I'm SURE I read that headline somewhere else, but I can't for the life of me remember where. Anyway, this is a very cool Google service that Nora pointed me to. They've just launched in beta form what I think is their very coolest search tool yet: Google Translate. As they say in their offical blog, Now, you can search for something in your own language (for example, English) and search the web in another language (for example, French). Or Russian. Or Chinese. Or Arabic.
This is so cool! As the authors of this blog entry (there are 3 of 'em) also note, although the majority of Internet users out there are non English speakers, a majority of the content on the internet is still in English. We've been aware of this for some time at The COW, The numbers can shift quite a bit, but it's been a long time since we saw all English-language countries COMBINED equal more than about half of The COW's traffic. It's currently at about 54%, which is quite a remarkable testament to the "world" part of the COW's name.
Equally cool to me is how useful this is for English speakers who want to reach out a little. I mentioned Russian, Chinese and Arabic above, because those are the examples you can find at the actual Google Translate page.
Again quoting Google's blog, While machine translation is not perfect, it's usually good enough for you to obtain the gist of information in a language you might otherwise be unable to access.
Yep, it's true. Take it for a spin and see for yourself.
Digg it
Tim - you are right about
Tim - you are right about blogrolls being a major draw. Whenever I visit an interesting site I always check out the links. Any plans for blogrolls on the cow blogs?
Blogrolling
Blogrolls are definitely on the list of things to do, for sure. Along with that, I'd like to have a place for authors to list the forums they frequent. Just two more sets of data points to help us get a teensy fuller picture of each other.
I have to confess that it's pretty far down the list. Here are some of the things I put ahead of that:
Anyway, you get the idea.
I look forward to any and all suggestions you've got. That said, this might be a good conversation to move to the Blog forum at The COW. Not exactly a "help" topic per se, but a threaded conversation might be easier to follow....
Thanks again for jumping in so quickly!
tim - if you want to move it
tim - if you want to move it go ahead and we can continue discussion there