As of May 14, 2008 Facebook is available in a variety of languages, not the least of which is Polish. I really appreciate how community-supported the whole translation process was:
More than 450 Polish-speaking users on Facebook chose to be part of the effort to translate the site from English to Polish. Users who added the Facebook translation application were allowed to submit translations inline while browsing the site. The community then approved all translations through a voting system.
My first thoughts are that the results of this translation are very natural and usable, even for a non-native speaker like myself. Congratulations to the team! The selection of terms for words like “poke” and “wall” feel right, much like they do in English.
Unfortunately, a some of my Greasemonkey scripts that depend on Facebook content stopped working, including a cool script that highlights todays birthdays. Facebook developers, including those making apps and scripts, are going to have to deal with internationalising (i18n) and localising their applications.
If you’re curious what it looks like, scroll to the very bottom of your Profile page or Newsfeed page (if you’re an American or Canadian user), and you’ll see a little link that says “English” with an arrow beside it. Click the arrow, and behold the available options: Norsk, Deutsch, Francais, and more.
Why not use English?
My cousin and I changed the language to Polish just for the novelty of it. So far, I have kept it the language setting simply because it’s a nice, daily way to interact with elements of my culture that I otherwise have little access to. Only after a few days use, Facebook in English feels a little less comfortable, and a little less interesting.
Introducing Flickr Search Tagging!
It’s a little utility that enables a couple of things:
- Let’s you to propose tags for images that don’t belong to you on Flickr. Contributing tags if you want to help describe the image is often not possible, unless: you’re the owner, you’re a contact of the owner, or the person has allowed very permissive tagging rights.
- Keeps your search queries around the tagging area. Queries are valuable, because you as a user took the time to contribute that text at some point. Now you can leverage that same text when you want to tag an image.
- Tag your images with the proposed tags, or delete the proposed tags.
If this sounds novel and useful, it is :) Or at least, that’s what I’m trying to prove in my thesis.
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Sometime around when I was 14 years old the World Wide Web showed up. and it seems that I have been developing with it ever since. So never, ever did I expect to be as lost on the Internet as I currently am: it feels like the one domain where I should be competent. With the help of an anonymous invite donor, I signed up for grono.net, a Polish social networking site akin to Facebook or MySpace. I thought the transition would be simple enough, and within an hour or so my profile would be set up and I’d be arguing about the merits of European hip-hop in no time. Boy, was I wrong.
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If you’re interested in the state of the art of large domain (internet) image search, then undoubtedly Google comes up over and over again.
Google Image Search, with its simple interface and reasonable results, is the de-facto consumer-grade image search engine. Offerings from competitors are actually a little more feature rich, especially the MSN Live Image Search, but don’t resonate as loudly in academia or popular usage.
As an example, compare search results for “red corvette” from the big three: Google, MSN, Yahoo. MSN nails the exploratory task: no-refresh scrolling, quick access to filters such as “photos”, “black and white”, and image size options that feel a little more usable and natural than Googles. Yahoo! attempts some categorising and support for ontologies in their interface; while not perfect, it’s a direction highly praised in cutting-edge research.
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It seems that the most interesting up-and-coming web applications go through a private, invitation-only beta phase before being launched to the public. This was certainly the case with Google Mail, the Yahoo! Mail do-over, and one service that I’m particularly interested in: grono.net. Unfortunately, none of my friends or relatives use that service, so getting an invitation isn’t likely.
There’s obviously a need here that needs to be filled: begging strangers for invitations to web beta’s. I’ve found a few places to share invitations, but by far the most beautiful and appealing is InviteShare.com. What a gorgeous, well-thought-out design.
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I’m trying to wrap my head around all of the information I’m reading about image search. Search, retrieval, information, data, all of these terms are loaded, and used differently depending on whether I’m reading an HCI paper, a text analysis paper, or a blog post about search engine optimisation (SEO).
In hopes of simplifying things, I’ve settled on a human-centred, conceptual definition of search:
Search refers to the process of a user developing a need, defining a query, retrieving information, viewing result(s), providing feedback, and refinements of those steps.
The end result does not have to be finding a single result. Occasionally, other steps in the search process, such as seeing a result set, can satisfy the users need. For example, if the need was to gain information (”What does a ‘87 Oldsmobile Toronado FE3 look like?”) rather than find a specific image (”I need a picture of a black ‘84 Cutty!”), viewing the result set may be enough.
Figure 1 is an illustrates the definition of search, in the human and interface context.
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After spending far too much time trying to get WP-Cache2 plugin to work on a very vanilla Wordpress installation, I’ve given up on it.
I’m sure it’s super amazing when it does work, but in my experience as a competent *nix user, it’s difficult to get working/debug (and silly to remove because of this stupid symbolic link that many FTP clients can’t remove).
1 Blog Cacher
Anywho, I started hunting for alternatives, and the one that I installed successfully (and confirmed working) on the first try is 1-Blog-Cacher.
Installation
The installation was NOT simple, at least not compared to WP-Cache. I followed these instructions:
- Create the cache directory /wp-cache/ in your WordPress directory (/wp-cache/) and make it writeable (chmod 777).
- Upload 1blogcacher2.0.php file to /wp-content/plugins/ WordPress directory (/wp-content/plugins/1blogcacher2.0.php).
- Upload advanced-cache.php file to /wp-content/ (/wp-content/advanced-cache.php).
- Add this line to the wp-config.php file (/wp-config.php): define(’WP_CACHE’, true);
- Activate the plugin and take a look to «Options > 1 Blog Cacher» in the WordPress panel.
… and there were helpful prompts in the Options panel if I forgot something. Changing the settings isn’t simple, as you have to open up the advanced-cache.php file with a text editor, and re-save/re-upload it when you want to make a change.
But anyways, it works.
The gentleman in this video, Dr. David Weinberger, thinks it’s a pretty terrible idea to try to categorise ideas in the same way we categorise physical things in the physical world.
Many people who deal with information on a regular basis tend to think that since you can only stack a chair in a single location, the virtual representation of that chair should be categorised in one place as well. It’s hard to explain why that’s a silly idea (and why it’s done often), but he does a very good job of doing just that.
He draws from a really neat reference: The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges, and compares Wikipedia to Borges’ theoretical, infinite library (that, naturally, drives its librarian mad). That bit is in the Q&A period at the very end.
Thanks to Gil P. for this one.
video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2159021324062223592
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