I am starting a new series of posts called "microtrends", in which I am going to blog about the small forces behind tomorrow's big changes. Or not so big.

On Saturdays RTVi shows old Soviet movies which I enjoy a lot. By watching them one can learn Soviet mythology and see why it was so powerful -- because it was intermixed with the USSR troubled history, and real people's life, real heroism, real love.

Some of these movies are available for download (copyright issues aside), and they could promote a deeper understanding of what communism really was, but how is Western audience supposed to understand them if there are no subtitles? That's where .srt files come handy in all their glory.

It's a brilliant concept, if you think about it. .srt files are simple text files that contain subtitles, they work with .avi video files and they can be edited (I tried). Which means subtitles writing can now be a community effort, a-la Joel Spolsky's translation project.

I read somewhere that it takes about ten hours to translate a movie. So... Translators of the world, unite!