Lingro has been invited to present at the upcoming Web Innovators Group meeting this Wednesday (April 2nd) in Boston! WebInno is a really exciting event for the Boston startup scene, and most of the companies that we've seen present at previous meetings had very cool ideas (such as SpotScout - creating a market for unused parking spaces, and GlassBooth - providing information to help people choose political candidates). Last time we were there the turnout was somewhere between 400-500 people!
WebInno is free and open to the public - if you're in the area, it's definitely worth checking out. If you're there, be sure to find us and say hi!
Cheers,
The Lingro Team
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Presenting at WebInno17
New on Lingro: personalized home page!
Since our last big site update, we've been working on improving the look and feel of Lingro's front page. We put the newest batch of changes online earlier this week - here's a picture of the new section of the front page:
After you've visited a site through the web viewer, you'll see a summary of your recent activity on the front page along with links to your complete Lingro browsing and word lookup history. If you haven't looked up words on any pages through Lingro, you'll see a sample of recently looked-up words by other users.
These additions should make it easier for new users to learn about how Lingro can help you learn new vocabulary by showing the words you've looked up along with their context.
Is there anything else you'd like to see on the main page? Send us a message or leave a comment!
Peace,
The Lingro Team
Great Blog: Liquid E-Learning
For a while, I've been reading a blog called Liquid E-Learning by Michelle Gallen. While the blog covers a range of e-learning topics, Michelle pays special attention to language-learning sites such as LiveMocha, italki, palabea, voxswap, SlovoEd, and Talk Irish (her own brand-new Irish language learning site). You can get a good feel of the focus and features of the sites from her posts. She also includes her take on each site, discussing highlights as well as areas that are lacking. As she puts it in the blog's description, "what's new, what works and what's plain daft."
Liquid E-learning is great for anyone looking to find new language learning sites and get the low-down before devoting time trying them out. It's also invaluable for us as designers to get a feel of what works and what doesn't on other sites when we're building new tools for Lingro.
Speaking of new tools for Lingro, Michelle's blog is now sporting the Lingro badge. I would expect a popular blog like hers with lots of language-learning content to have a decent number of readers who don't speak English as their first language. With the badge, those readers have a quick way to open Liquid E-Learning in the web viewer. The blog also includes the Lingro contributor (scroll to the bottom of the site), which lets multilingual readers help build Lingro's open dictionaries by giving them a way to contribute missing translations.
Liquid E-learning is definitely worth a read. If you know of any other good language-learning blogs, feel free to leave a link in the comments.
~Paul
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Lingro's Growing!
Come check out all the new tools, dictionaries, and translations of Lingro’s pages!
Since our launch, we've received a lot of amazing feedback and requests from you, our users. We've been hard at work adding tools you've asked for, fixing problems you've found, and adding new dictionaries you've requested. Here's a run-down of everything new you'll be able to see on the site:
Lingro in your language
Users have been coming to Lingro from around the world, especially from the U.S. and Europe. To make the site easier to use and accessible by more people, we've added translations of Lingro's pages into German, Polish, French, Spanish, and Italian! To set the language you see Lingro in, click "preferences" on the right side of the toolbar at the bottom.
If you speak German or Polish, you can also use http://lingro.de or http://lingro.pl for quick access to Lingro in your language.
It's a fact - learning new words in context not only helps you remember vocabulary, but helps you develop a deeper understanding of their meaning. You've been able to look up words in context with the web viewer and file viewer - now you can review words in context too! The sentence history page lets you see all the sites you've read with Lingro, along with the words you've clicked on and the sentences those words were in. Try coming back to your Sentence History a few hours after you've read a page and see how many words you remember.
Do you have a blog or a website with international readers? Here are some great ways to give these readers a hand, without having your writing lost in translation with Babel Fish or Google Translator. You'll also be showing your support for open, community-developed dictionaries!
By putting the Lingro Badge in the sidebar of your blog or on your website, you'll let your readers open your page in the web viewer with a single click! Multilingual readers will be able to read your website much more easily since they can look up new words with a single click. They'll also be spending more time on your site, which is great for you if you're supported by ads.
You can try it out right now on our blog - you should see the badge on the right.
Are you as enthusiastic about open-content as we are? We designed the contributor along with our friends at Worldwide Lexicon (check out their site if you haven't already!) to let your readers contribute translations missing from the Lingro dictionaries. The contributor figures out which language a reader uses on their computer, and prompts them with words from a second language to translate.
Check it out on the bottom of our blog.
The Lingro API gives you a way to invisibly add Lingro translation bubble capability to your page. Just add one line of HTML code and set the class of any element on your page to "lingro_container" to let users click on words inside for instant translations. This is especially useful for sites with interactive multilingual content (such as language-learning social networking sites) where users will frequently encounter words they are unfamiliar with.
Help build dictionaries
Lots of people have been asking us, "How can I help build the dictionaries?" Here's our answer: the dictionary builder. In a nutshell, it shows you words missing from Lingro's dictionaries, and lets you enter translations and definitions for these words. It even shows you a few sentences which use these words to help you get an idea of their meaning. The missing words shown to you are ordered by how commonly they occur in the language, so you can be sure that your time is spent working on something meaningful. Everything you contribute will be available under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license and the GNU Free Documentation license so that your work is made free and open to the world!
As you can see, we've started a blog! You'll be able to check here for all the latest Lingro news on new tools and dictionaries, and maybe even some thoughts on language and linguistics from Lingro's creators.
Last but not least, improved dictionaries (including Swedish!)
A lot of you asked for Swedish translations. We heard you - Lingro now has Swedish dictionaries! They're still relatively small, but with your help, they'll grow! If you know of anyone fluent in Swedish and another language on Lingro, point them towards the dictionary builder. :-)
Since we're asking you to contribute translations, it's only fair that we should also be doing our part to keep the dictionaries growing. We've been hard at work searching for more open dictionaries to add to Lingro's existing languages. You should notice fewer missing words in most of the dictionaries on Lingro, as well as a huge improvement in the Polish dictionaries. Check out our redesigned statistics page for all the details.
We just wanted to say another giant thank-you to everyone who's tried the site out, and especially to all the people who have blogged about us and sent us feedback. If you ever have any suggestions for Lingro, please don't hesitate to shoot us an e-mail at feedback@lingro.com, or post a comment here.
Peace,
The Lingro Team
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