Sometimes web sites and services that use crowd sourcing just work, and one great example of this is Forvo.com, a site that has over a million pronunciations of nearly as many words in 268 languages. What better way to promote your winery than to join this site and pronounce the name of every wine you make?

Pavillon Rouge du Château Margaux

So all the great Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Austrian, Swiss, French and winemakers, get your boots on, roll up your sleeves and say the names for us! And if you're not into wine, join and pronounce some words in your language, just to add to the world's knowledge base!

Take a look at the list of requested words, can you help? It just takes a moment to enrich human knowledge forever.

It's one thing to grow a language, adding foreign words in common usage. It can also happen by modifying existing ones like Chris Borgan's recent use of shareability - perfectly logic and understandable. Funny by the way, Chris was challenged about the existence of the word, but he didn't inventshareability, I just saw a reference to it from a 1986 article and hundreds more recent.

Inventing a whole new language of web nomenclature and navigation is something we're occasionally asked to do by customers. Simply stated, here's why this is not a good idea. The way you visit web sites is a kind of language. Everyone expects to find information like contact, visit, menus, wine lists, technical product data, company background, opening hours, etc. They expect this to be in a language they know, the one they've seen on a million other sites.

 

The temptation to be too creative is strong, and I have erred more than once in that direction. One day I thought it would be cool, instead of calling the search "Search" we'd call it "Find". It works on a level where you read it in a text like this, but not on the level of the scan you do when you first reach a site. Most ergonics folks will tell you the first 20 seconds are when the critical decision to invest in actually reading a web site takes place.

A commercial web site can, in effect, be a visual answering machine. Realizing what the visitor is most anxious to find there is your number one priority.  Here's a funny thing that happened to me in California, when I wanted to reserve a table in a restaurant. I went to the web site, which was one page. It had all of the information I wanted right then: address, directions to get there, phone number, open hours, and descriptive stuff I skipped, since I already knew all about it and wanted to book a table there. Now here's where it gets funny: I called the "Reservations" number, which was shared by the same owner's other restaurant. Here's what I heard:

Thank you for calling *****. We are open from **** to *** Monday thru Friday and from *** to *** Saturday. Sunday hours are *** to ***.

We are located at ********, across the street from **** and just around the corner from ****. We are proud to announce the opening of our new restaurant ***** this summer. (Long description follows....)

"For Restaurant A, press one. For restaurant B, press 2"

How long would it take you to figure out that the last line of this message should have been the first?

Ebay, Paypal, Orange do not care about their users, customer experience or service. They just want your money.

 Listen, Google

What part of "preferred language" do you not understand?

Every browser has a list of languages the user would like to see, in order of preference. I even tried to remove French from this list, but

No matter what I do, when I am in France, my language is set to French, except where I can change them manually (gmail, google apps).

photo www.ronmartin.net

Ok, this doesn't affect huge numbers of people, but hey, a lot of social networking folks are on the road a lot.

I just tried to join Social Wok using my Gmail address and then my Google Apps addres. Both are set to English. Yet, in both cases, French was imposed on the initial signup and it isn't changeable. (The signup submit was shown in French, I can read French but what if I was in Turkey, China or even Germany?)

So, I brought up a proxy, making my IP look like it was in New York, and guess what?

Google now shows me as an English speaker. Dammit, what about the browser prefs I set to English?

 

Make it easy for users to change language settings and retain these

If you can't find a way to read the browser settings and respect these (and any beginner programmer knows how to do this, so don't pretend it's difficult), at least put a language selector in a very visible place. This isn't just me, there are countless threads about every Google product asking how to change the language. It took them two years to fix YouTube!

Places: Minneapolis, Bellevue, Seattle, Berkeley, Mill Valley, Fresno,Costa Mesa, Newport Beach, Iowa City, San Antonio, Eagle Rock, Highland Park, Manhattan Beach, Silverlake, Montecito Heights, Simi Valley, Van Nuys, Venice, Paris, Bordeaux. Every place I've lived has a separate and distinct vibe. What creates a vibe?

Air quality and odors, noise level, population density, architecture,advertising, language, regional accents, expressions of people on the street (where there are streets and people on them). Also, the relations you have with people from those you pass on the street to neighbors to those with whom you live. The look you got on the street in say, Mill Valley where every single resident would say "hello" and smile and nod to everyone they met would be so much different than the experience in Chicago, L.A. or Paris.

I recall the first time I set foot in Paris, for example, in the late 1970's. The first sensory impression was the very heavy odor of diesel fumes. Paris is very polluted by cars. Cars bring noise, too, and myfirst morning in the Hotel Boëtie, a symphony of car horns was my wakeup call. Paris is densely populated, so there's lots of street noise and activity as well. Delivery people calling out to each other, buses, pedestrians. Out on that street, when you pass a café, you can smell the espresso. Often, walking by a bakery you can smell the bread or croissants fresh from the oven. All this in spite of the diesel fumes.You used to see teams of men sweeping the water by in the gutters with"brooms" with bottoms which, although plastic, were green and made to look like branches in a fractal sort of way.

Life in Paris was radically different than the one I had left in L.A.and every day was a new discovery. The first days in the hotel, before Ifound a place to rent, were quite an adventure. Much of my French practice was done in the tiny bar there in the hotel, because I quickly discovered that in order to overcome the sensation of expressing oneself at the level of a four year old, some kind of anti-inhibition method was needed. Either sex or alcohol work well for this, but at that point in time I was limited to the latter, so in the evenings I often spoke tobusiness people passing through. It was great fun, and my French improved considerably during the first week by the total immersion. The staff was great, too. At night, there was an Egyptian student who patiently helped me improve my vocabulary in areas the books don't usually cover. During the day, the Spanish clerk was friendly and helpful and the maids were adorable.

In the second week, a tech was sent to help me and he was ready to accept the offer of a "girlfriend" that one of the night staff had been suggesting we try since he'd arrived. The call was made to arrange this.We were sitting in the bar when a lovely Eurasian woman came and sat down next to me with a big smile. She asked in French about my astrology. Since I'd lived through the L.A. days of people asking that, I should have had no trouble understanding it but I knew she was D's "girlfriend". I will call her W for woman. Here's the rest of that conversation in my improving by the moment, but still not ready for prime time French:

W: "What's your sign, baby? "

R: "I do not have any children."

W: "No I mean like Goat, Fish..."

R: "I do not have animals, either."
W: "What is you as-tr-lo-gi-ca-l sign?"

R: "Ah. Yes. I have been a Cancer, but it is only that my friend who he telephoned for yourself. You are for me not here."
W: "So, how does one do?"

R: "Fine. How do you do?"

W: "No, I meant, how can we make the switch politely?"

R: "What Switch. The light switch?"

W: "Are you being stupid on purpose, or what?" (Smiling)

R: "Ok, I see what you are meaning. I will erect myself and move myself to the bar of whiskey. Then you will move yourself over on the leather thing to be next to my friend."

When they went upstairs, I felt lonely but oddly fulfilled by mylinguistic experience. I like the idea that languages used to be called "tongues". That's what ties together the experience of the four of usand makes it coherent. I'd never forget Paris. Maybe that's why I moved back and lived there for over 25 years.