Living in a Multilingual World - Internationalization for Web 2.0

posted 04:03PM Nov 08, 2007 with tags berlin internationalization mindquarry opensource presentation tips translation web20 web20expo by Lars Trieloff

To my suprise I found out that someone posted my presentation slides on slideshare.net before I actually held the presentation. I usually post my slides only after the presentation to update them to reflect questions that came up in the Q&A part of the session, but at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin things seem to work a little bit differently.

The presentation went very well and we had a very interesting discussion at the end, so I would guess the awareness of the importance of internationalization in Web 2.0 is rising. One of the most interesting aspects brought up was: Is providing textual translations of a web application enough?. My take on this question is that providing a multi-language user-interface is only the first step in true internationalization, afterwards you have to go for localized content, design and business processes that respects the culture of your audience.

Finally, my slides are available at slideshare.net and an online version can be seen here (If you see nothing, it might have been filtered by your feed reader, so open this page in your browser.):

If you are at my presentation, please make sure to give feedback at feedback.berlin.web20expo.com. Thank you.

Web Montag in Berlin Today

posted 04:11PM Jul 16, 2007 with tags berlin mindquarry webmontag webmontag20070716 wevent:event=533 by Lars Trieloff

I will present Mindquarry at Web Montag in Berlin. Just in case you want to meet me or get a live demonstration of Mindquarry. This evening there will be an opportunity.

Webmontag in Berlin (05-22-06)

posted 01:35PM May 23, 2006 with tags berlin blogs collaboration microformats semanticweb ting webmontag wiki by Lars Trieloff

I've attended yesterday's Webmontag in Berlin. It was quite interesting, but the interesting parts were not the ones I expected:

Ting and Gobby

Mattis Manzel talked about Ting. A ting is a collaborative editing session that is supported by three tools: A collaborative editor like Gobby, a Voice-over-IP client like Skype or Teamspeak (Mattis said Teamspeak's push-to-talk-feature makes it the best program for tings because it does not distract from writing and disciplines the users) and an extension of MediaWiki that will save the exported document (The extension seems to be Mutante/MoonEdit and was originally designed for the proprietary MoonEdit).

The main idea is that a bunch of people meets at a specified time at a certain server and launces their collaborative editors. The appointment for time and server will be made using a wiki page. People start writing and discussing what they are writing by embedding comments into the document and using the VoIP tool. After completion of the ting, which might take from 30 minutes to five hours, the created document is copied into the talk page of the wiki.

From my point of view, collaborative editing is an extremely intesting topic and I see many connections to Wiki software, but I am not sure how the Ting concept could be used for more than geek entertainment.

Structured Blogging

The part was the unexpectedly interesting part. Baju Bitter introduced Structured Blogging, which I head about before, but have seen it as just another way to make blogging even more complicated. After hearing Baju's talk, I've changed my opinion. The basic idea of structured blogging is to define data types for blog entries. For example an weblog entry can be a review of a book or a movie, it can be the announcement of an event and many more. The structured blogging initiative provides a definition of blog entry types and relies on the popular microformats concept which embeds machine-readable data into HTML by using CSS class definitions. Furthermore it provides plugins for two weblog tools that make creating structured weblog entries easier by providing editors that are suited at certain blog entry data types.

Most interesting part of this concept is that there are already aggregators that are utilizing these structured blogging contents.

  • edgeio finds listings of things you would like to sell in blog entries, think of it as a decentralized ebay (which would need Rapleaf integration, of course)
  • incredibooks is a list of book reviews by children and teenagers.

If you are capable of reading german, you should further check out Baju's collection of links, his weblog entry on this Webmontag and the german structured blogging website and forum he maintains.

Readers Edition

Finally Peter Schink of Die Netzzeitung showcased a new Cititzen's Journalism project: Readers Edition which will go live soon. Nothing new, but nice webdesign.

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