ResearchBuzz

Pecan Sandies to Darren Straight, who discovered that Windows Live (as opposed to Windows Filmed-On-Location-Before-A-Studio-Audience) now has a translation service available, http://translator.live.com/Default.aspx . It’s in beta.

The first thing I noticed is that the language offerings are not quite like Google Translate, with at least one translation pair (Dutch -> English) not available at Google. The second thing I noticed is the side-to-side translation. You put the text (up to 500 words) on one side and get the translation on the other side. Even when I couldn’t read a language, I could sometimes use this setup to pick up sentences and try to retranslate them or translate them word-for-word.

When you translate a page — actually the first page I tried refused to be translated. It was text (not Flash or anything like that) but nothing doing, Windows Live couldn’t translate it. (There’s a FAQ available if you run into a problem. The FAQ won’t fix anything, but might help you understand why something isn’t working.) The second page didn’t work either. Neither did the third or fourth. I finally gave up.

If you manage to get an entire page translated, you’ll find that the original page and translation are presented side-to-side, though there are layout options in the top right of the translation page.

I like this layout, and there are options here you don’t see at other translation services. But I never could get a Web page to translate, and I didn’t see dictionary translation like you’ll find a Google. Worth looking at, but can’t replace existing tools.

Props to the groovy people at Cool Tools for the pointer to a directory of hostels around the world — http://www.hostelz.com/ . This site contains information on over 22,000 hostels in over 6,000 countries in the world.

Searching from the front page is extremely simple. Enter the name of the city or country you wish to stay, or the name of the hostel. I’ve been reading a lot of Inspector Maigret stories lately so I searched on Paris. I got a couple dozen results of hostels in Paris (the results were not numbered) with the option to narrow down the results further by area of the city (a dozen different areas!) The results listing included a star rating, name, and a very brief description. Beneath the hostel listings you’ll also find reviews of the area itself.

Click on the hostel name to get to its page and much more extensive information, including address, price, direction, and contact information. The site has a great layout which contrasts the way the hostel describes itself with a Hostelz.com review. There are also often a lot of photographs available. After the hostelz.com reviews there were customer reviews available. It was a pleasant surprise to see that there were more places that had reviews than did not (on my sites I visit that’s reversed.) Some sites had dozens and dozens of reviews.

The left nav has links to other places in the area that you can link to, and also links to information resources (Wikipedia etc.) about the area.

All the places I looked at had contact information available, so you could get in touch with them directly for a reservation. Hostelz also had an option to look for reservations, but it seemed to take a bit of time to load.

Chock full of information and the reviews had a much higher usefulness percentage than I’ve seen on some sites. I would have only two suggestions — make there be some way to enlarge the pictures taken at the hostels (I clicked on them thinking I would get a larger version, nothing), and perhaps have some way to quickly show how old some of the visitor reviews are (maybe a shaded bar at the top of the review?)

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For a long time there’s been promise that location in real space will have a greater and greater impact on what we see on the Internet. And to some extent that’s true — there’s geo-targeted advertising and some sites have content tailored to your location. But to a great extent you still have to go out and find content relevant to your area. Placeblogger.com ( http://www.placeblogger.com ) is a directory of placeblogs — that is, blogs that are focused on the happenings/news/culture of a particular area, a pretty focused area.

The front page has pointers to featured blogs as well as recent headlines from blogs in the directory. The search engine is in the right column. You can browse by location (country/state) or search by keyword. The directory is dominated by US locations but there are other countries available too. I did a keyword search for news and got a three-tabbed search result that provided content results from the Web site first. The third tab was for location blogs and allowed me to search within x miles of a zip code or country.

Placeblogs have their own pages. There’s one called Streatham whose page is at http://www.placeblogger.com/placeblog/streatham . The page has information on the blog itself (URL, a small map) and pointers to the last couple of blog postings with excerpts. There’s also a place for visitors to comment on the blog (in this case, the comments were, “What’s the deal with that map? London and Newcastle are nowhere near each other!”)

The directory also has a spot for you to add your own placeblog, a discussion group (hosted by Google Groups), and a blog (Placeblogger blog content is also on the front page of the site.)

One note — I don’t know if Placeblogger.com got Slashdotted or Dugg or what — but I did have a hard time connecting to the site sometimes. I’d be browsing through the listings and suddenly everything would just time out. I wasn’t looking at it at a particularly busy time of day. There’s interesting material here but you’ll need some patience to get to it.