All posts by Jim Muttram

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Translations which are good enough

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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!

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Writing for both audiences

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I was interested in this great post from Yelvington which describes the two things necessary to cater for the twin newspaper audiences – the loyal regular reader and the ocassional visitor, maybe brought in by the search engine.
The answer, says Yelvington, is the beat blog and the topic page. I was particularly taken with the handbook-like details he gives to help the receptive to improve. Worth a read.


[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

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Twitter the platform

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The innovations around Twitter just keep on coming, proving, if nothing else, that an open platform is the best spur to innovation there is.

Yesterday I noticed a couple of posts like this one which point to a simple discussion thread created by an application called Tiny Thread. It’s a simple but powerful add-on to the Twitter platform.

Meanwhile, the energetic Dave Winer posted about his mash-up with Disqus which allow you to start a discussion from a single thread.

And yesterday I also read about the latest iPhone app to take advantage of the open Twitter APIs, Twuner, which will read you your tweets on your iPhone.

Twitter may be struggling for a business model, but it is a beacon for innovation in the tech space second to none at the moment. Keep your fingers crossed they remain independent.

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Microsoft woes

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I wonder whether the news that Microsoft, still the world’s largest software company, posted profits down 29% in the second quarter may turn out to be a very significant turning point?

Microsoft has in the past been a shining example of the law of increasing returns where everything they produce pushes more developers to develop for their platform and therefore more people buy their software, and so on, and so on.

But now there are credible alternative platforms growing at speed: particularly Google in search, advertising, cloud based productivity apps, and now mobile; and a resurgent Apple in the desktop and especially the mobile space.

It could be that the relentless upgrade cycle which drove the company’s profits for so many years is finally faltering, as corporates delayed the upgrade to Vista because of the well-publicised woes of the platform, and enough alternatives have arrived on the scene to at least cause a review of IT strategy.

Of course it is far too early to call the end of Microsoft’s growth, but the earnings dip is surely a sign of more trouble to come.  

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The new community site foundations?

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I attended and very stimulating meeting yesterday morning with the Flightglobal team discussing the future of navigation on the site. It’s a hard topic, and nobody has all the answers anywhere, partly because web publishing is still an evolving medium. However, a lot of progress was made and some general principles agreed which I’m sure will make a huge improvement to the site in time.

One of the ideas discussed was that at the core of the site would be a wiki-like resource which allowed for a basic inventory of (in this case) aircraft, to which much of the site’s content would link. This made me start thinking that probably this should be at the heart of all good community sites – although what information is collected will obviously vary from industry to industry: it could be buildings, chemicals, people, companies, or just about any collection of “things” that makes a particular industry tick. And in some there could be more than one core information base required.

Up to now this has tended to be the “job” of the site managers, building key content landing pages for the most important “things” in a market – usually driven by the need for more search engine reach.

However, I think the key will be to open up this process to the audience and to encourage the collaborative building of the ultimate resource for the particular industry.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be a role for the journalists and site managers. For one thing they will need to seed this enterprise and keep in on the straight and narrow as it grows (hopefully helped by an army of industry super-user volunteers).

But the other key role will be in the building of topic wiki pages which will become the other core foundation of the community site of the future: this is the “story so far” wiki page curated by journalists, but open to contribution by all, as described by Jeff Jarvis. The idea is that stories evolve over time and the old fashioned “story” approach does not reflect the realities of the new web.

With these as it’s root, a community site should be well on its way to defining and reflecting its community – provided it continues to do all the others things well.

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Elsevier’s experimental articles

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Elsevier has announced an experimental project to design the scientific “article of the future”. There are currently two prototypes which our sister company is inviting comment on from the scientific community here and here and from my standpoint these look like pretty good attempts to update the scientific article formula. I particularly like the way that each of the constituent parts of the article – abstract, text, results, figures, references, authors etc, are given their own tabs and treatment relevant to their particular information needs – the analysis of the references struck me as a particularly useful fusion.

However, not everyone has so far been overly impressed with the efforts. Paul Carville, writing on the Online Journalism Blog, is particularly underwhelmed. He has a detailed critique which looks at things such as design, information architecture and innovation, and he is less that glowing:

I think this area of publishing is indeed long overdue a complete overhaul of its staid online publishing practices, and any move to define a new specification for doing so should be welcomed. Even the otherwise impressive nature.com only goes so far in its presentation of research papers, and there is much room for improvement. But when the result is as underwhelming, cumbersome and shortsighted as this, I despair.

As Paul says the reinvention of the scientific article is long overdue, so I look forward to seeing what else emerges in the coming months.

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Is Google turning into Microsoft?

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Great, thoughtful post from Anil Dash, VP of Six Apart, asking whether Google is having a “Microsoft moment”. He defines it like this:

This is the point when the difference between their internal conception of the company starts to diverge just a bit too far from the public perception of the company, and even starts to diverge from reality. At this inflection point, the reasons for doing new things at Google start to change.

Well worth a read.

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