Comments on: Is there a world beyond delicious?

By: alex

alex — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 19:28:45 +0000

is there a world beyond here?

By: JW

JW — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 17:57:35 +0000

I wrote a review of six bookmarking services, including del.icio.us, Simpy, RawSugar and BlinkList, at my blog. You can read it at http://jw.clawz.com/blog/2006/02/13/the-alternatives-ii-bookmarking/.

By: Philipp Keller

Philipp Keller — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 07:33:44 +0000

igor: good to know! I found out that spurl is available in English, German, Spanish and Icelandic. Then on spurl you can even say that you just want to see bookmarks pointing to e.g. German and English sites (though I have no clue if that works and the site seems just to be down right now..)

By: igor

igor — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 07:06:45 +0000

scuttle is translated, have a look at the wiki.

By: Philipp Keller

Philipp Keller — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 07:11:35 +0000

Alex: I’m not really into attention.xml, but I guess attention.xml would have to contain at least some tag information. Somehow it must be extractable which tags I’m really interested in.
I can imagine the attention.xml not only coming from my feed reader but also from any bookmark service (delicious et. al.). Though I don’t know if that would be inside attention.xml spec.

Then the attention.xml would be parsed and probably a “top 20 tags” list would be built and compared with the “top tags” list of the different services.

The top matches would be presented to the user with an explanation why he should go to RawSugar or why he would best fit into Connotea.

Do you know Attention.xml? Would this thing be inside the specs?

By: Alex Barnett

Alex Barnett — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 06:24:07 +0000

The attention.xml bit sounds interesting…how would you see this working? What would you consider to enough data within the attention data set? What data types would you forsee it containing to make it useful?

Alex.

By: Bill Lazar

Bill Lazar — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 20:11:05 +0000

Otis: Color me impressed!

Patrice: I agree that I18N requires less resources when implemented in the code base from the start. Unfortunately that’s rarely the case. We have not written off doing this but for now we have to devote our resources to more important (in our perspective) tasks.

By: Otis Gospodnetic

Otis Gospodnetic — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 03:57:13 +0000

Philipp: nice overview. :)

Bill: never underestimate!

Patrice: I don’t know about narrow-minded Americans (Simpy was actually launched in Croatia, and had releases from China, Hong Kong, New York, San Francisco…), but I do know that Simpy has support for i18n. As a matter of fact, if you switch your browser to Croatian (HR), you will notice some portions of the UI translated to HRvatski (Croatian). So, in Simpy, it’s a matter of translation, not the matter of infrastructure and software to support it.

By: Patrice

Patrice — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 21:54:07 +0000

@Philipp: Yes, translations would definitely help acceptance. I have a few friends who don’t read English and thus don’t read my blog anymore. And of course here in Peru knowledge of English is even lower.

And because I want to teach a course on how to use tools like del.icio.us, Wikipedia, etc. to improve teaching, I’m currently looking for a Spanish del.icio.us.

By: Patrice

Patrice — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 21:51:55 +0000

Hi Bill

Thank you for responding to my comment. I wasn’t talking specifically about RawSuguar and not even specifically about tagging sites. It’s just that many sites never consider translation. And in my experience it’s often because of Americans who somehow often don’t realize the presence of people on that planet who do not speak English fluently enough.

It’s still my opinion that making the application translatable is not that big an effort – especially when planned from the beginning. Adding translation as an afterthought can be hard work, though.

The translation itself is a whole different topic. But look for example at how Google does it with their translation desk. That’s an innovative approach that spares them work and thus money but still gives them a very well translated site. Unfortunately this mainy seems to be used for google.com and not so much for other services (though Blogger is also translated quite well AFAIK).

And thus I conclude by saying that I disagree with your assertion that making a translation is difficult work. It may be a lot of work, yes. But not difficult. And when it’s done from the beginning it’s only very little work.

I’ve got (not too much but a little) experience with this BTW as here in Switzerland many applications are translated in more than just one of the three official languages.