Monthly Archives: July 2011

Nice article in NYT today about the Record-a-thon


Behind the scenes at the Internet Archives PhraseFarm test recording session

A great article about our upcoming Record-a-thon event just came out in the New York Times this morning.
Here’s the link:
A Chance to Record Some of the 112 Local Languages

This is really wonderful press for a project we are quite excited about.

I’ve always been fascinated by other languages and yet have never been able to discipline myself to learn another language besides English with any fluency. Despite years of French, my most passable second language is Spanish (which I speak like a not very intelligent 2 year old). Regardless, little snippets of languages I’ve picked up over the years have been so important to me. Saying “itadakimas” before eating, or “hi!” when you want to emphatically agree with someone as they speak has become woven into my vernacular.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could all share each other’s poignant, wise, deeply felt expressions and take them into our own communications as we move through life?

This has been a driving force behind Mightyverse.

Imagine being able to say, “Wow, that’s extraordinary, thank you!” or “I love cheese!” in all 7000+ languages spoken today.

With community based language recording efforts by the Rosetta Project, Internet Archives (and in our small contribution, Mightyverse) that has some chance of becoming possible.

We can’t think of better partners in the social mission side of Mightyverse than The Rosetta Project and The Internet Archives. The Record-a-thon tomorrow is going to be a really fun start to that collaboration.

Many thanks to the event sponsors, organizers and supporters, including Dr. Laura Welcher of The Rosetta Project, Brewster Kahle, founder of The Internet Archives, and Elizabeth Lindsey, keynote speaker.

Stay tuned to see the recordings post event!

-Paul

When You Can't Click the Flash Player Allow Button

We’ve been working on a very cool web recording feature for Mightyverse. One of the reasons that it is not quite ready for prime time is a bug in the Flash Player where sometimes you can’t click the “Allow” button in the microphone/camera privacy dialog. (It happens when the SWF is not aligned to a pixel boundary, which happens quite frequently in normal CSS/HTML layout.)

Flash Player 10.3 was released on Friday, which is supposed to fix the issue. You can download it here, or you may follow the detailed steps below to workaround the bug.

Right-click (or control-click on the mac) and a menu like the one below will appear:

Choose “Global Settings…” and the Flash Player system preferences will open (sometimes this takes 10-15 seconds). Then select the “Camera and Mic” panel (1) and click “Camera and Microphone Settings by Site…” (2).

A panel will drop down displaying the sites that have asked you for camera or microphone permissions. Click the [+] button in the lower left corner:

Next type the full hostname “www.mightyverse.com” as the site domain and select “Allow” from the popup and click “Add.”

Click “Close” (and optionally close the system preferences window) and then refresh the browser page. Now the privacy dialog should not appear and the site will have access to your camera and microphone. Whew!

Brand Localization Challenges

In doing some research into localized SEO this weekend, I found an awesome blog post that well describes the difference between localization and SEO translation.

As an example of localization challenges, it reports “an Iranian soap product line is called ‘Barf‘, which actually means ‘snow’ in Farsi, but becomes ‘vomiting’ in English.” I tweeted this excellent example, and learned from @adamwride that Argentina actually has a line of hamburger patties named “Barfy”!

@mightyverse not sure what the origin was. Just a brand. Fwiw... on Twitpic

Using our fun, new not-yet-publicly released web recording interface, I recorded some English phrases for the occasion: