Thus they are most likely targeting me with the message using some kind of IP delivery – looking at which country or region my IP address originates in, and as I use a Polish ISP, they sometimes give me information in Polish.

After you switch display language, it looks a little like this

Facebook was translated using crowd sourcing – to be honest I am not sure it is the best option – it is certainly the cheap option, and gives users some additional sense of ownership which can encourage brand loyalty, but I am not convinced it is the best option.

I am not a native Pole, in fact my linguistic skills are a source of constant frustration for my Polish wife and her family.

Whilst Facebook clearly state the translations are for information purposes only, I shouldn’t be able to pick up glaring translation flaws in a matter of minutes, within headlines… just scanning pages.
Note:- whilst in the games industry one of the roles I performed was coordinating the localization of over 100 SKUs from English to Polish, and occasionally translation Polish > English but that was often more like rewriting the manuals

Here is an example from the terms and conditions

Hmm, definitions and constructions… referring to grammatical definitions and constructions

Unfortunately “Remonty” in Polish means “Renovation” and unlike other similar words, is never used for anything to do with grammar.

The following alternatives would be suitable.

Definicje i Konstrukcje
Definicje i Budowa (zdań)

Google Translate Does It Better

Plugging the same phrase into Google Translate, which recently added support for Polish gives much better results than were achieved using crowd sourcing.

Google Translate isn’t perfect by any means, it needs to expand the dictionary considerably, and probably include specific thematic dictionaries, but recently I have used it to translate from Polish to English for friends and family with reasonable success.

I expect such blunders from professionals translating from their native language into a foreign language, but from such a huge company using crowd sourcing on a large scale, with professional management, I expected much better.

There are other bugs, along with a sense that they didn’t include a solution to take into consideration gender.

Facebook isn’t an open source project with limited resources.

“feel free to invite others to this room – as long as they are bloggers and/or are interested in the ProBlogger type topic I’m happy for anyone and everyone to join. I’ve invited all my contacts on FF. Pity there’s no list of public groups for people to join.”

Whilst there isn’t a public list, in many ways Google with a site search query these days provides a very real alternative.

Here is the query I used:-

http://www.google.com/search?q=%3Asite%3Afriendfeed.com+inurl%3Afriendfeed.com%2Frooms%2F&pws=0&gl=US&num=100

Here is a clickable search link for Friendfeed Rooms in Google

You can always add an extra keyword term to the search to find rooms related to specific niche’s or maybe rooms where specific people have interacted.

In other Friendfeed news, it seems Steve Gilmor doesn’t like Friendfeed much, and I love this line:-

Nowhere in this debate (most of it mercifully hidden forever behind the FriendFeed black hole where conversations go to die)

this seems to be the weekend bitchmeme so I thought I would at least add something useful.

The current 28 blogging partners (increasing daily) have been provided with a list of categories to accept nominations for, and it is down to each blog to decide how to proceed with collecting nominations, whether to make individual posts for each category, or to handle things from a single post.

Voting will take place in a much more refined manner.

1. Mainstream and Large Scale Networks
2. Applications and Widgets
3. Social News and Social Bookmarking
4. Social Search
5. Sports and Fitness
6. Photo Sharing
7. Video Sharing
8. Start Pages
9. Places and Events
10. Music
11. Social Shopping
12. Mobile
13. Niche and Miscellaneous Social Networks

As I loosely focus on niche marketing, with an emphasis on WordPress, Blogging and SEO I am hoping that we can get some nominations for some of the more niche players.

Blog widgets for instance unfortunately haven’t got their own category, and the same is true of more niche services for blogging such as for comment presentation and monitoring.

It has been suggested to me that those services will most likely fit under widgets or the niche services.
Widgets is likely to be dominated by Facebook applications from many of the mainstream blogs, so this is really your chance to help some of more blogging related widgets gain some exposure.

I am not sure where monetization widgets fit in, probably in the same categories, even though some social shopping widgets allow you to add an Amazon or Commisson Junction ID.

How To Nominate

We are going to make this easy to avoid multiple comments

I am going to allow up to 3 nominations for each category, just add an additional line with a nomination if you want to nominate say more that one widget or niche social network.

Just because someone else has already nominated a site doesn’t mean you shouldn’t also nominate it. If they end up with nominations for 100s of different widgets, I am sure there will have to be some filtering, so your additional votes will be important.

<b>My Nominations</b>
Name of Service - URL - (Applications and Widgets)
Name of Service - URL - (Applications and Widgets)
Name of Service - URL - (Social News and Social Bookmarking)
Name of Service - URL - (Social Search)
Name of Service - URL - (Sports and Fitness)
Name of Service - URL - (Photo Sharing)
Name of Service - URL - (Video Sharing)
Name of Service - URL - (Start Pages)
Name of Service - URL - (Places and Events)
Name of Service - URL - (Music)
Name of Service - URL - (Social Shopping)
Name of Service - URL - (Mobile)
Name of Service - URL - (Niche and Miscellaneous Social Networks)
Name of Service - URL - (Niche and Miscellaneous Social Networks)

I have made it easy to copy and paste the code, and even included an extra line for both widgets and the niche social networks.

If you don’t want to nominate a service for a particular category, then just delete the line.

We will also be looking for nominations over on Collective Thoughts soon, and I expect my colleagues will say a few words to slant voting in different directions.

Update 5th December

Comments Are Now Closed so I can send nominations through to the guys at Mashable

It updates live, in a similar way to Truemors.com and various widgets such as the one for Netscape.com

Topics are split between Entertainment, Technology, Politics, Sports, Business, and Life and apparently blogs have been selected based upon Technorati Authority, frequency of posting, use of relevant tags, links to related subject matter and general topicality.

In theory some of my content might appear within both the Technology and Business sections, but that remains to be seen.

Is Technorati Topics Useful?

In theory it is spam free but it is also elitist, though the bar hasn’t been set insanely high for entry. I suppose it might bring additional readers to sites who wouldn’t otherwise get noticed.
I have seen one blog with an authority of 65 appearing in the results already.

Technorati Bugs Fixed?

The Technorati Popular page is fairly broken

Apparently Guy Kawasaki has a twin, in fact he is not the only one…

I actually took these screen shots a week ago, and nothing has really changed

Automattic is now a top rated blog… huh?

Lets have a look at the quality of the posts in the feed on the Automattic blog

There are other discrepancies too, but it is really not my place to snitch on anyone. Technorati are allowed to interpret and hand edit the results just as much or maybe more than Google are, especially as they don’t have a monopoly and 10,000+ employees.

The errors I have pointed out here are the most obvious ones.

I did check to see if they have fixed the Technorati favorites for those with more than 200 – they haven’t so I can’t add or remove any.

Important Milestone For Technorati

Recently Technorati have had quite a few shake ups, with Dave Sifry dropping his CEO role (but remaining Chairman) and 8 people were also let go.
Prior to that in July Adam Hertz, Tantek Celik and Liz Dunn left whilst hiring promoting Dorion Carroll.
Corrected – see comment by Dorion in comments

By my reckoning, Technorati probably still have around 40 staff and have still to show how they are going to integrate Personal Bee which they previously acquired.

Hopefully we will start to see either existing systems fixed, or more ways we can interact and explore our favorite blogs, and make use of what is still one of the best implementations of OPML.

Technorati simply can’t cope with new forms of blogging and RSS feed generation. I am not talking about splogs, which seem to still be rampant, and reblogs, likewise, but totally legitimate alternative unique content sources that are effectively blogs.

coComment

Not too long ago, coComment introduced the ability to be able to claim your coComment feed on Technorati, and went to the trouble of creating a very integrated claim wizard.

Within a few days, the very legitimate coComment feeds full of unique content were filling up Technorati links pages. It seems Technorati swiftly took action and decided that coComments feeds were not blogs, and silently nerfed them.

coComment feeds are not splogs, they are a record of activity all over the web that contain content directly linked to individual people, and real discussions.
Technorati could use coComment as a way to filter out splogs, because blogs that don’t get comments might be a good indication of splogs and reblogs.

Twitter

Twitter allows you to post a Technorati claim. I have claimed my Twitter feed, and so have a couple of my friends. Update: Paul has written about doing so here now.

Twitter also has a blogroll of sorts. There are links on the sidebar to the people you are following which are links Technorati can see.

The result if people claim their Twitter account in Technorati and their friends do the same is clear to see.

Now what happens if you are a Twitter user like Robert Scoble with 100s, actually over 1000 followers.

Not all of Robert’s followers have claimed their feeds, and Technorati hasn’t found them all, but that won’t take long.

Technorati Can’t Cope

coComment is very legitimate user generated content – if I fed my coComment feed into a blog, it would be looked on by Technorati as legitimate, so why negate it’s effects only days after it was introduced?

Twitter is actually less legitimate than coComment – you are limited to very few characters unlike blog comments which can often be longer than many blog posts.
Twitter has a Blog Roll of sorts, that is providing cross linking, and soon Robert Scobles Twitter might enter the Technorati Top 100 – you only need 3300 blogs linking to a blog to hit the Technorati 100 currently, Robert already has 1000 followers and I am sure he will easily clock up more very quickly.
The problem for Technorati is that Robert’s Twitter feed is legitimate content on a different platform, and that people are choosing to link to him from their “Twitter Rolls”

Blog Rolls

One of the reasons blogs that are part of blog networks gain Technorati rankings fast is their sitewide links to other blogs in the network.
As I pointed out recently when defending 2000 Bloggers, there are blogs that are part of blog networks that haven’t posted for more than a year, but due to blogrolls have very high Technorati ranks, without any links from within the content.

Widgets, Plugins and Themes

Various members of the WordPress development team used to dominate the Technorati Top 100 because of the default blogroll links. Nothing wrong with the links which are well deserved, everything wrong for Technorati counting them.

Currently the best way to game Technorati is to create widgets and themes with links to the author. Technorati picks them up as links from the blog.
Some of the widgets can do this in quite a collective way, such as community blogroll widgets that add 100s of cross links to all members of the community. Then again they are only doing the same as “legitimate” blog networks.

How to Fix Technorati

Technorati have to change the way they look on links completely, and only count links within content. That may mean their spiders have to start working in a totally different way, and current link totals will twist real results for 6 months.

Technorati should be counting alternative blogging platforms such as coComment and Twitter, but again, they should only count links from within the content.

Twitter is dominating Techmeme today.

I love Pete Cashmore’s timeline of blogging, Marshall Kirkpatrick did a “sitting on the fence” roundup, (i.e. unbiased reporting), and Brian Alvey put a unique perspective on things, (he should be thinking of adding a Twitter widget to Blogsmith for a USP).

What would be better than Robert Scoble’s OPML file?

The Best Search Technology

Google Custom Search Engine gives great search results, and quite often gives better results than the main index.

Alister Cameron has just launched his new Scoble Search

It does give more current results on Technology news than Google might provide from the main search, though it doesn’t cover as many sources.

Robert Scoble Megite Meme

Megite have had a meme for Robert Scoble for some time, based upon the same OPML file.

It provides a great alternative to Robert’s Shared Feed from Google Reader. You don’t get Robert’s top picks, but the top picks based upon the people Robert reads. It is maybe slightly broader content, but it is automatic, and works at times that Robert is taking some time off to read his email.

Custom Google Toolbar Button

Of course it is a total coincidence that I happen to have a Google Toolbar button that points directly to Alisters custom search, and includes the Scobleizer Meme on Megite.

Robert Scoble – Custom Search | Megite Meme | Toolbar Button

But then my readers might not believe in coincidence ;)

It looks like Megite have joined MyBlogLog

Actually Megite would be a great purchase for someone very soon, probably more so than Digg in many ways.

Om Malik recently reported on Alexa outages as large as 14 hours.

I still like using Alexa as a way to compare websites. But it is just one yardstick, and should only be used comparing websites in the same niche. If one webmaster uses Alexa and another doesn’t within a small niche, the difference in rating can be extremely high.

Alexa isn’t Just Down

I have noticed over the last week that Alexa wasn’t updating their statistics. They were frozen on 22nd November. Not just my own site statistics, but also for sites like CNN and Google.

Today is the first time that statistics have been updated for 6 days, and Alexa are now shoing statistics for… November 23rd.

This isn’t the same as an outage. There seems to be something going on behind the scenes.
They have still been gathering data, but not displaying the processed results.

Lots of tracking services have some level of delay, Google Analytics has a delay. MyBlogLog has a delay, unless you subscribe to their pro version.

Is this something to do with data centre migration or a technical hitch? If that was the case I would expect to see results today for November up until 28th now that things are moving again.

Alexa May Have Made Changes

The way that the data is appearing suggests to me that maybe Alexa have made some changes in the way data is being processed, and that it will take them a while to catch up.

Only time will tell.