Dana's developing her language skills (Kilala.nl (Cailin Coilleach)) by Cailin Coilleach

Just this week I've noticed new changes in Dana's behaviour :) For starters we heard her very first real laughing this weekend. And I'm not talking about a moderate eheh-heh-he either. Nope! It started out with a few grins and smiles, but proceeded into honest-to-$DEITY laughing back and forth with Marli.

During a diaper change it also occurred to me that she's also added new letters to her vocab. There's l's, m's, b's and w's, and even an i or a u! So now she's capable of forming such coherent sentences as behh-ha-webrl meh ^_^

Posted in: baby , dana , development , language

? Let Google Reader Automatically Translate Feeds Into Your Language (Tiny Screenfuls (JoshB)) by Josh Bancroft

Official Google Reader Blog: Is Your Web Truly World-Wide?

Ever wanted to subscribe to a feed in a language other than one you understand, and have Google automatically machine translate it into your language? Now you can.

Of course, machine translation is usually terrible. I worked in software localization for a few years, where I learned first hand just how far out the idea of usable machine translation is. But hey, it’s better than nothing, and is a nice option for that Chinese or Russian blog you REALLY wish you could read.

I tried this out on the feeds for the Intel Software Network blog in Chinese and Russian, and it seems to work pretty well (as well as Google Translate ever does). Pretty slick.

Posted in: feeds , google , language , linky , localization , reader , translate

Counterpoint: The State of Search on the Kindle (Tiny Screenfuls (JoshB)) by Josh Bancroft

(Over on the Intel Software Network blog, software ninja Clay Breshears put up a post today about why he will “Never Own an Electronic Book”. Turns out his frustration stems from how hard it is to search for something, if you don’t know exactly what you’re searching for. This is a problem not just for ebooks and readers like the Kindle, but for the web and our text-oriented world in general.

I typed up a response to Clay in a comment, which I’m reproducing here, because I think it illustrates that things aren’t as bad as they seem, and not yet as good as they should be.)

Clay, you make a very good point, but it seems to be aimed at the effectiveness of search in general, rather than just on ebook readers (though they suffer in the same way). Just like prices can only come down, I hope that natural language search can only get better from here.

That said, as a rabid Kindle fan, the situation there might not be as bad as you fear.

When you search on a Kindle, it searches across all the books you have on the device (it indexes them during idle time while you’re reading, and new books show up in the index quickly). And here’s what the search results page looks like:

Image credit Robert Mohns via Flickr

It shows you how many results were found in each book, and by selecting that book, you can quickly skip back and forth between the hits.

Notice that there are also options to find results from the web, Wikipedia, the Kindle Store, and the built-in dictionary on the Kindle, if what you’re looking for isn’t in one of your books.

Search DOES need to get better, but I’m pretty happy with how well it works on the Kindle today. Come by next time you’re in the neighborhood, and I’ll give you a demo!

Posted in: amazon , blog , counterpoint , kindle , language , search

Perhaps The Most Ironic Post Title You'll Read All Day (Martin Gordon's Blog (cptncelchu)) by Martin

Nick Bradbury on blog post titles:

As people subscribe to more feeds, the more they stop reading every unread item and instead just skim the titles looking for something that interests them. If you use boring titles for your posts, skimmers like myself are likely to skip right over them.

Ever since I did my media fast experiment, my Google Reader unread count has floated somewhere between 875 and >1000. Since I switched to more selective reading, I use List View instead of Expanded View and post titles more than anything push me to actually read an item. Another thing to be careful about - titles that are too news-y. If your post title reads, "XYZ Corp Announces ABC", then you need to go back to the writing board, so to speak. For one, a title like that often sums up enough of the entire post to suffice. In addition, a post title like that screams "Press Release regurgitation" and suggests that more of the same basic information that I probably read before. In this case, even "Thoughts on XYZ's ABC Announcement" is slightly better because it signals that you put more thought into the post than simply picking original-sounding synonyms to cover up the fact that not much, if anything, was added.

Technorati Tags: blogs, blogging, titles, writing, traffic, attention

Posted in: blogs , language , news , thoughts