Further adventures in the global community…
I came across an essay by Ethan Zuckerman of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard called The Polyglot Internet in which he discusses the problems of machine translation (see previous post) and the danger of linguistic isolation on the internet. Despite the massive globalization of user generated content with more opportunity available to interact with people of your own culture there is less incentive to share across global barriers.
“This in turn may fulfill some of the predictions put forth by those who see the Internet acting as an echo-chamber for like-minded voices, not as a powerful tool to encourage interaction and understanding across barriers of nation, language and culture.”
I thought, wait a minute, so I couldn’t find Farsi (Persian) in Google Translator, I know they have Chinese. However it appears that unless you’re dealing with romance languages machine translation doesn’t cut it. A comparison of the English text provided on the site with the one Google Translate chugged out is, well, let’s just say it’s difficult. Zuckerman looks to peer generated translation. Peer generated is the Internet way…
Ahh, but there’s always music! The title of this post is the title of a CD I just picked up by Kasai AllStars, a group from the Congo who have a beautiful mishmosh of traditional instrumentation along with bizarrely distorted and amplified ones (due to amps constructed from abandoned car parts and such). It’s awesome. And who could resist a title like that?

So I was stumbling around the web today like usual and came across Netvibes, an RSS/widget aggregator that lets you create a homepage of personalized favorites.  As someone who got really RSS happy for a while I thought it was kind of cool to be able to see all my favorite feeds displayed at once and from any computer. Michael Wensch of Kansas State is using it as the Digital Ethnography homepage/portal, and what a wealth of info.  (If you haven’t seen the Digital Ethnography YouTube project check it out)  Started a Netvibes homepage but need to play with it some more…

Also got invited to join a Goodreads group called “Underground Thought” by someone in Iran who “friended” me (I don’t know what you call it for Goodreads).  I like the title so decided to check it out.  The first post was in Arabic.  I plugged it into Google translator and this is a sample of what I got:

] اولین base: it’s the principle of time, the ghosts of بی خبری …. By Sraghtan می آیند broke Ha der Webster sleep, روزها der گوشه taking, warned باشید’s New آنها and even سایه These Ra جدی بگیرید. چرا که Roozbarha smuggled Annan Ra دیدار می below and your New NBA خبرید.

So I’m going to hold off joining the group.  I kind of want to know what they’re discussing.  I do find the books he reads interesting (the ones I recognize), and have  learned about authors I didn’t know existed (like Abdolkarim Soroush) so it’s all good.

Geez, it just occurred to me that the post was probably in farsi, not arabic.  Duh.  What an American I am.  Maybe I’ll try that translator again…

After annoying many a fellow student with too numerous thoughts and ramblings and links as I stumble across so many things that fascinate me in the webosphere, now I will finally bite the bullet and put them here. The online discussion boards breathe a sigh of relief…well, only a little