I was reading about the new feature called Scribe on the Blogger in Draft blog. This post is being written using this interesting auto-suggestion system. It takes some time to get used to reading the word forming ahead of the cursor – which you need to do if you are going to really take advantage of the functionality. And for touch-typists it is probably more of a hindrance than a help. But I can see it being quite useful if you find yourself lost for words.
One more example of the spurt of functionality coming from the Blogger team – see my last post on the iOS app.
Tag Archives: tools
Translations which are good enough
The current issue of Wired had a very thought-provoking article which argued that “good enough” was now a viable business model in many fields. The examples of technologies where consumers had apparently determined that what was on offer was good enough included Skype (patchy quality, but free), Flip video cameras (not brilliant quality and lacking in features, but dead simple) and netbooks (fairly low powered but small, convenient and with great battery life).
It has occurred to me lately that another technology which is rapidly approaching the “good enough” hurdle is online translation. I’ve been amazed recently that the language pair translation which Google offers now within Gmail is actually good enough to enable me to easily understand emails written in another language. Some language translations are better than others, and the syntax leaves something to be desired, but I really believe we’re nearly there.
This has be brought about by the mining of the internet to enhance machine translation. And crowdsourcing has now started to play its part: Facebook has just applied for a patent for its Digg-like crowdsourced translation system which enabled the very rapid translation of the site into multiple languages.
In my view we’ll now see an explosion of “good enough” translations of journalism which was hitherto limited to the country of origin. Better to have the gist than nothing at all. And the one thing you can rely on is that the quality will get better and better. Babelfish here we come!
Alexa Announcement
Alexa are changing their ranking methodology by adding in more sources. But as Ciaron points out, since they don’t tell us who their new sources are, we won’t know whether the new rankings will be any less error-prone than before.
Second chance with Second Life?
eWeek reports on experiments in a Japanese university where paralyzed people learn to control avatars in Second Life. Electrodes attached to the scalp can pick up electrical charges associated with brain activity and this can be interpreted by a computer to manipulate an online persona. eWeek suggests paralyzed people could one day be able to shop or do business or socialise just by thinking about it – in cyberspace.
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Google to store data?
CIO Insight reports that Google plans to launch a service to store users’ data quoting a report in the Wall Street Journal – the so-called Gdrive.
According to the story users would be able to house files they would normally store on personal computers—such as word-processing documents, digital music, video clips and images—on Google’s computers. Files could then been accessed through the Internet from different computers and mobile devices when users sign on using a password.
The report says Google plans to provide some free storage, with additional storage allotments available for a fee.
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Single point of failure
Steve Rubel points out on his Micro Persuasion blog an outage on TinyURL, a five-year-old service which offers small, easy to handle URLs which replace to long URLs full of ?s and so on. He points out the vulnerability this implies as more and more sites are using the service as a convenience to users. What happens when all those URLs stop working?
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