Entrepreneur Brian McConnell and I have been trading mail for the last couple of months about his latest project — the WorldWide Lexicon. It’s a social network for translating web pages. Prettty simple idea, but perhaps also very compelling.
The way it works is as follows:
- You register your site with WWL (Saunderslog is already done)
- You encourage your readers to help translate your site into whatever languages they speak; direct them to demo.worldwidelexicon.org. (direct friendly URLs such as saunders.worldwidelexicon.org are coming this week)
- Bilingual readers contribute and edit translations; monolingual readers can view translations in any language that someone has posted translations for (when you go to demo.worldwidelexicon.org you’ll see a grid of two letter language codes beneath each site, all you need to do is click on the code for the language you speak and read the translations or add your own
- Translations are published on WWL as HTML, and also output as RSS loopback feeds, so you can loop them right back into your blog. Brian plans to be doing a lot to make republishing easy for publishers and for readers.
Many large sites are obviously candidates for full translations, and even selected elements of smaller sites make sense.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
