The English Cemetery

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

We built a nice application over Google Maps, that runs smoothly, can map multiple views no matter which corner of the world... We have a dedicated web application server, tuned to a nice database. It works. We have learnt the tricks of the Google Maps API.. We could use that elsewhere, and we did, partly because our effort has been noticed by others as well.

As a matter of fact, there are already customers and projects for our company, CodeSyntax. The FON wireless connectivity network, an ambitious idea by Argentinian entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky, has launched in Spain with maps provided by us (in collaboration with another company, Alianzo).

In turn, ideas used for the FON maps might be applied to Tagzania. From this platform, we hope to promote our work, and contracts that we may get will return to Tagzania as improvements, features...

maps.fon.com are now restricted to Spain. But the network may go international soon. A test for Sweden...

This Mechanical Turk is a (slightly) rewarded system to distribute tasks that need humans to be completed has been launched by Amazon and described in detail by Techcrunch.

But which tasks will be assigned to the Turk? First examples in the site are from Amazon itself and, a-ha, looks like they think they can tag, describe, disambiguate or illustrate places. Reminds familiar of our Tagzania tagline: Tagging the plane. Several tasks are destined to the illustrated streetplan system of A9. They reached thousands of street corners, and now seemingly need people to assign the correct pictures to those places.

This is a task I found at the Mturk.com site:

  A9 BlockView(tm) Image Adjustment -- Seattle, WA  Requester:             Amazon Requester Inc.   HIT Expiration Date:           Nov 6, 2005  (1 day 5 hours)  Time Allotted:         60 minutes   Reward:        $0.03  HITs Available:        13  Description:   You are presented with the name and address of   a business as well as a set of photos taken along the  street where   the business is supposed to be located. Your task is to identify the   best photo of the business that is  listed.  Keywords:      A9, Blockview(tm), image 

I've entered in a task: I had to choose the beste picture for a business building in Phoenix... Then I returned for pictures and the URL to write this post, but there was an error message. Will this micro-rewarded effort tag the planet? Tagzania has a different approach: you tag what you want, not what we need, and you are rewarded with a collection of places (like bookmarks) that you can recall in the future or share with others.

Tagzania's presentation at Webdosbeta has been published at that site. It's in Spanish, of course.

Back from Madrid, some Tagzania-related work among our hands. Working for Martin Varsavsky's FON project, we are involved in the mapping side of the website that they will deploy, in collaboration with another Basque company, Alianzo.

The Cemetery, this blog, is no longer trilingual. It turns bilingual: Basque and English. The Spanish side does not disappear, it migrates, to a domain of its own. There it is: Mapamovil.net

It has a robuts blog header, yes. A variation on the work of Italian Hyperrealist artist Maurizio Cattelan.

Why? The Webdosbeta workshop was very positive for us. Good feedback, contacts... Looked like an opportunity to continue comenting map-related things for the Spanish audience in a new blog.

We did receive praise in English as well. The report by french blogger Yannick Laclau, who writes about tech issues from Barcelona, was truly encouraging...

I feel envious of web 2.0 events like the ones that TechCrunch organizes. The location (see pasted map below) in California, is a little bit far us, and not only in geographic terms, I'm afraid.

However, I am glad that a presentation about Tagzania entered into the WebDosBeta selection, a workshop next week in Madrid to meet among web 2.0 entrepreneurs and else.

Besides ours, the other projects listed seem interesting, in this first web 2.0 event in Spain. The bigger ones are probably Musicstrands and Fon , which have more backing than Tagzania, obviously. Particularly Fon, a venture launched by Martin Varsavsky Argentinian tech-entrepreneur of fame. Fon is a sort of big wifi connectivity system based in the long tail of users with wifi routers...

Another english-language project is EyeOS. Other interesting things are more blog-related and so far, in Spanish.

Interestingly, Yannick Laclau will be covering the event in English.