This eyecatching image, taken from the Gran Vía out towards Moncloa, is from the enjoyable site Notes from Spain, a blog/podcast run by two expats who also give Spanish language classes over the Internet. I read about them here over the weekend and they run a professional-looking e-ship. Their comment about how the image is deceptively peaceful, given the chaos and noise beneath, is spot-on.

Imagine you were a Spanish journalist, or just someone interested in reading about Spanish matters in Spanish. You might want access to international, national and regional newspapers, radio stations, blogs and encyclopaedias. You might want to look at the Invisible Internet or a Dictionary of Proverbs, you might want to know about films or search the contents of libraries. Well, this might be the sort of thing. It's been around since 2000 and my life would have been a lot easier if I'd known about it. Beware: beautifully designed it is not.

This news site, on the other hand, is very beautiful indeed and is in fact generally rather wonderful. "10x10," its policy statement declares, "runs with no human intervention, autonomously observing what a handful of leading international news sources are saying and showing. 10x10 makes no comment on news media bias, or lack thereof. It has no politics, nor any secret agenda; it simply shows what it finds." Well, it might have no agenda, but I don't think it can help having politics.
--------

Plenty of useful stuff for Span lang fans here. Meanwhile, sleeping dogs are not being allowed to lie.
--------

This could be a timesaver for people who (a) can (b) believe they can (c) would like to be able to shuttle easily between two languages. To give you an idea, I tried it out with "racism in Spain" and this is what I got. But of course I'm probably just showing myself to be in thrall to new technology for the sake of it - Babelplex might, very occasionally, be mildly useful, but it's probably nothing to write home or blog about.

Unlike this news. The truly revolutionary thing about the project, if the universities I've had anything to do with are typical, is that more than one person should be able to use a book at any one time.

This largely unsung but important piece of news today is, of course, more revolutionary than either of the above, but gets a lot less newspaper inches than anything Google. What it says, ultimately, is that people are more important than religions.
--------

Thank you, Nigel, for this link, which points out the connection between the recently deceased deconstruction giant Jacques Derrida and Prince William. And I recommend the madcap surrealism of Frank Key's site, here. He may be a genius. New on the block: SpainMedia.com, news and opinions, sometimes strongly-stated, on Spain, in English. (Thanks to them for the link.)

Oh, and lest we forget, congratulations, George: still fighting on after all these years.

--------

According to Bitacoras.com, PdS Blog is the 843rd most popular blog in Spain. I should start preparing my thank-you speech. Bitácora is Spanish for "blog".

--------