Google launches search translation service

Google Wednesday launched a test version of a translation tool that enables people to search the Internet in any of a dozen languages and have the results converted into their chosen tongue. A beta version of Google’s ‘cross-language information retrieval’ feature is online at http://translate.google.com/translate_s. The service ‘in effect, will make the Web universal,’ Google vice-president of engineering Udi Manber said while describing it to the press at the Internet search giant’s campus in Mountain View, California, last week. ‘We have been working on translating all of the Web to all languages,’ Manber said. ‘The results are probably not perfect, but the information you want will be there.’ Google’s new software translates queries to perform multi-lingual searches of the Internet and then converts the results to a searcher’s language. The languages included in the service are French, Arabic, English, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and traditional and simplified Chinese. The service is to eventually be expanded to include other languages. (Middle East Times)

Pressdisplay brings Newspapers Online

Last week Pressdisplay.com mailed me and said they had chosen to give me unlimited personal access to their new system.- And I must say I am impressed. I have just read my local tabloid, Jerusalem Post and The Guardian in full versions on my tablet-pc with a bunch of features that makes newspaper reading much more fun and integrated with what else I do. I can blog a specific article as an image with link to the full original article for my readers to view, I can have articles read by a female machine voice if I prefer and I can setup a subscription system locally on my laptop that automatically downloads my preferred newspapers among more than 200. The system also stores my downloaded newspapers for up to 60 days.

Let me show you how it works.

Pressdisplay lets you access more than 200 newspapers from one site and with one subscription. When you subscribe you can read your newspapers before it appears in newsstands and before it is even printed! As a subscriber you can read your newspapers online and/or download the PressReader, a program that lets you read and manage newspapers for offline reading and more convenient page browsing.

Interestingly the Pressdisplay browser really makes the regular print newspaper format browsable. Specially if you use a vertical screen like a tilt LCD or tablet pc. I use the PressReader on my tablet PC, but there is a version for smartphones as well running the Windows Mobile platform 5.0.
When logged in to my account I can browse newspapers by language, title or country. I can pick a newspaper and its front page will appear in full screen size. At the bottom of the screen some tools for surfing, zooming and other things show up. At the right thumbnails of the issues other pages are listed. One click and that page shows up. Pages can also be flipped by clicking the corners of the pages.

This is yesterdays edition of The Guardian, viewed with PressReader online. This is also here I can choose newspapers for my off line PressReader.

Here is the downloaded version on a tablet. All pages is listed at the right sidebar.

If I chose to hear the words of an article spoken I just click the loudspeaker icon next to the headline of an article and a player starts.

I choose to save The Guardian for offline reading.

The Guardian now shows among my other preferred newspapers in the PressReader display, it is fully downloaded and I can start reading.

Most of the time I read in single page full screen view. It takes a few minutes to get used to the navigation. One click zooms in and four-way scrolling is done by holding the pen down on the screen. Here you see full page view, the text is too small for reading articles.

First level zoom is perfect for reading four columns, that makes up The Guardians Berliner format.

If I find something interesting, that I would like to share I can send a number of articles each month to friends and theres a blogging feature that allows subscribers to publish directly from the system to blogs. WordPress, Blogger, Livejournal and MSN Spaces are supported.

PressDisplay has a range of subscription models. There is a free sign up, where you can view front pages and buy single editions for USD 2.75. for USD 10 you can have monthly access to 31 newspapers of your own choice etc. There is also some corporate solutions and plans for libraries and hotels.

Newspaper Index in Korean, Russsian, Malay and Vietnamese

This week I will finish the translations Newspaper Index in Korean, Russian, Malay and Vietnamese. The Korean version is online now: Link

Next step, probably in june, will be to translate the site into Thai, Hindi, Polish and Finish. Later Portuguese and Dutch will be added and the site will be translated into the 23 most widespread languages on the Internet.

‘Mozart new edition’ now online for free

As the end of a full year of Mozart celebrations nears, the musical scores of his complete works have been made available for free on the web. The bound volumes of the composer’s works, which consist of over 24,000 pages, have been posted on the internet by the International Mozart Foundation located in Salzburg, Austria. The books are a digitised version of the prestigious ‘New Mozart Edition’ (’Neue Mozart Ausgabe,’ or NMA) which is considered the gold standard of Mozart editions. The edition serves as an aid to authentic performances, as well as providing music researchers with an accurate text based on available sources, such as Mozart’s autographed manuscripts. NMA-online will further aid research, as well as enabling non-experts to access the composer’s scores in a user-friendly manner. Visitors to the website (http://dme.mozarteum.at) can search for specific symphonies, concertos or even single lines of text, writes Deutsche Welle. The site has some traffic problems the moment, but check back later.

Recently I picked up classical guitar again and I have enjoyed two sites in special for that hobby of mine. First of all Classtab that hosts tons of quality tabs, videos and midis. Most tabs are in different versions which is great for newbies advancing technically with a piece. Secondly I use the cool metronome at MetrononeOnline. I needed a metronome and went shopping by Google for it, and there is was free on the web. The site also gives you a clean “A” for tuning your instrument.

Newspaper develops groundbreaking HTTP accelerator

Newspaper Index recently moved to a faster and better 64bit server in order to handle our growing traffic. To make sure that our users get pages in time even when we are slashdotted we looked around for some caching software in adition to the hardware improvements.

Hilli, who handles the server, suggested the cool new application Varnish HTTP accelerator and it is actually serving these pages you are browsing right now. It is extremely fast, the server is doing nada and the only bottleneck right now is the 100 MB backbone - or so it seems. There are competitors out there, but Varnish beeing an BSD license open source application, is outperforming them all. Varnish is ten to twenty times faster than the Squid Web Proxy Cache and even the commercial accelerators are far behind.
The funny thing about Varnish is that the development is sponsored by the Norwegian newspaper VG. They had as the largest online newspapers in Norway (I think the largest in Scandinavia) constant problems with heavy traffic loads. In 2005 they initiated the development of an application written from scratch that could accelerate/cache their web content. The wellknown BSD-programmer Poul-Henning Kamp got involved together with the Norwegian Linpro and in a few months they build Varnish. Now it is running on VG’s servers. VG had 12 servers but now they can handle all the traffic on one server, thanks to Varnish - and they still have not had enough trafic to test the limits! VG.no has Alexa Rank 1584 today.
But why does a newspapers support the development of free open source software? Anders Berg from VG Multimedia said earlier this year to linmag.no:
“We are enjoying open source sofware and we see this (supporting Varnish) as a great way to give a little back to the community.”
He estimates that Varnish will save VG about 150.000 USD a year in reduced hardware expenses - Nearly the same as the price for building Varnish. Using the commercial alternative Akamai would have costed VG many times that sum.
Poul-Henning is not sure if he can tell who, but he says that at least two of the danish top-ten websites are now using Varnish and the application is beeing picked up right now all over the world.

Thanks to the innovative team VG, Poul-Henning and Linpro!

‘Social network’ for newspapers to launch next month

A computer platform that allows newspapers to share news and classified advertising will launch early next month. US-based CityTools will enable newspaper publishers to create content networks with one another and draw on articles written by members of the public. Developers claim that several US newspapers are interested in the service, which they hope will eventually become a none-proprietary standard for exchanging content. ‘If you spin the CityTools model forward, you can go to your local newspaper website and suddenly, because they have built smart networks and smart relationships with other publishers, you get reliable content. The same kind of mass but its all relevant to the local readership,’ said Robert Cauthorn, president of CityTools. Publishers pay a USD 650 (EUR 506) flat monthly rate for the service which also allows them access to articles submitted to a public-facing CityTools website where people can share original news pieces under a creative commons licence. The public can also establish networks on the platform. (Journalism.co.uk,November 21, 2006)

Another perfect reporters tool

Last week I wrote about my new tablet pc. I just had another great day on the road with it, and this time I tested a new type editor Google presented a couple of days ago: Google Docs. It is an easy to use web based word editor with all the functions you need to write and format an article. Features I like are:

• Auto save
• Wordcount (never seen that in web based editors before)
• HTML editor
• Post to blog (works on WordPress and a range of other systems)
• Save and open as word, pdf, Open Office, HTML etc.
• Easy sharing, up- download of documents.
• Starts faster than both Word XP and latest Open Office aps
• Hotkeys - like ctrl+s for bold, ctrl+s for save. Overrides browser defined hotkeys (in firefox)

Click to view a screenshot of google docs 

To this comes a more advanced revisions feature, that lets you share the document with reviewers. Finaly you can publish the document by direct print, email or to an unique URL created by the editor. See my example here: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dgt9dxxw_3f43fnx. Changes in document can be subscribed to via RSS :-)
Dispite the simple userinterface I can´t find anything missing exept from maybe danish spell checking (the English sucks byt the way, it won’t reconize the words: Google, pdf and blog) and a system for mass handling of docs. Would be cool if I could upload and publish 50 docs at the same time. Google Docs has been integrated in the Google Spreadsheet, released in 2005, so you handle both types of documents from the same interface and with the same tools.