get back to this.)

Apparently, Khan felt a bit of heat for his dismissal of concerns about decreasing linguistic diversity, but, rather than rethinking his position, he just ups the ante and draws some analogies to Stanley Diamond to shore up his never-mind-the-cultural-diversity-it's-all-good' argument (by the way, in post #3, he decides to off-handedly diss Stanley Diamond, possibly to throw his critics off, since he said he was simply paraphrasing or extending Diamond's argument in piece #2). The good news is that he includes a much more open discussion of the value of language for identity, distinctive worldviews, even literature, suggesting that Language is history and memory.' He even waxes eloquently about how linguist nuance gives intangible aesthetic coloring to the world' wow.

But he still doesn't care about language extinction.

The key for Khan is that he thinks the preservation of linguistic diversity is an imposition on those individuals in minority communities:

But this [advocacy of language diversity] ignores the costs to those who do not speak world languages with a high level of fluency. The cost of collective color and diversity may be their individual poverty (i.e., we who speak world languages gain, but incur no costs).

Khan puts forward the argument assuming that 1) you must not be able to speak a world language without sacrificing your native language, 2) language preservation is foisted upon minority linguistic communities by rich people for their own gratification, 3) language diversity causes you to be poor or at least prevents you from getting rich, and 4) rich people don't learn little' languages (a particularly interesting assumption considering the dismissive things he has to say about the field of anthropology, where we do this kind of thing).

He says of a couple of critics, if anthro-gibberish drives you crazy, don't follow the links.' Okay: one catty remark: at least the anthropologists know what the word vacuous' means, especially handy if you want to keep using it.

The problem with his critics is that they just get all tied up in their semantic intellectual games and don't understand the core truths:

Many anthropological types problematize too much for my taste. They confuse the nuance and shading which vary between societies, for the core truths, which are relatively culture-free. For almost all of human history most people lived at the poverty line, because Malthusian conditions were operative. The possibility for wealth, and consumer society, is new. Those who opt-out in modern societies do so for explicit ideological reasons and are aware of the trade offs (e.g., the Amish, Hasidic Jews, people who live in communes).

Of course, if Khan had gotten over his aversion to anthropological types' with our incessant problematizing, he might have learned along the way about the correlation between the industrial revolution and advanced farming techniques and increasing rates of populations growth. Khan might have learned how surprisingly stable some indigenous populations have been over time (and cases where that had not been the case, often with ecological disaster quickly following). If Khan were actually reading anthropology, or even history, he might learn the role of enclosure in destabilizing rural populations to make them poor,' or the troubles colonial officials had talking subsistence farmers into producing cash crops because they correctly perceived that they would suddenly become poor' when they no longer were self-sufficient.

If Khan had read one of the classic works of anthropology in the last century, Stone Age Economics, by Prof. Marshall Sahlins, he might not so flippantly declare: For almost all of human history most people lived at the poverty line' a statement that simultaneously commits at least three fundamental errors in only thirteen words. Heck, even a cursory reading of John Kenneth Galbraith might have made him less reckless, but I digress

Also, Khan assumes that those who opt-out' in modern societies' (again, more errors than I care to correct) do so voluntarily, apparently passing over the people who are opted-out' because they're just poor. And there's no consideration that wealth in some countries might actually be related, somehow, remotely, to poverty in others. Books have been written about the fundamental Modernist errors that Khan glides through: that poverty is because people are traditionalists (some of the poorest are those who are integrated into the global economy tightly but in horrible conditions or moved to satellite manufacturing areas in periphery countries), that there is no poverty in the developed world (except those who opt-out'), that everyone, everywhere, before the advent of capitalism, was poor.' God, I'd like to get this kid in my economic anthropology class

Razib Khan has this to offer to those who actually study culture, human diversity, language, and the like, in closing:

For a better understanding of how I approach anthropology, and the study of human culture, the first half of D. Jason Slone's Theological Incorrectness describes it almost perfectly. If you continue to read this weblog, you'll note that I have a deep interest in culture and history. But, my treatment is not going to resemble much of what would find in cultural anthropology in the United States. In fact, I'll drive you crazy, and perhaps an r-squared here and there will strike as you positivist gibberish. No one's paying you to read though.

I don't think an r-squared here and there' is positivist gibberish.' I think that pulling stuff out of your a** as you go, making up facts, conveniently rereading or simply being ignorant of history, trying to hide it with shallow engagement with economic terminolgy or statistics, and misusing academic concepts is just gibberish. Unqualified. Not positivist.'

But rather than just hurl invective at an individual who has just dismissed my academic field, I'd like to talk about, well, some evidence. Fortunately, since I hail from anthropology, I can be contented with a bit of anecdotal sampling and a few back-of-the-envelope scribblings to see how the Khan Theorem of Linguistic Diversity = Poverty holds up to, well, empirical reality. So, in a non-systematic and purely on-line-from-my-relatives'-home kind of way, let's look at some rich countries and some poor countries

The evidence

Khan doesn't really have any data, but he does offer a graph that's a kind of thought experiment based upon his idea of how the world works. His graph, which I won't reproduce here out of respect for his intellectual rights, suggests that, with everyone speaking their own language, median human utility' would be zero. As language use become more and more homogenized two people speak each language, then three eventually, median human utility would reach a plateau. But then, at a certain point beyond the maximal language oligopoly' (his term), median human utility would then drop again.

Of course, those who advocate for language diversity do not suggest that everyone should have their own private language, nor are they engaged in thought experiments. They are actually struggling for the language rights of minority groups around the world who exist in a form other than on a hypothetical graph. So instead of testing the thesis with hypothetical extremes one person-one language and global monolanguage let's look at actual countries with different (or a single) language.

As a caveat to this, quantitative analysis of this sort is not a personal strength, and I'm usually the one talking about lies, damn lies, and statistics,' but the comparisons at least, even stripped of the pseudo-analysis, are worth considering.

We could start with the countries with the highest nominal gross domestic product per capita (admittedly, a rough measurement of utility' but easier to get than something like human development index or an agreed-upon measure of national happiness'). Luxembourg, Norway, Qatar, Switzerland, Denmark, Ireland, Netherlands, UAE, USA and Austria were the top ten per capita GDP countries according to the IMF as of 2009. Just to increase our pool, I'll also pull other top-10 earners according to the CIA Factbook and the World Bank: these would include Finland, Sweden, Belgium, Lichtenstein, the Faroe Islands and Jersey. So are all these countries monolingual speakers of world languages?

The following table lists 16 of the wealthiest countries in the world, the CIA World Fact Book description of their current language scene as well as some key facts: the first (Global?') describes whether one of their official languages is a Global' language spoken by 50 million people or more. EL' is the number of non-immigrant languages (that is, native languages) spoken in a country according to Ethnologue; Pop' is the population of the country in millions; and Pop/L' is the total population in millions divided by the number of languages, a very approximate (very, very approximate) sign of language diversity. The higher the Pop/L' score, very roughly, the less the linguistic diversity in a country.

The very last line on the table is an aggregate Pop/L, the total population of the wealthiest countries in terms of nominal GDP/capita divided by the total languages; I didn't bother to remove duplicates and I pulled out the Faroe Islands and Jersey (they don't really have 0' population) because I don't have complete information to do my back-of-the-napkin comparisons. Besides, they'd likely artificially lower Pop/L as they have such small populations (and speak duplicate languages found in other rich countries).

Of course, Pop/L, being a back-of-the-napkin calculation, is sloppy, getting worse the larger a country's population is, as a large number of very small language communities can lower a Pop/L without signifying that a population is really all that linguistically diverse. But the same problem occurs with nominal gross domestic product per capita, so I'm going to run with it. If you really wanted to measure linguistic diversity, you'd have to come up with something analogous to the Gini coefficient, the measure of inequalities in wealth; if it's out there, someone will tell us, I hope. That said, here's the table:

How about the correlation of linguistic diversity with poverty? The ten poorest countries, according to the IMF, are all African: Madagascar, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Niger, Eritrea, Malawi, Sierra Leone, Liberia, DR Congo, and Burudi. Adding in my two other sources would increase the pool with Nepal (the only non-African country), Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, and Somalia.

The analysis, of the admittedly anecdotal data, that is

So what's this all suggest? First, that a higher proportion of the poorest countries have global' languages (for the sake of argument, those with more than 50 million speakers) among their official languages than among the wealthiest countries. I'm sure Khan, like me, is skeptical of the possible gap between official' language and actual language spoken, but the gap would only exaggerate the importance of that global language relative to the local language that was not official. If business, government, legislation, tertiary education, and a host of other opportunities and resources in a country depend upon learning a language that you do not speak, then you theoretically would have more motivation to learn that language (if, in fact, one was motivated to learn language by rational decisions in a world of constrained choices' by the way, is economese' a global language yet? 50 million speakers?).

But certainly we can say that the governments of poor countries are doing their part to end poverty by making global languages official, right? The much easier explanation of the pattern is that, if you were colonized by a global power, you stand a much greater chance of having a global language installed as your official language (of course, the irony is that so many wealthy countries seem not to have gotten all their languages to become global' nor have they spent time, money and energy eradicating these pesky little local languages that they have in their borders).

Okay, so making a global language your official language as panacea to national poverty? Not so compelling a case here.

How about language diversity undermining national prosperity, certainly this bears out in the data, right? The total aggregate Pop/L,' our admittedly messy surrogate for language diversity, in the whole globe is around 1(Population of the world (6.9 billion or 6900 million)/Total number of language (6909) = 1). Here, we might have something: the rich are more linguistically homogeneous! Their aggregate Pop/L is 1.1, which everyone knows is more than 1! And the Pop/L of the poor countries is .6, which is a lot lower than 1.

Of course, things are not quite so clear as this (Khan doesn't like the way that anthropologist problematize' but we can't help ourselves). If we look at the rich countries, one of them stands out like a sore thumb: the US. On virtually every measure, the US is out of place. Identified as a linguistic hotspot' by people who concern themselves with these things, with a population so large that it skews the pattern of all the other states. Arguably, the high EL is actually a distortion, as the significant populations of non-English speakers might be much smaller (with Spanish and a few others, perhaps, if the analyst was feeling generous). What about the other countries? Without the US, the Pop/L of the remaining wealthiest countries would be .7. The huge US population, even with the very large number of languages, helps to pull up the aggregate average.

In addition, there's one of the six linguistic hotspots among the poorest countries as well: Nepal, the only non-African country. If you pull the two linguistic hotspots out of the data the US and Nepal the pattern among the rest is surprisingly similar. The Pop/L of the rich is .733 and of the poor, .730 (the extra decimal places added to impress those who have extra strong faith in numbers). Since our method likely inflates aggregate Pop/L relative to global Pop/L (because we don't eliminate duplicates in aggregate, but they're eliminated in global numbers), I think we really wind up with one thing to conclude about the Language Diversity Causes Poverty' Hypothesis: meh.

I say, meh,' and not, no,' because it may or may not be the case, but it seems to me that other factors are obviously more likely explanations. After all, other patterns are far more obvious: like being African, or politically stable, or formerly colonized, having corrupt government or an especially damaging war, or being European (even Scandinavian) Certainly, I don't think most people would look at these charts and say, My God man, we must save these poor countries from their linguistic diversity and make them like the linguistically homogeneous rich countries!'

On average, the wealthiest and the poorest countries are not enormously different to the global average; like I said, we'd need a measure of language concentration to really be able to judge this. At the very least, the data suggests that there's not really much of an upside to increasing homogeneity beyond the average the wealthiest countries don't seem to be exceptionally homogeneous (except for that outlier, you might argue).

Moreover, the rich group is hardly characterized by the use of global languages as first tongues in spite of the fact that they come from a region where languages have disproportionately become global languages through conquest. In contrast, no native African language has more than 50 million native speakers, unless you include Arabic. Plenty of very wealthy small European countries have boutique national languages and support indigenous language groups; in my experience, many American writers tend to dismiss the example of well-to-do Scandinavian and Western European countries when rhetorically convenient, like on the subject of socialism, the pernicious effect of high taxes, or linguistic diversity. A number of the high performing countries have primary languages that are not global and many support substantial Indigenous populations that preserve linguistic distinctiveness.

I would go so far as to say that the data suggests something more interesting than diversity causes poverty'; all but one of the wealthy countries has few dead' languages (not in the table sorry it occurred to me later). Except for the US, the majority of wealthy countries have preserved their language diversity even though many have undergone very rapid economic growth and have histories of stigmatized language minorities (such as Romani). Mind you, I'm not complicating the picture by raising the issue of immigrant language diversity, which is enormous in some of these wealthy countries, often because of liberal refugee asylum systems, and these language communities can be controversial.

Data can tell many different stories (especially back-of-the-napkin correlations), but I would suggest that Khan's argument is less persuasive from this data than an argument that say, preservation of language diversity correlates with high GDP per capita. I would need a much larger examination of the dead languages statistics in Ethnologue, but from this data, it looks equally plausible; I would also need to remember my college statisics, probably a more difficult proposition. Moreover, none of the language hotspots that are under threat is in Africa; there are several areas of high language diversity on the continent, but they are not under the same pressure as those in Australia, the US, Canada, Siberia, South America, and Melanesia.

The whole discussion of linguistic diversity leads to poverty' misses the point, perhaps intentionally. Advocates of linguistic diversity are generally talking about the languages of indigenous peoples within the borders of states that have long histories of oppressing these languages. Khan may think that this is just anthro-jibberish,' but the historical fact is that in Australia, the US, Canada, Russia (and the Soviet Union), and many South American countries with substantial indigenous populations, majority groups have long sought actively to eradicate these languages or just assumed that they would disappear while simultaneously starving them of support. Khan's argument is a complete distraction from the actual situations that language diversity advocates are talking about.

Does linguistic difference create conflict?

Khan argues that the only way to preserve language distinctiveness is to put up extremely high barriers to interaction,' like the Amish, who don't interact with anyone else (? My late paternal grandmother lived in Iowa around Amish families and there were a lot of Amish people east of South Bend, and I don't recall either extremely high barriers.' I recall driving out many times for good pies and excellent wood furniture. But then again, I'm an anthropologist, and I think ethnographic facts are kind of obdurate).

My family is from Bangladesh, which had a language movement, which served as the seeds for the creation of that nation from a united Pakistan. Though there was a racial and religious component to the conflict I don't think it would have matured and ripened to outright civil war without the linguistic difference. Language binds us to our ancestors, and to our peers, but also can separate us from others. A common language may not only be useful in a macroeconomic context, reducing transaction costs and allowing for more frictionless flow of information, but it also removes one major dimension of intergroup conflict.

So language homogeneity not only promotes economic prosperity, according to Khan, but also decreases potential for intergroup conflict. We should let people's languages die if they're at risk and the people want to save them because, in the future, they'll be less likely to fight. People don't fight with each other if they speak the same language except in the US Civil War, US Revolutionary War, War of 1812, virtually every war of independence in Latin America, virtually all civil wars, dirty wars' and low grade conflicts in Latin America (except where the governments sought to eradicate indigenous languages), the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam (remember, it wasn't all about us there were two sides of Koreans and Vietnamese in both) and I'm just pulling these off the top of my head. I'm sure that the slightest bit of research would yield more examples.

Moreover, if language created conflict (and I realize that I'm treating Khan's more subtle multiple-causation insinuation as if it were a strong theory of causation), wouldn't we expect to see a lot more conflict? Again, approximately one minute with the Google brought me to the Global Peace Index which suggests that the most peaceful countries, with their number of languages (if not already discussed), are: 1) New Zealand (4, 1 indigenous), 2) Iceland (2, 1 indigenous), 3) Japan (15, multiple indigenous), 4) Australia (274, many dead languages, many indigenous), 5) Norway, 6) Ireland, 7) Denmark, 7) Luxembourg, 9) Finland, and 10) Sweden. A lot of these also appear on our list of wealthiest countries, but the top spots also appear to be disproportionately occupied by island states not sharing a border is kind of like not having to share the back seat with your little brother, I suppose. And if you thought the Pop/L was skewed by the US in our initial calculation, you should do the numbers with Australia in the bunch!

On the other hand, many of these countries also border on countries with different national languages, presumably without, You say potato, I say prta' (Irish for potato') escalating into armed conflict. After all, with over 6000 languages on the planet, one would expect more wars if language was too strong a driving condition. From my perspective as an anthropologist interested in human rights, I'd probably point to excessive arms sales, especially automatic weapons and firearms, into unstable areas; violent nationalist ideologies and other forms of intolerance; and resource-based conflicts, before I'd line up language diversity' on my list of things likely to cause or exacerbate group conflict.

In a later post, Khan argues that, If you have a casual knowledge of history or geography you know that languages are fault-lines around which intergroup conflict emerges.' Of course, you might also know that exploitative economic relationships, desire to eradicate a neighboring group, and imperialism also tend to result in testy relations. Why we should point to language as a cause of conflict and then advocate imperial indifference is not clear to me. He keeps saying that the choice is between conflict and assimilation, or between poverty and homogeneity I just don't get where the forced choice is coming from except from his theory of decreased transaction costs (what is the language-related mark-up on trade anyway?).

Should we care about language extinction?

In the original Seed article that Khan criticized, Montenegro and Glavin offered one rationale for caring about language extinctions: As cultures and languages vanish, along with them go vast and ancient storehouses of accumulated knowledge.' This rationale has been put forward, for example, about Aboriginal languages, especially because we know that some Indigenous vocabularies highlight distinctions among plant and animal types that are only now becoming evident to biologists. The disruption of Aboriginal communities and their conduits for transferring knowledge has arguably set back our knowledge of the complicated ecosystems that they inhabited, perhaps irrevocably if these ecosystems are themselves undergoing profound change.

Montenegro and Glavin present research by Italian-born anthropologist and linguist Luisa Maffi as a turning point in the realization that there might be links between decreasing cultural and ecological diversity. Maffi was conducting medical anthropology fieldwork in Chiapas, Mexico, when she met a Tzeltal Mayan man who was bringing his daughter to a clinic for diarrhea care; he remembered dimly that there was once a grasshopper leg herb' which could cure her, but he no longer could identify it, or perhaps it had become too rare in the environment to support its use. Maffi realized that the world was losing language knowledge of particular species just as it was also losing these local species, in some cases. Maffi went on to form Terralingua, an organization dedicated to fighting for linguistic human rights.

This rationale, we might argue, is the lost knowledge' anxiety, that languages contain knowledge about the world, a rationale that Montenegro and Glavin point out is ultimately utilitarian (save languages because they might be good to have.'). But the point isn't just that knowledge is being lost to us, Westerners, but that formerly self-sufficient cultures are being subordinated and made less viable, replacing knowledge of locally grown medicinal herbs, for example, with ignorance about any option but purchasing patented pharmaceuticals.

Another reason to care about language diversity is what we might call the lost ways of thinking' anxiety, that languages contain ways of thinking about the world, cognitive styles, and their own logics. This concern was one expressed by linguistic anthropologist, Benjamin Whorf, which we've discussed a number of times on Neuroanthropology.net.

Khan dismisses this argument when it is put to him:

As I told ana below a lot of the discussion we had was basically just talking past each other. I kept telling her she was vacuous because she was assuming presuppositions which I simply did not share as empirical background descriptions of the world (e.g., a strong form of linguistic relativism where the specific nature of a language shapes cognition).

Fortunately, theorists in cognitive science and linguistics don't always share Khan's dismissive view. But again, this is a utilitarian argument: language diversity is valuable to us so we should encourage it. We need their language so they should be allowed to keep it. Of course, this rationale itself is self-centred; something is valuable only if we think it is useful to us.

More importantly, it's pretty bold for Khan, a non-linguist and non-anthropologists to tell people in that field, Naaaaah nothing to see here.' To simply declare, with no apparent relevant expertise except reading a book that is of no clear relevance to the issue, that the disappearance of language diversity is no big deal would be tantamount to me, an anthropologist, saying that the disappearance of diversity in oceanic life or the disappearance of most of English literature was really no bid deal. Of course, restraint and staying within one's area of expertise are not among the higher angels of blogging.

Montenegro and Glavin highlight a systems view of the importance of diversity, identifying it with the study of resilience.'

It's the ability of a systemwhether a tide pool or townshipto withstand environmental flux without collapsing into a qualitatively different state that is formally defined as resilience. And that is where diversity enters the equation. The more biologically and culturally variegated a system is, the more buffered, or resilient, it is against disturbance.

For resilience theorists, an excellent example of the dangers of homogeneity might be recent global epidemics of financial crisis. These crises spread, not merely because of interconnection among the world's economies, but also because of homogeneity; since all futures traders use the same equation to value derivatives and all banks converge on the same reserve requirements and lending policies, any failure to the system quickly ramifies across all components that share the same platform. The contagion of computer viruses, similarly, depends upon the homogeneity of code (and the deadening effect of decreased competition on preparedness for new problems). As Montenegro and Glavin summarize:

Homogeneous landscapeswhether linguistic, cultural, biological, or geneticare brittle and prone to failure. The evidence peppers human history, as Jared Diamond so meticulously catalogued in his aptly named book, Collapse. Whether it was due to a shifting climate that devastated a too-narrow agricultural base, a lack of cultural imagination in how to deal with the problem, or a devastating combination of the two, societies insufficiently resilient enough to cope with the demands of a changing environment invariably crumbled. The idea is perhaps best summed up in the pithy standard, What doesn't bend, breaks.

But the most important reason to preserve indigenous languages is the one reason that Khan doesn't seem to consider: Indigenous people want to preserve indigenous languages. If you say to people, You can preserve your language, but we'll make you poor,' they might choose to give up their language, but a surprising number do not, even when you add suffering from prejudice and discrimination on top of the cost. But the choice is a false one, one imposed by Khan's narrow way of seeing the world and language skills.

Khan argues that over the generations there will be a shift toward a dominant language if there is economic, social and cultural integration.' Like in Europe, for example, where no one wants to preserve his or her own language. Right.

Caring about the causes

To understand the possibility that preserving linguistic traditions might not simply be a librul imposition on the poor people that they hate so much, we need to ask why languages are dying out. Is it simply that people, when they hear it, want to stop speaking their own languages and start speaking Spanish, English, or Mandarin? Ultimately, the discussion of language extinction is about a process that is anything but natural; language extinction has often been an avenue for social domination. Montenegro and Glavin write:

That the Earth is becoming more homogeneousless of a patchwork quilt and more of a melting potis only partly due to the extinction of regionally unique languages or life forms. The greater contributing factor is invasiveness. According to the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report, as rapidly as regionally unique species are dying out, rates of species introductions in most regions of the world actually far exceed current rates of extinction. Similarly, the spread of English, Spanish, and, to a lesser extent, Chinese, into all corners of the world easily dwarfs the rate of global language loss. This spread of opportunistic species and prodigal tongues thrives on today's anthropogenic conduits of commerce and communications.

Khan believes that the days of coercive language change are over. Instead, he argues that contemporary language change is elective, that groups give up local languages when they realize that global dominant languages are the path to material prosperity:

Quite often, and especially today, language change does not occur from on high (in fact, the top-down imposition of standard national languages on the masses is more a recent feature of post-Enlightenment nationalism; Latin spread in the Roman Empire over centuries among the western peasantry). Most Africans who adhere non-world religions are shifting to Islam or Christianity. There is little explicit coercion in this (though a fair amount of social pressure from elites who find Vodun and other native traditions backward).

This is when he brings up the idea that people want to opt-out' of their own languages. It's an interesting idea. Khan doesn't really discuss the imperialist imposition of languages because he assures us that these bad ole days are over. Now, people are choosing to let their languages die.

Okay, let's leave aside for a moment the issue of forced language change, of imperial powers that demanded minority groups speak the dominant language. Let's just forget for a moment that Indigenous groups have often been denied education in their own languages, marginalized in legal and political process without dominant language abilities, even had their children taken away from them and been punished for speaking an Indigenous language. Let's just, for a moment, ignore the fact that Indigenous people have been identified by language and subjected to oppression, persecution and even genocide for it. For the sake of argument, I'll grant Khan this for the moment and say, Let bygones be bygones! Today, people only change their languages because they want to and no one wants to be stuck with a lousy local Indigenous language when they can have a shiny dominant global language.'

Do people want their local languages to go away?

Several logical and empirical problems dog the assertion that people just want to get down with the global languages: first, if folks don't want to preserve their local languages unless hysterical liberals put them up to it, why are the people on Faroe Island speaking Faroese, or anyone at all speaking Luxembourgish, Bokmal Norwegian, Nynorsk Norwegian, any of the Sammi languages, Romansch, Greenlandic, Finnish or Swedish? I mean, c'mon, these folks have got some cash in the pocket why don't they just drop these distracting languages and get with the Globish? And what about Hebrew? And why the heck would otherwise right-minded people in prosperous parts of he world be trying to revive or revitalize Scottish, Maori, Aragonese, Celtic, Cherokee, Cornish, Basque, Navajo, Catalan, Gascon, and Hawaiian, let alone teaching themselves Klingon or Tolkeinese?!?

The point is, when people have resources, even if they have access to global languages, they often vote with their tongues for the preservation, revitalization or even creation of languages that are meaningful to them. In many places around the world, even poor countries have done the same: Papua New Guinea, for example, has found that it's possible to have primary education in hundreds of languages, and Native American languages are increasingly used for education throughout the Americas. These programs are seldom top-down, imposed programs of liberal guilt there just aren't enough guilty liberal language teachers of rare tongues around to make this happen.

The leadership may be led by local elites, true, and they may ally themselves with outsiders, like anthropologists, but the idea that libruls everywhere in the impoverished world are forcing Francophile Indigenous kids or Spanish-loving Native Americans to study their local languages oh, no, not that white ma'am speaking Tlingit again! is clearly a figment of Khan's imagination.

In fact, for left-leaning intellectuals, the recognition that Indigenous peoples wanted to stay indigenous,' in language and culture, came as a bit of a shock; raised on earlier Marxist-inspired understandings of liberation, mid-twentieth-century radicals often assumed that these languages would disappear to as poor Indigenous people became International Workers. Psssst, Razib, Indigenous rights are not a liberal conspiracy, they're an Indigenous conspiracy: some people call it self-determination.'

Can we help stop language extinction?

The point is that to save many of the world's endangered languages, we don't need the speakers to change; we need to change. They're already speaking these languages, trying to get the right to have their kids go to school in the language that the speak at home and in their communities. These languages are not disappearing because people are spontaneously making rational decisions to drop their old languages and get down with the global argots; these languages are disappearing because populations around them are actively undermining or, at the very least, callously doing everything else to make these languages unviable. The crisis of decreasing linguistic diversity, like the decrease in biodiversity, is an imperial side-effect, not a failure of indigenous communities.

Can indigenous languages be saved? Absolutely. We've seen a number of revivals and revitalizations of Indigenous and small' languages in North and South America, the Pacific, Europe, New Zealand, and Asia. We've seen communities proudly starting language classes in traditional languages with no seeming ill effect on their utility,' or ours, the speakers and writers of majority languages, for that matter. Is language revitalization undermining the quality of written and spoken grammar? Not half as much as texting.

Will we, Western speakers of dominant languages (if that's not you, I beg your pardon), work to save other languages if we don't change our attitudes? Of course not. But isn't that the point? Some Westerners have convinced themselves that the cure to the world's ills is for everyone to become more like them, and they've set about making that vision a reality with some pretty coercive means. But the problem is, if everyone else consumes like us, farms like us, mines like us, burns fossil fuel like us, and, yes, talks like us, we're going to run out of the space we need to support even us. The whole point of the movement for biocultural diversity is to realize that we, those speakers of dominant languages, need to change.

Increasingly technology is making it possible to overcome language differences and communicate in spite of using multiple dialects. Low-cost local media can support linguistic minority communities, as can locally-produced educational materials. We know that students are more likely to succeed in school, to graduate, and even to do well in dominant-language classes, when they get a substantial part of their education in their mother tongue.

Besides, it's estimated that more than half of the world is bilingual or polyglot, including plenty of people who are both extremely poor and quite well to do. Learning multiple languages is just not that hard; in some societies, virtually everyone does it.

I would say that Khan has got the argument precisely backwards; languages don't die out because poor people want to become wealthier. Languages die because people are too poor (or too dominated) to maintain them. Westerners or colonized elites often make shedding language and minority culture a precondition of interaction. If they have the resources they need and under no coercion, virtually no group voluntarily sheds its language; they may learn second languages, but I know of no case where a group spontaneously decided to switch languages (although Fiji did recently switch which side of the road they drove on more used cars available on the other side). If anything, people produce more literature, more poetry, more radio broadcasts, and more webpages in their first language. Of course they want to learn global languages, but the point is that it's not an either/or choice.

If dominant languages were so great, so infinitely superior to local languages, then global languages should spread on their own, without coercion. To some degree, they do we find English as a second language around the globe, especially among the educated and upwardly mobile. But to assume from this fact that everyone should just learn English because your theoretical model of transaction costs predict they would be better off, even though people are clearly indicating through their own actions that the cost-benefit bundle of their own native language is the way to go is believing in your model more than the evidence of reality.

The big reason: it's not us, it's them

A number of Khan's online respondents, and his own statements, imply that the motivation for preserving indigenous languages is a kind of liberal guilt. So, go ahead, they seem to suggest, off with the rest of em!' As one knuckle-dragger remarks: On a side note, I had a friend in my undergrad years who felt that the English language was a vehicle of atrocity and imperialism (hehe, to paraphrase that saying you would have to have a college education to say something that stupid).' He he. That's so funny. No, enforced language has never ever anywhere been a problem. He he. You'd have to have a college education to say something that stupid. (Lovely, too, that Khan then makes a crack about the commenter's friend being retarded.')

So let's talk about this stupid' idea that preserving language might be somehow linked to imperialism. Khan's anti-diversity, anti-human rights argument is that language preservation is simply a form of amusement for the wealthy whose cost is imposed on the poor who actually speak these languages. As he puts it, The cost of collective color and diversity may be their [the speakers of minority languages] individual poverty'

In fact, the discussion of language diversity is a crucial front in the debate about how to make real the rights of Indigenous people after some staggering acts of callousness, cruelty and neglect toward them. Leftists did not put language preservation on the human rights table; Indigenous people did. To treat the language diversity discussion as if it were just an elitist and paternalistic concern both disregards one of the most important frontiers for human rights and involves convenient amnesia about the legacy of imperialism and even genocide (or culturecide'). To me, the decrease in language diversity is not the problem itself, but a kind of global indication of how the numerous wars on minority groups are going, even if those wars are simply sieges of neglect and indifference. Decreasing linguistic diversity suggests that pressures to lose language, impediments to transmitting local languages, are still in place, in spite of what Khan might want to believe. The fact that so much linguistic diversity exists in wealthy countries suggests that the choice between prosperity and language diversity is a false one.

In other cases, loss of language diversity would signal the eradication of a community. For example, one of Khan's commentators points out the case of the Andaman Islanders; because they are hostile to outsiders and wish to be left alone, the disappearance of this language would signify the disappearance of the group, through some sort of small-scale, but extremely profound demographic catastrophe.

The most important thing that Khan gets wrong is the simple fact that people care about their languages and, given a choice, choose to preserve them, even at some cost to themselves. They demonstrate with their own investment of resources and energy that it matters, enough so that Indigenous groups and other groups have repeatedly struggled to get these rights recognized in scores of countries. Khan doesn't bother to even acknowledge this historical fact, dismissing the possibility that people could care about language. He implies that the philosophical foundation for protecting linguistic diversity is a misplaced liberal celebration of diversity for its own sake when it's actually respect for hard-won human rights. Don't ask me, Khan, look in the relevant UN and human rights documents!

In fact, language preservation does involve thinking about past genocide, realizing that language extinction is a form of burying the body, hiding the remains, or scrubbing the evidence. Preserving endangered languages, or at least helping the communities that want to preserve their endangered languages, brings up some awkward questions to which Social Darwinism offers convenient answers. Languages will always go extinct, but hurrying them along because they're inconvenient to us is a bit like the undertaker or mortician in Monty Python's The Holy Grail' dispatching the man with the temerity to say he's not dead yet!' Khan's approach is to tell them to get on with the dying because they'll be better off afterward, when their cultures are gone more utility in that, you know.

Providing people with the right to educate their children in the language of their choice is a bit like allowing the memory of the crimes of empire to be told. To see these languages flourish is to find signs that our world has become more open to groups' desires for self-determination and less inhospitable for minorities. For those among us who care about human rights and justice, hearing a rare language should be a gratifying reminder that it's still possible to choose to carry on one's own tradition, that the choice to preserve diversity is not bought with a condemnation to poverty or isolation.

Ultimately though and I think that no matter whether you disagree with me on the previous points our not, this is crucial the decision about whether or not to preserve a language is in the hands of those who speak it. Khan and other critics of the linguistic diversity movement seem to deny that this should be where the decision must be made, even though they often accuse the linguistic diversity movement of being paternalistic.' Ultimately, anti-diversity proponents cannot imagine that other people would not choose to become like us, interact with us, or at least to understand the language of dominant people, so some of these proponents want to eliminate even the possibility of making a choice. When the language is gone, the choice will be, too. Anti-linguistic diversity advocates do not recognize the costs of learning a dominant language or the costs of losing one's own tongue. Market advocates tell us that we should trust people to make their own choices, as this is the only way to maximize utility.' Telling people what is good for them, telling them what will make them most happy, is a command economy. If there's a cost to remaining ignorant of world languages, and people choose to bear that cost, that is, by definition, their utility maximizing position.

Saying that you want to help people, but only on the condition that they give up what makes them distinctive something that plenty of rich countries demonstrate is no impediment to being successful is holding their well-being hostage to your ideology and desire to make others like yourself. This conditional approach to development is anti-human rights, but it's also anti-self determination and even anti-market. It's just old fashioned cultural imperialism dressed up with some economic jargon: what's wrong with you is that you're not like me. Let me fix that. Khan may openly admit that he's Eurocentric, but I don't really think he's considered the other implications of what he's arguing.

Razib Khan on cultural anthropology: Now, it's personal

I've just got to make a few comments on Khan's attitude toward anthropology, which seems to me to display a certain bipolarity. First, Khan doesn't feel the need to respond to cultural anthropologists who argue with him (please continue this policy with my post, Razib thank you):

As for my critics, note that I don't really engage them directly, because the theoretical frameworks we use are so distinct. They misunderstand me, and I misunderstand them (honestly, I have no idea what they're saying most of the time in the broad sense, aside from the fact that they're offended).

True, Khan, well-trained, well-read anthropologists have a tendency to use technical terms that you might not have come across in your biological education, I'll admit, but I suspect that you, too, use a few bits of jargon here and there, sometimes even when you don't need to (although I'm surprised that in all your reading about cultures, you haven't picked up the basic gist of what we're saying). Fair enough, but I believe that some of us are actually understanding you much better than you suggest. Khan continues: I have as much respect for most American cultural anthropology as I do for Talmudic scholarship; I'm sure they're bright individuals, but they aren't doing anything which I think relates to a world outside of the minds of the practitioners.'

This critique that what anthropologist do does not relate to a world outside their minds is pretty rich coming from a science blogger who works online, probably sitting at a desk and clearly not reading much of what anthropologists write (leaving aside the Talmud). After all, cultural anthropologists have to do things like, well, go outside, to do their research. Anthropologist often actually go live with poor people (as opposed to just smell them, Razib), talk to them, learn their languages, advocate on their behalf, and then try to persuade fellow Westerners that their lives and opinions are worth considering.

Ironically, in a final post that I only saw as I finished this, Knowledge is not value free, Khan tries to say that he's especially fascinated with cultural diversity and reads monographs on different cultures (are they written by non-anthropologists? He keeps linking to Wikipedia, so I don't know):

I'm not someone who has no interest in the details of ethnographic diversity. On the contrary I'm fascinated by ethnic diversity. Like many people I enjoy reading monographs and articles on obscure groups such as Yazidis (well before our national interest in Iraq) and the Saivite Chams of Vietnam. Oh, wait, I misspoke. I actually don't know many people who have my level of interest in obscure peoples and tribes and the breadth of human diversity.

He then goes on to suggest that, if you share his extraordinary interest in obscure peoples, as well as his disdain for the fate of their languages, you should contact him for coffee if you swing through his locale. (If you need an RSVP, Razib, I can't make it.)

The hubris and just, well, confusing illogicalness of saying that the Western academic attempt to understand other world views through direct research doesn't relate to a world outside of the minds of the practitioners' is pretty bold, but then talking about how much you enjoy reading about other cultures is, well, bizarre and a bit bipolar. Don't let the facts get in your way, I say. You may not like the way we write, Khan, but at least grant us the courtesy of recognizing what we do for a living. I daresay it's less isolated from a world outside of the minds of the practitioners' than, well, professional blogging, for example.

You may have smelled poor people when you went to Dhaka, but anthropologists actually go live with them, sometimes for years at a time, or longer. If you too have done this, great, but anthropologists try to return the hospitality they are shown with something like compassion and concern for those who make our work possible. Rather than just pontificate on what minority groups or Indigenous people might want, we sometimes do crazy things like ask them. The fact is that anthropologists are disproportionately involved in human rights causes, including Indigenous rights, not because we're closet totalitarians who hate poor people and want them to be

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