The internet is a wonderful thing. It lets everyone from all over the world communicate with one another. At least, it does if they have a common language.
MAX looks like it’s getting great turnout including international turnout, as is evidenced by the international pings to MAX Bloggers.
Unfortunately, I’m not able to read all of the posts since I’m not educated in German and Dutch and my Portuguese is way too rusty. I guess this aggregator is a good example of why people should build language filters into the aggregator.
Ideally, it would be best to support all languages and let visitors specify which languages they can read and filter out all others. However, if an aggregator is written on short notice, totally filtering for just one language would work too.
RSS has a language identifier for this purpose, so aggregator should take advatnage of that. I’m not sure how many aggregators do filter on language, but I don’t remember seeing non-English posts in the MXNA, Full as a Goog, or FLOG.
Hi Sam, I agree with you 100%. What is the syntax for the language identifier for RSS?
In RSS 2.0 there is a tag that usually identifies the language of the feed. In our RSS feed it is
<dc:language>en-us</dc:language>
Good Idea~!
Hmm.. interestingly enough Fullasagoog is at work on this as we speak. But I don’t want others to steal me thunder so that’s all I’ll say – stay tuned.
Sam, 100% agree on you – language filters do make a lot of sense. But – don’t forget that maxbloggers.com is some sort of a temporarily used aggregator. It’s used to show the world how international the MX community is and that there are a lot people contributing to it in countries like Brazil, the Netherlands or Germany.
Since the release of maxbloggers.com I noticed a strong increase in readers of my MAX category.
There might be two reasons for that:
1. German-speaking MX-related people not using CF, Spectra, JRun (the stuff we blog on) who found us “accidentally” by browsing maxbloggers.com for Flash, Fireworks, Contribute etc. stuff.
2. Non German-speaking people who are interested in what we’re writing there and using some sort of translation tool for getting the core information.
Both is great and is a great support for the community in countries not speaking/writing English as the first language. And – to come to the point – I’m quite sure it won’t happen like this and we would lose a lot of potential readers of 1 and 2 when using language filters. So – for me it’s a great push for the MM-related blog posting in other languages that English!
I personally do try to read most of the foreign-language (Portuguese, Dutch) by using Altavista Toolbar in IE. I’m quite sure to miss a lot, but at least I got some information of the post.
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Hi Sam
Language filtering for the body text is obviously a good idea. However as time has gone by ‘translate with google’ has come on in leaps and bounds, although not yet good enough to translate this metaphor.