What the fuck is Edicy?

Brace yourselves: this is going to be another tech rant.

Edicy is one of a number of startups funded by Ambient Sound Investments, which in turn is the corporate invocation of the enormous pile of money received by the four Estonians who were in on the ground floor of Skype. I only became aware of it because of a fellow Esto-blogger who got hired to work for them.

What Edicy does, ostensibly, is give you a nice, simple web page editor. It's all done inside the browser, in a cute Web 2.0 sort of way. You know - widgets. Awesome! I thought. It was about time for me to add a page to antyx.net advertising my freelance translation and documentation services, and with Edicy, I could use a very clean and well-color-coded template, just typing in my own text. It even had a rudimentary blog engine, though obviously I didn't need that. I muddled around with the page creator for a bit, but there were bugs in the interface, and I couldn't see what I could do with the page, except leave it there as a numbered placeholder. And, as usual, I was wondering how these folks intended to actually make money off the product.

It is said that history repeats itself thrice: once as a tragedy, again as a comedy, and furthermore for the dumbasses who didn't get the point yet. Time has passed from that early beta stage, and now Edicy is a full-on product. And the product it is, is goddamn Geocities.



Remember Geocities? Cast your mind's eye a decade back, when Al Gore had just invented the Internet, and we were all eager to grab a part of that action. The premier way to leave a mark was to have a Geocities homepage, where you could use a pink swirl image as a repeating background, a MIDI for background music, and post pictures of yourself and your goddamn motherfucking cat.

Geocities was the tragedy. MySpace was the comedy.

(Full disclosure: I might have gotten a Geocities page, but I never really used it. Even back then, I was 1337 enough to code my homepage in Notepad.)

Edicy is Act Three. In their current, presumably finished state, they will let you make a mostly-text page with some nifty browser-based tools. Except you can't do much with it when you're done. What I expected is some sort of export facility, where they would give you an index.html and a folder with all the images and CSS files, with relative paths in the code, so you can simply upload it to wherever you want. Ideally they'd have some sort of generic hosting integration, where you give them your FTP details and they do all the hard work - kind of like I use the Blogger engine to automatically publish static HTML pages to the antyx.net webhost. No setup or knowledge of PHP and chmod required.

Edicy won't let you do any of that. Instead, you have three options. You can publish your page at prefix.edicypages.com - just as the easiest way to use Blogger is to have a prefix.blogspot.com. That's fine for blogs, but personal homepages died out mercifully with the first dotcom crash. The online presence of a regular person these days is on facebook, which doesn't offer an easy-to-remember URL, but does offer a lot of other vastly superior interaction tools (including a perfectly functional search by name, gender and general vicinity). If you have your own website, it will probably be for some kind of business promotion purposes, and at that point you better fucking have your own domain name. It's 2009, you bastard. Godaddy will get you a domain for seven bucks, and webspace is cheaper than toilet paper.

This isn't even Googlepages, which at least has some air of fanboyism about it. I don't approve of Google worship, but at least I understand the mechanism of trying to attach oneself to the aura. But this is Edicypages, and what the fuck is Edicy?

Of course, you don't have to stick to edicypages, just like you don't have to stick to blogspot. Except here's the big difference: Blogger will let you do things with your blog for free. If I wasn't already paying for hosting, I could point the antyx.net domain to Blogger's servers, and none of you would notice a difference, or care. But I have this overarching feeling that the way a blog engine is supposed to work is to generate static HTML that gets published on a webserver that I control, so I do that. It means I can't use some of the newest Blogger widgets, but it's a free service and the important functionality is still there, so I don't especially give a shit.

But Edicy is not like Blogger; it's not one of those Web 2.0, advertising-supported ideas that I loathe so much and criticize for not having a discernible source of revenue. Oh no. Just as Skype charges its users to call regular phones, Edicy will offer its pageholders a premium commercial service.

Enter Edicy Pro. For a small fee, they will host your text-and-images homepage and make it accessable from any domain (that you have to buy separately, of course). They will even let you download the page! And give you priority support!

And the cost? Depending on the length of your commitment, 4-5 Euro per month.

MOTHERFUCKER.

My own web host, the unassailably awesome Tantum.ee, will give you a gig of web space and 25 gigs of traffic per month for eight euro a year. By broadband standards, a gig doesn't seem like a lot, but let me put this into perspective: I only changed up from their cheapest package when the site first got slashdotted and I ran into the traffic cap, which back then was something like 3gb per month. And yes, their hosting package does include a site builder.

Also, I checked: the output of the Edicy page builder is clean HTML. You might need to grab their CSS files as well, but otherwise, open your prefix.edicypages.com page, View Source and save to Notepad.

I mean no offense to Sehr, and I certainly appreciate that they have thought about revenue sources, but OMFG, this is preposterous. Makes me wonder about the whole ASI incubator: the other startup of theirs that I am aware of is a self-customizing RSS feed.

Because I know Rikken will be interested: I can make a reasonable case that the best coffee in Estonia is served at the Kükita Grill, around half way down the Tallinn-Tartu road.

Bah, humbug.

Christmas holidays are looong this year. From tomorrow and until Monday. Anyone in Tartu fancy a pint?

Vladivostok 2008

Providing that you still have a stable income, you've probably seen mostly good things from the global financial crisis. The most obvious benefit is the price of oil, which has lost two thirds of its peak value. It's a good thing for us, but it's been playing havoc in Russia, where the state suddenly no longer has near-unlimited disposable income to pacify discontent. The Russian budget is designed with a market price of $70/barrel in mind; I've seen numbers that suggest a fall to $30 in 2009 would create a budget deficit big enough to swallow up all of Russia's foreign-exchange reserves. Even with oil at $40-45, and a fundamentally uncompetitive industrial base, the Russian economy is screeching to a halt. People are already quite unhappy.

One of the things that the Kremlin has done is try to protect the car industry. The VAZ factory, one of the biggest integrated manufacturing facilities in the world, has only survived on lasting demand in the domestic market because of trade tariffs. Importing a three-year-old family hatchback into Russia will cost several thousand Euro just in excise fees. Anything older than seven years old is prohibitively expensive - and yet a VW Golf that's spent a decade trundling along the autobahns and villages of Westfalia is still immeasurably superior to a factory-fresh Lada.

Still, not everyone in Russia buys Russian cars. A number of assembly plants have opened inside the country, some - like the Ford factory - providing not only jobs but subcontracts to local parts suppliers, others simply attaching bumpers and seats to semi-knocked-down vehicles to satisfy a loophole. But there is another source of cars in Russia: Japanese imports.

Russia's a ridiculously big place, and a lot of it is quite remote, but probably the most isolated city is Vladivostok. Established largely as a base for imperial Russia's Pacific fleet, it is located in the southeastern corner of the country, closer to China, North Korea and Japan than any other significant Russian enclave. After the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of infrastructure, Vladivostok turned out to be of little interest to anyone out west. The population, some half a million people, survived through a single revenue stream. Vladivostok became the staging area for used Japanese cars, popular throughout Siberia, but as far as Moscow and St. Petersburg as well. Japanese tax laws mean that keeping cars past a certain age is more expensive than replacing them, so there is a steady stream of perfectly serviceable vehicles that need to be taken off the island. China and Korea have their own auto manufacturing industries, Australia is too far for shipping, but Vladivostok is right there - and a five-year-old Toyota that was a salaryman's pride and joy beats the hell out of a domestic deathtrap, even if the wheel is on the wrong side.

One way or the other, everyone in Vladivostok earns a living from the steady stream of cars being loaded onto freight trains and shipped westwards. So when new tariffs were announced, to be introduced from the beginning of 2009 and shutting down the nearly-new import business almost completely, the city would not have it. When Putin and Medvedev said they'd replace the Russian East's Nipponese fleet with discount Ladas, it was received as an insult.

People took to the streets. As a response, Moscow sent its crack troops: the Ministry of the Interior's own, personal SWAT team. On December 20th, after earlier protests, the people of Vladivostok assembled in a central square, around a Christmas tree, and sang carols. Understanding the rules of the game, they did not bring anti-government banners or bullhorns. As long as the crowd didn't get overtly hostile or political, the local law enforcement would not stop them; everyone in the city was equally worried.

Except the federal government could not tolerate any organization, any large mass of people standing up for their rights. On December 20th, the cops on scene were not locals, but OMON Zubr. This was Moscow SWAT, the same group used to guard international summits and crack the skulls of marching skinheads.

When, shortly after the Bronze Soldier riots in Tallinn, the Kremlin roughly shut down opposition protests in its big cities, it was an ironic contrast to their accusations against Estonia. But I said back then that we should not be complaining too loudly about the treatment of the Marches of the Dissenters, as they were called; most of the people involved were decidedly unpleasant characters, with whom we emphatically did not need to align ourselves. The actions of the federal police at that point showed simply that Russia had no moral right to complain about anyone else; they were no better.

But the protesters in Vladivostok were not neonazis or anarchist radicals, nor even people with a deep-seated hate of the Putin administration. These were apolitical folks, enraged not by propaganda, but by a howlingly terrible decision that would rob them of their livelihood. It wasn't even the result of incompetence or mismanagement, nor the loss of windfall oil profits, that was going to do them in, but a conscious decision by the ruling clique to protect a rotten industry that is spewing inferior product, which nobody in their right mind would buy, given a choice. The people of Vladivostok had every right to take to the streets; and the central government's reaction proved that they aren't just no better than us - they are, self-evidently, far, far worse.



----
Photo source, video source. Bonus story: the moderator of Russian LiveJournal's biggest car community apparently was contacted by the FSB and asked nicely to delete any posts about the import tariff protests.

Pale of Settlement

A while ago, back when I first met Justin and Jens-Olaf, we discussed (among other things) the Jewish population of Estonia's first Republic. While it is a historical fact that Estonia was the first country under Nazi occupation to have been declared "judenfrei", it's often overlooked that the Estonian Jewish congregation was far smaller than that in either Latvia and Lithuania. When the Germans arrived, they found less than a thousand Jews - compared to tens of thousands in Latvia and significantly more in Lithuania. Of course, many Jews had fled, but the truth is that there weren't that many here to begin with. I didn't have a clear idea of why exactly that was, but my guess was that the proximity of the Russian imperial capital - St. Petersburg - meant that Estonia would not have been included in the territory where Jews were allowed to settle.

This seems to be confirmed by the catalogue of the Estonian Jewish Museum, pointed out by the guy who used to run Estonia in World Media. You can find the catalogue itself here, and in the short overview of the history of Jews in Estonia, it mentions:

13.06.1794
Pale of Settlement - the region of Imperial Russia, along its western border, in which Jews were allowed permanent residency. Estonia (Estonia and Livonia) were outside the Pale of Settlement.
1828
Decree issued by Nicolas I ordering forced conscription of Jews. All Jewish children over the age of 12 were ordered into military service (became Cantonists). One of the three garrison (military) schools was in Tallinn.
1856-1867
Certain Jews, e.g., First Guild Merchants, long time tradesmen, people with higher education, discharged soldiers (Nicolas soldiers) and their family members and descendants were given the right to live outside the Pale of Settlement. As a result, the Jewish population in Estonia rose sharply.

So, as I'd suspected, Jews only began to settle in Estonia in any significant numbers in the middle of the 19th century. Mind you, they seemed to make themselves welcome: almost two hundred Jewish men had fought in the Estonian army during the War of Independence, and after the country was secured, Jews were one of the national minorities to be granted cultural autonomy.

Estland points out this quote from the catalogue:

“Estonia is the only East European country where Jews are not discriminated either on the government level or in the every-day life. …The cultural autonomy is in full force and gives the Jews lead free and dignified life, according to their national and cultural principles.” („The Jewish Chronicles“, London, 1936)