Google Wave in 2 Minutes

And like the video says, “if I could get an invite, it would be great!” Anyone?

[via: Lifehacker]

Failure of Social Media Apparent With Recent Iran Unrest

The recent elections in Iran have reminded me of something I was pondering for a while.

I listened to an interview with Ethan Zuckerman about
the multilingual web and put it in the back of my mind. But now that the events in Iran are escalating the need for a multilingual web becomes even more important. In the first two days of uprising (June 13 and June 14) there was a lot of news reports coming in from people on the streets. They were filing them on social media (twitter and friendfeed) but mostly in Farsi. The at that point the rest of the world wasn’t able to make the most of these reports. There was even a meme created on twitter about how CNN missed reporting this election: #cnnfail. Slowly as the reports came in English, other sites tried to aggregate the torrent of news. I especially liked what twazzup did with their Iran Unrest site. They were smart enough to notice that more content can be added by search for Farsi keywords and capitalize on this gap.

I now fully agree with Ethan Zuckerman, and think we need the web to become inclusive of all languages. If we can easily and quickly translate between languages on the web, news and information can flow more freely. Of course there are inherent problems in translating various languages, and I think currently without human intervention that can’t be done easily. Case in point is that the site balatarin started to ask for volunteers to translate important Farsi language blog posts.

However, things like this will not take off until the big players get involved. And today I heard that google has entered the game by adding Farsi translation services. It still has a long way to go, but it’s a good start!

Twitter Has Come Of Age

What’s the hottest new thing these days? Why it’s twitter! And where people are, the spammers will surely follow. Like the parasites of the internet ecosystem, they will find a way in. Then they will start hammering away, sending messages until they get a click here and a click there.

I woke up this morning to see that 5 or 6 people had started following me on twitter. When I went to their profile to check who they were I was greeted with the page below.

This can mean bad things because twitter’s sign up page has the standard anti-spam measure of captcha. So either the spammers are using sophisticated technology to get in, or they’ve outsourced the sign up process to a large number of human workers. I would prefer if it was the latter since it means there’s a limit to how much spam I will get. Although I remember a reading a while back that Gmail’s captcha was broken.

Balatarin is back!

Balatarin ( Farsi: بالاترین ) is a farsi website dedicated to social information sharing and link aggregation. This site is much like digg but mostly for the Iranian internet sphere. (wikipedia article)

A couple of days ago, the site was hacked (most likely their DNS or the registrar info) and suddenly the importance of this site to Iranian internet users became quite apparent.

Well, the good news is that the site owners have now gained control of the site. It will come back soon, but in the meantime here’s the message on the front page:

CBC.ca – an example of proper online presence

I’ve had a new-fangled smart phone for the past 4 months now, and I’ve been using it to read the news whenever I’m on a bus, or train. I’ve found that some sites understand their audience better than others. After looking into it some more, I realized that by far the best of these sites is CBC.ca. So, here are some things that makes CBC a very cutting edge site – or web 2.0!
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