The English Cemetery

That's what Lili and Peru have to say to you:

My wife took this picture back in october. Love and peace. Now, we'll go on vacation. Bye!

The blog at Ask Jeeves announces the new translation service available at their searches.

They offer an Spanish example in that post, with Rodriguez Zapatero, the prime minister. So, I do click on that, and then, on the translation offered for the first non sponsored link listed. This is the result:

Jose Luis Rodríguez Zapatero was born in Valladolid On August 4, 1960. There there moved his(her,your) mother (Purification Cobbler), in order that his(her,your) second son was born, provided that the mother grandfather of Rodríguez Zapatero was a prestigious pediatrician of the city vallisoletana, that wanted to represent and to attend to all his(her,your) grandsons...

Looks as if they tried to offer Zapatero as a clever example: Hey, it's a common noun in Spanish, but our machine recognises the person, and does not translate it! However, the example miserably fails. The automatic translator may know Rodríguez Zapatero, but her mother's name, Purificación Zapatero, appears as Purification Cobbler.

The original Spanish text and the alleged translation by Ask Jeeves.

Windows Live Local has, truly, improvements in interface and features as compared with Virtual Earth, which has been the name for this ajaxian mapping app since July 2005 until Dec 2005.

But, there have been functionality loses in this transition as well. The permalinks that we made with Virtual Earth, like this one that I collected, no longer work.

Perma-link. It looked like a promise to users, but just 5 months, that's what permanent meant, apparently.

The new Windows Live Local also promises permalinks: I hope that they last longer. Most can be generated dinamically, like the previous ones in Virtual Earth, but not the most interesting ones: the new birdeye oblique hi-resolution imagery available for several US cities. Permalinks can be generated, but there's no way to construct them dinamically, as there is a scene variable that can't be guessed from latitude and longitude... A dissapointment, really: if URLs for the hi-resoluton views could be created dinamically, the mapping application would get more inbound links, as webmasters could provide more interesting direct links towards the awesome vistas in Windows Live Local...

These lines above, I posted them also at Topix.net's new functionality, User Stories. No HTML handled, as you can see here but, however, at this moment, the article is in the Microsoft section of that news aggregator.

However, we adjusted Tagzania to the new Windows Live environment, including a new bookmarklet to save those new awesome bird-eye vistas in your Tagzania accunt. For instance, suppose you get to the Luxor Casino pyramid in Las Vegas.

Once there, click on the permalink option:

A box will appear at the middle of the interface, with a long address on it. Click on that long permalink address. Having done that, now you can click on our special bookmarklet for Windows Live, and you can save that location on Tagzania.

There's at least another English-language blog in the city of Donostia. Unlike the English Cemetery, that's in decent english. Wellcome to Wheylona's blog

The blog is called Viva, An Experiment and the blogger seems to be an american woman, Wheylona. I assume that's a name, by US standards. Her Flickr username is the same as her Blogger username, at least.

I have commented some of her entries. Like the one about Basque food, trying to correct her tastes: according to our sources, Idiazabal cheese dose not match with olives, it is nuts with cheese; and anchovies with olives and pepper. Or this one about the sheep stickers popular around here lately: she got Sustatu'ed for that, sort of Slashdotted on a Basque scale ;-) as we featured it at a frontpage of the Basque collective blog Sustatu

It's nice to look at your own place thru the eyes of a foreigner: it gives you a wider perspective. Wheylona has an eye for capturing things that for Basques living in Donostia are not worth a second thought, like her visit to the health center. Her camera also has a good sense of opportunity: in this picture, she captured the most famous Basque writer, Bernardo Atxaga, seemingly not noticing him there...

I feel so envious of some friends that are there at Paris, at this conference, Les Blogs 2.0

At least I can watch them from the satellite, with the brand new interface at Tagzania.

A new interface in Tagzania. Each single location looks different now. This is a well known place in Paris, for instance.

Tag aggregation, combined with proximity calculations is providing some value to the simple and minimal information that users provide with each point. That's with 8200 tagged points only (we are growing slowly), but as locations are added and added, information will increase.

More info at the blog