Tony Karrer's eLearning Blog on e-Learning Trends eLearning 2.0 Personal Learning Informal Learning eLearning Design Authoring Tools Rapid e-Learning Tools Blended e-Learning e-Learning Tools Learning Management Systems (LMS) e-Learning ROI and Metrics

Thursday, November 30, 2006

Blogs, Automated Translations, and a Better Site Feed

I ran into a little utility this morning - Snap - that let's you add previews of any link on your site as a quick little pop-up. It's kinda cool. You'll have to visit my blog to see this in action.

While you are there, definitely check out the new translation capability that can be found at the bottom of each post. This is provided by Yahoo's, AltaVista's, BabelFish - aren't acquisitions fun? Since I've found that about 30% of the links to my posts come from blogs in other languages, maybe this will be of value. I've certainly been using it to translate from other languages to English so I can see what people are saying relative to the topics in my blog. I'm actually surprised at how much you can understand from automated translation. It makes me wonder if this isn't something that we should all be doing with our content whenever we have a multilingual workforce?

Of course, this then raised the question - can't I add this to my feeds? Well, I blew it a long time ago and didn't point everyone to my feedburner feed. Using FeedBurner, I can add lots of fun stuff to the feed and I've turned on publishing a daily summary of my del.icio.us links.

I would suggest that readers of this blog might want to change over to the FeedBurner feed to get these added functions: http://feeds.feedburner.com/eLearningTechnology

2 comments:

Stephen Downes said...

Ick. No. Please don't point people to feedburner - it has 'proprietary' written all over it, it mangles your links, and 9sometimes) it inserts advertising.

Tony Karrer said...

Really, I've not seen the advertising insertion. The links are mangled so you can get tracking which is something you more or less do on your site Stephen.

It does feel proprietary - but what's the alternative?

For example, I've played with having emails sent with my del.icio.us links to Blogger for posting. It works, but they are ugly. Too ugly to have in my blog.

I'd prefer not to leave Blogger, but maybe that's the only answer.