Automated translation services seem to be getting more and more traction these days. Today, we saw announcements about new translation related products from both Microsoft and telephony service JahJah. Microsoft announced that it will be giving its users a free update that will integrate Windows Live Translator into MS Office 2003 and 2007, while JaJah is now offering free voice translations from Mandarin into English through JaJah Babel.
While JaJah doesn't specifically pitch this new service in the context of the Olympics, it is obviously releasing this just in time for the opening ceremonies.
Microsoft Office
Out of the two announcements, Microsoft's is probably the least exciting, but, on the other hand, there is a good chance that it will see a lot more actual use than JaJah's voice translation. The Microsoft Research Machine Translation team has just released this update to MS Office 2003 and 2007 to the Office team for integration, but they already offer instructions on their blog for setting this up yourself without having to wait for the official update.
The integration with Windows Live Translator allows you to translate English texts into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, German, Italian, Arabic, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish, as well as vice versa. We have tested the Windows Live Translator and the translations were generally about as accurate as you would expect from machine translations. There are various mistakes and words it doesn't recognize, but overall, the translation is relatively readable and gives you at least some impression of the original text.
JaJah Babel
JaJah Babel is clearly the sexier product of the two. You can call access numbers in the U.S., England, or Australia, and after a voice prompt, you simply speak the text you want to be translated into Mandarin. The service will then replay your message, you acknowledge the accuracy of the input, and after a short delay, you will hear the translation. Given our general lack of knowledge when it comes to Mandarin here, we can't vouch for the accuracy of the translation, but the service itself worked very well and seemed to understand at least our initial input accurately.
If you are in China, of course, the fact that you have to call an international number to get this to work is a bit of a limitation.
Other Translation Services
There seems to be quite an interest in working on consumer oriented translation services right now. Just yesterday, we wrote about Mloovi, which translates RSS feeds trough Google Translate, and earlier last month, we wrote about the collaborative dictionary and translation service Lingro.
Babel Fish
JaJah's product is especially interesting here because it takes speech as its input and it will get even more interesting once it works for other languages beyond Mandarin as well. JaJah is offering this service based on IBM's technology, and given IBM's expertise in doing voice-to-voice translation, it will probably only be a matter of time before we see support for more languages. Besides other projects, IBM already supports the U.S. Army with an English to Iraqi Arabic translation service.
There has always been a lot of hype around the possibilities of instant voice translations, but very few products were ever good enough to make it in the consumer/business market. JaJah represents a major step forward here, even if its voice prompts make the service a bit less frictionless than the science-fiction ideal if autmated, instant translation.
Personal recommendations of targeted content are something almost every publisher would like to offer their site visitors. It's hard though, to know who those visitors are and what they really like. That task just got easier today with the release of a WordPress plug-in called "Just for You," built by the team at Yahoo's MyBlogLog.
MyBlogLog has more personal information about millions of blog readers than any other system we know, it's ripe for offering this kind of service and we're excited to see it come to fruition.
How It Works
Just for You is on one level a pretty simple service. When a MyBlogLog visitor visits a site with the plug-in running, the system looks at the tags that user provided for their interests when they created their MyBlogLog account. It then finds blog posts with the same categories or tags and serves them up in a widget.
Right: MyBlogLog's Ian Kennedy is using the plug-in on his blog and it knows I like RSS. Oh yes I do.
The most interesting part, though, is it recommends posts with different but similar tags as well. "The weighting for a user's interests ranges from 10, a direct match between your posts' tags/categories and their MyBlogLog tags to 1, a loose coupling," the MyBlogLog team says. The company wouldn't tell us how exactly it does this analysis, but the algorithm was built by two members of the Yahoo! Bangalore team, Mani Kumar and Saurabh Sahni. It's very cool.
When non-MyBlogLog visitors come to your site, they will be shown recommendations based on tags from the most recent MyBlogLog users who have been there. That sounds like a good solution.
We asked the MyBlogLog team if they were going to offer further recommendations based on tags found in other accounts users have associated with their MyBlogLog profile, like Delicious or Last.fm. They said they had some top secret magic in the works for that. We'd also love to see a plug-in for other blogging platforms, like MovableType for us here at RWW.
MyBlogLog - an Incredibly Important API
MyBlogLog is a fascinating service. People expose an incredible amount of personal information about themselves in exchange for being able to see the faces of people who read their blogs. It's big outside of tech circles, too.
When the service launched its API in January, we said it was going to be a big deal. When Yahoo's Kent Brewster built the BlogJuice widget, we found functionality that we continue to use almost every day here at ReadWriteWeb. Why, we wonder, are all the coolest things built on the MyBlogLog API being built in house at Yahoo! and not by other members of the development community at large? The company says they don't know, if developers have thoughts we'd love to hear them.
Just For You is a great example of what this API can do. There are countless companies that have raised millions in venture capital to offer publishers recommendation systems for their readers - commercial publishers pay big money for this functionality. Now bloggers can have the same type of thing for free and base recommendations on the self-identified interests of their readers. That's really powerful.
We continue to be impressed by what this team is able to do with user data. This is just the kind of thing that gets us really excited about the web.
We first wrote about the mainstream RSS reader and blog directory Regator in early July. At that time, Regator was still in private testing, but today, it has opened up its doors for a public beta release. Since we first covered Regator, the developers have made some important changes to their service, including the ability to upload OPML files. Even with this feature, though, Regator still remains a highly curated service, where every new entry in its blog directory has to be approved by the editors.
Regator is a very well designed RSS reader and blog directory. Every blog listed on Regator has been categorized and approved by the editors, which has allowed them to create a very extensive catalog of high quality blogs and news sites. As we pointed out in our initial review, Regator does an especially good job at handling posts with embedded media files. The layout of the site is very distinct from other RSS readers like Google Reader, Bloglines, or Newsgator. In some ways, with the focus on categories and comments, Regator almost looks more like a blog than an RSS reader.
Bring Your Own OPML
One of our main issues we had with the earlier incarnation of Regator was that you couldn't import your own OPML files, which seemed to restrict it quite a bit as an RSS reader for more advanced users. While Regator now allows you to upload your own OPML files, your imported feeds will only be visible to you because of Regator's approach of personally vetting all feeds shown on the site. At the same time, Regator will look at every imported feed and consider them for inclusion in the general index, which turns uploading your OPML file into a recommendation mechanism.
New Features
Also new in this release is the ability to share post via Twitter, Facebook, and email. Besides this, Regator spent a lot of time polishing and tweaking the service, as well as adding a few minor features. For the near future, Regator is also expecting to give its users a unique page for shared posts akin to Google's Shared Items pages.
What About Advanced Users?
In our earlier review, we said that Regator was a great resource for mainstream users and maybe even a good introduction to RSS in general. With the ability to upload custom OPML files and the soon to be released Shared Items pages, Regator is now closer to being worth a second look for more advanced users as well. What does hold it back for power users, though, is still the fact that it only displays summaries of articles and doesn't display any images in those summaries. There are good reasons for that, including the fact that the folks at Regator want to give traffic back to those who write the content, but it does make the site just a bit less useful in comparison to a regular RSS reader.
On Monday, Facebook released a sample site that demonstrates how Facebook Connect (previous coverage), their new authentication methodology for logging into third-party web sites, will work. On the demo site, instead of registering for an account, you're presented with an option to use Facebook Connect instead. The Facebook team built the site so developers interested in using this technology could see how it works. The source code was provided as well.
The sample site is called The Run Around and it's just a simple site that lets runners log their runs and chart progress on their workout routines. From the homepage, you're presented with two options: on the left, you can login with a username and password and on the right, you can click the Facebook Connect button.
Of course, before you can login, you have to register. When you click the link to register, you have the option of filling out the fields to provide your username, password, name, etc. Alternatively, you have the option of clicking Facebook Connect.
When you do so, a dialog box appears and all you need to do is click the "Connect" button to authenticate with the site (assuming you're already logged in). Note there's also a checkbox that you can leave checked (the default) or uncheck. It reads: "Let this application publish one line stories without my approval."
Click the button and you're in.
Once you're logged in, you'll see that your Facebook friends already using the site will already have been added for you. Although you know that's one of the main purposes of this technology, it's pretty amazing to think that at last, the tedious process of finding and adding friends will finally be over.
You'll Never Have To Add Friends Again - You Just Have To Add Them To Facebook
Let's assume for a minute that Facebook Connect really takes off and is available on every social web site you can think of. If that's the case, then the only way to really make that friend graph of yours portable and easy to use is to add all of those friends to Facebook...does anyone have a problem with that?
Not long ago, Facebook established itself as a place to share your personal activities on the web. Here, people share family photos, videos from social gatherings, and post personal comments on each other's walls. Facebook, at least back in the beginning, was a social hangout - not some place where you would want to "friend" all of your colleagues, or heaven forbid, your boss. In fact, people using Facebook tended to use it for personal - as in "real life" - friendships only. Not a place where they friended everyone under the sun. (That was MySpace, if you'll recall.)
But on the new social web, nothing is really private anymore. People are lifestreaming their every action and friending complete strangers on sites like Twitter and FriendFeed solely because they share the same interests. If those relationships are valuable enough to you that you want them to be portable, then you'll need to start friending everyone on Facebook, too. Since that's the case, it looks like you might want to dig into those privacy settings after all.
One academic warns that it might and says we need to pay attention to it.
As machines learn to understand what the web means, what perspective will they understand it from? Who is teaching them? "Objective" descriptions of the world and the relationships in it can cause real problems, particularly for people with little power in those relationships. How will the emerging Semantic Web understand relationships and what will that mean for us as human users?
Austrian researcher Corinna Bath argues that there is a real risk that the semantic web of the future will be built with the perspectives and assumptions of male computer scientists baked-in unconsciously - at the expense of everyone else.
Background
Corinna Bath is currently research fellow at the "Institute for Advanced Studies on Science, Technology and Society" in Graz, Austria. She's now working on engaging the several decades old study of gender and technology with the emerging world of the semantic web.
What is the semantic web? We define it as a paradigm that makes the meaning of particular web pages understandable by machines - not just in full text searches or keyword categories, but in terms of which concepts are central to a given page and the relationships between them.
The semantic web is hot. World Wide Web founding father and W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee says all the pieces are now in place for a semantic web to emerge.
So is it a boy or a girl?
When You Assume, You Make an...
Corinna Bath did an interview last week for the Austrian Semantic Web Company where she articulates her concerns about gender and the semantic web. Unfortunately, the interview is extremely academic in language and tone - so we'll try to explain her arguments here.
Her first argument is that the architects of the semantic web need to be very careful about the assumptions they carry into the creation of categories of relationships. Bath draws a historical parallel with the first phone books, where listings were organized by the names of the husband in each household. That appeared to the authors to be the logical way to do it at the time. It wasn't until after years of feminist political organizing led to general cultural change that the phone books changed. Why is this important? Because systems like the phone book help color our view of the world we live in and are the building blocks of basic inequalities.
Too often, Bath argues, "binary assumptions about women and men are not reflected [upon] or the (gender) politics of [a particular] domain is ignored. Thus, the existing structural-symbolic gender order is inscribed into computational artifacts and will be reproduced by [their] use."
Right: The Semantic Web made me grow this beard. Semantic web t-shirt via SpreadShirt.
For example, the Dublin Core ontology concerns Documents. It consists of a list of elements that can be used to describe a document, including "creator," "contributor," and "isReferencedBy." Are there types of relationships that aren't included on the list but are important to an accurate understanding of a document? There probably are, and different perspectives could help articulate what those relationships might be.
For example, some feminist critics argue that the Western cannon of almost every type of literature is full of work that men didn't give women appropriate credit for. Some argue that Albert Einstein's wife deserves substantial credit for his theory of relativity - should that be included in semantic markup wherever the book is cataloged? How should that relationship be described? Calling her a contributor would be controversial and wouldn't really capture the history - a new category may be needed.
There are no shortage of ways to describe documents, events, people or concepts. The roster of people who will participate in the creation of a standard way to describe them will become increasingly important as machine learning becomes more important in our every day lives. Failing to take this seriously, Bath argues, could lead to the silencing of "minority views, quieter voices, and allows the dominant voice to speak for everyone, which seems highly problematic."
Is Categorization Itself The Right Solution?
The semantic web today is based largely on what are called "triples" - sets of subject, predicate and object. For example Marshall Kirkpatrick [subject], loves [predicate] Punkin' the Tabby Kitten [object]. (Hypothetical, I don't have any kittens and please don't send me any.)
This way of describing things isn't beyond question, however. As Bath argues:
Even the modeling concepts themselves should be questioned as Cecile Crutzen suggest, since e.g. the class concept and the inheritance concept lack to represent social processes, because of limited formal expressiveness for conflict, change and fluidity. Such an ontology abstracts from human sociality, situated action and real meaning construction processes.
In other words life aint so simple: people change, conflicts and context matter and things in this world don't just get their meaning by one object bumping into another, one event leading to another, child inheriting traits from a parent, etc.
Computer logic may necessitate simplification of some of life's richness - but this is nothing to take lightly. We're talking about helping computers understand meaning and that is not a simple or trivial matter.
Is Knowledge Only The Absence of Doubt?
Bath calls into question "computer science modeling that rests on the Cartesian epistemology," or the belief that way we know that we really "know" something is by having no doubt about it.
If our semantic markup reading robot finds markup asserting that a certain relationship exists and does not find any markup asserting that it does not exist - ought we conclude that we've determined the truth of the matter? Particularly if not all perspectives on the matter have been taken into consideration in even formulating how the situation is described, then an assertion that a particular object has a certain property or two subjects have a particular relationship may be woefully inaccurate in describing reality. There are a lot of things people disagree about and there's a lot of knowledge that people deny for political convenience. The absence of doubt is not sufficient basis for determination of truth. Repeated attempts to disprove a theory make a much better basis for working knowledge.
Or, as political blogger Karoli Kuns said to NPR's Andy Carvin this morning when Carvin asserted otherwise, "I'd argue that tag dissent balances folksonomies, not undermines."
Let's talk about "working knowledge" and stop whispering about "truth", before the robot children hear us.
Philosophy Aside, What Does This Mean?
It means that as the language we use to communicate meaning to machines develops, we'd better watch out who is building it and what perspectives they take into consideration. Unconsidered assumptions could lead to a real disconnect between the meaning that machines know of the world and they way that millions of other people experience it.
Bath isn't suggesting that the semantic web should be rejected, quite the opposite in fact. "I am convinced," she says, "that the perspectives I tried to sketch here can contribute to build better semantic systems or even prevent them from failure in function or on the marketplace."
She has her own explanation why this is important: "With the use of the Internet we are already witnessing a radical change in practices of how knowledge is represented, stored and spread. In the future most of our work and life will involve the manipulation and use of information. It will crucially depend on the epistemologies, concepts and leading metaphors of the Semantic Web, which direction the semantic "human-machine reconfigurations" (Lucy Suchman) will take."
That's a nice way to say that we need to work hard to avoid creating fascist robots that exercise a homogenizing influence on diverse human experiences. There are people who are doing semantic web work in directions that take this into account, but it's something worth considering for all of us.
Disclosure: The author has consulting relationships with a number of pre-launched semantic web companies.
You can do a lot with new software if you tell it a little bit about yourself - but who wants to give the new kid on the block the password to their most important communication tools?
Unfortunately that's what we're asked to do with a lot of new applications these days. It doesn't have to be that way, though.
Standards based user authentication protocols, and one called OAuth in particular, allow applications to send you back to home base with a request for permission to access your data - whether that's your email contacts, your Twitter account or other information. Today we learned that Firefox is probably going to implement OAuth inside the browser itself and Twitter is getting ready to implement it for sure. That's very good news.
Senior Software Engineer at Twitter Britt Selvitelle said today in a conversation for developers working with Firefox that Twitter "will be using OAuth as our primary form of token auth."
That's fantastic news for a few reasons. Twitter is a very important communication tool for many people, the service's Application Programming Interface (API) has allowed a huge ecosystem of interfaces and applications to flourish around it...and yet today all of those 3rd party apps have to ask for your Twitter password in order for you to use them. It's been an awful lot of risk for users to take and we're really surprised that no one has yet ripped Twitter passwords from unsuspecting users and then unleashed a wave of valid looking spam.
Finally, it appears, Twitter will soon implement a secure way for you to give 3rd parties access to parts of your account without giving them a copy of the key to walk in the front door any time they like.
Firefox
The conversation today took place in the context of a question from Matthew "lilmatt" Willis, a Flock employee and longtime contributor to Mozilla. Willis wants to know if the Firefox developer community would like OAuth built into Firefox and if so how. He points out that much of the work has already been done, if not multiple times.
We're not entirely sure what this would look like, but we are intrigued. Browser-based authentication for data mashups sounds great. Browser plug-ins that securely access your various accounts without asking you for your passwords sound great too.
As of this afternoon there's a developer preview of a browser-based OpenID implementation for Firefox (thanks Vidoop!) so we hope that an OAuth implementation for Firefox could be a complimentary project.
The Big Picture
Google adopted OAuth for all the Google Data APIs this summer, so there's really no reason why 3rd party apps should ask you for any Google passwords ever again.
This is all very good news for everyone. Secure user authentication equals greater user trust, which equals developer access to more user data. More developer access to user data equals more innovation. More innovation makes us happy (we love this stuff) and, co-incidentally, leads to more user data. Data portability is good for everyone. Bring it on, Twitter and Firefox!
RWW Readers, Please Check The Bottom of This Post For Invite Info!
Do you hate calling customer service at a large company? It's safe to say we all do. Nearly every large corporation today utilizes phone menus to route your call to the correct department and it's nearly impossible to get a real person on the phone. Wouldn't it be great if there was a web app that did the calling for you and then rang you back when they reached the right spot in the phone menu? That would be a truly useful service, wouldn't it?
Introducing Fonolo
Now there's an app that will do the deep dialing for you. It's called Fonolo and it's dead-simple to use. To get started, you first find the company you want to call in the Fonolo directory and then click to display that company's phone menu. Instead of having to navigate the company's phone tree yourself, you just find the area or department you need to call and click the button that reads "call here."
Fonolo will then place the call and navigate the menu for you. When they reach the right spot, they'll call your phone and you'll be connected.
Although Fonolo's directory is nowhere near as extensive at the one at GetHuman.com, another popular site for getting a person on the phone, the big difference between the two sites is that Fonolo directs you to the area you want - which may or may not be speaking with a customer service agent. For example, you may just want to check an order status - there's really no need to speak to a person to do so - but people get frustrated with the menu so they just take the shortcut to customer service.
Unfortunately, after testing a few companies, it was easy to see why the company is still in private beta - the call quality was very poor. However, the company is aware of this and are working on this problem with their termination provider. The issue is due to the volume of calls - more than they expected, apparently. But if they can get that problem fixed, this will be an invaluable service.
The Developer Platform
The company has also just introduced a developer platform and API, which lets developers build applications that interact with the Deep Dialing service. Developers will be able to:
- Search Fonolo's directory of companies;
- Display the full text of the phone menu for a selected company;
- Initiate a Deep Dial process to any node in the phone menu;
- Route calls to any PSTN number or SIP address.
Developers can sign up at developer.fonolo.com.
A future API release will cover Fonolo's "Intelligent Call History" service, providing access to Deep Dial Bookmarks, call recordings and user notes. "We want users to access the power of these innovations through as many channels as possible, including mobile applications, soft-phone plug-ins and carrier integration," said Fonolo co-founder and CEO Shai Berger. "Today's announcement is the first step in making that possible."
Invites!
After the app leaves beta, there will be a few more features available, like the ability to bookmark individual spots in a phone tree and the ability to record your calls.
If you would like to take a sneak peek at Fonolo, which is still in private beta, let us know by leaving a comment. We have 100 invites to distribute to our readers. Remember OpenID users, your comment won't display your email address, so please leave it in your comment itself.
We just got word of an interesting new microblogging service: Rejaw. Rejaw is an interesting combination of microblogging with real-time chat. In some ways, it is similar to Plurk and Identi.ca, but its interface looks a lot more traditional and instead of just alerting you to updates, it pushes them directly onto your screen in real-time. On the client side, Rejaw is taking the unusual route of releasing a Mac client first. A Windows version should follow in the very near future and the team is also planning to release an iPhone app.
Rejaw puts a number of very nifty twists on the microblogging genre. In testing out the service, the immediate updates to the discussions really added a different level of interactivity to the experience. And while most other micro-blogging services put a strong emphasis on keeping messages extremely short, Rejaw allows its users to write up to 1000 characters per message.
Shouts and Whispers
Rejaw differentiates between sending out 'shouts,' which go out to all of your followers as well as the public timeline, and 'whispers,' which are direct and private messages.
To find your friends, Rejaw can look at your Facebook and Google Mail profile, or you can search by name.At the bottom of the page, you can always see if there are any new 'shouts' or 'whispers' and clicking on those links will take you directly to the appropriate pages.
As is to be expected, every conversation on Rejaw also gets its own permalink and Rejaw also provides RSS feeds for all conversations.
Payloads
One very cool aspect of Rejaw is that you can just post links to images (we tested this with jpg and png files), YouTube and Google videos, as well as mp3 and flv files into your posts and they will immediately appear in a mediaplayer in your timeline. The team behind Rejaw is also responsible for Lingr, which uses the same technology at the back-end.
API
Right from the start, Rejaw offers an API to developers who want to integrate the service into their own tools.
Verdict
So how does Rejaw stack up against Twitter and its brethren? In trying out the service for a while this morning, we really enjoyed the immediate interaction with others on the site. We only noticed one minor bug with regards to deleting already posted messages on the site, but otherwise, the service feels extremely well thought out already and we didn't experience any other issues in our tests. We especially liked how easy it was to embed videos, pictures, and audio into the posts and comments.
If you would like to add me to your friends on Rejaw, you can find my profile here.
Mloovi is a new app that runs any RSS feed through Google Translate. This may not be perfect, but there's is a clear need for such a service so we're pretty excited about it.
Created by the makers of language learning service LearnLists, Mloovi is free with ads and offers premium accounts. The company credits TechCrunch UK's Mike Butcher with the inspiration, and Butcher's blog is where we discovered the service.
Limitations
Let's be up front about limitations of the service: it strips images and formatting, the translations don't read super well, there's no analytics ala Feedburner, etc.
All of that said, we can now see with relative ease what's on the front page of Spanish Digg-type site Méname, so we're happy! When we find something that looks interesting, we'll read the translation, then perhaps try to find English language coverage of the same subject or just be happy to have some information even if it's a little Google-funky.
Read RWW in Spanish, Chinese, Etc.
Want to read (or scan) ReadWriteWeb in Spanish?
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Readwriteweb-inglsToEspaol
How about in Chinese?
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Readwriteweb-ChineseTranslation
We ran the Mloovi-created feeds through FeedBurner so that we could get some idea how much interest there is in reading our content in the languages above.
Are these translations of sufficient quality to be of interest to readers? Let us know what you think in the poll above. RSS readers can click here to visit this post and participate in the poll or see results.
Other Translation Tools
We love our international readers and anyone who takes the time to read RWW in a language other than their native one. As such we try to pay particular attention to tools that facilitate text translation. If these tools are of interest to you too, see also our coverage of Lingro - the on the fly Creative Commons translation dictionary - and DotSub, the collaborative video translation service that results in projects like the one below. Three cheers for the global change made possible by new tools on the web!
Google has just announced that it will sell its Performics search marketing business to Paris-based Publicis Groupe. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of 2008. Google acquired Performics when it bought DoubleClick and after this deal closed in March, Google had already announced that it was going to split up Performics into a search marketing and an affiliate marketing division. Google rebranded the Performics affiliate marketing business in June, but hadn't announced any plans for the search marketing business until now.
Publicis Groupe is one of the world's largest advertising holding companies and is headquartered in Paris. Its portfolio ranges from traditional television, magazine, cinema, and radio advertising, to a number of agencies focused on Internet marketing. According to Google, this makes Publicis an ideal buyer for Performics.
Google obviously does not want to be in the search engine marketing business. This would create a constant conflict of interest inside Google and the company would hardly be able to keep up any appearance of objectivity.
As we reported in June, Google already rebranded the affiliate network side of Performics as the Google Affiliat