Yesterday's discussion about language translation on-the-fly (make sure you read the comments) is taking a new turn. Brent Ashley (he who figured out how I could provide an abridged RSS feed for my site) is taking his fascinating BlogChat tool to a whole new level with language translation. Bear witness:

"I've been playing with realtime translation with BlogChat. I'm at a pretty early proof-of-concept stage, but have used it to good effect already. Here's a capture of a session:

It's simple to use and quite fast. I've got a whole bunch of ideas of how to build a useful translating chat. Time to leap into the conversation, I guess!"

This is great news, and kudos to Brent for this work. Of course, my next question is how do we get on-the-fly translation into news aggregators, but I'm sure we're a ways off from that.

Presence of Mind

"cwcoxjr (10:33:15 AM): the UC PDA thing is similar to a project at PARC — part of the Ubiquitous Computing project
cybrarygal (10:33:38 AM): yeah, just more "mainstream"
cwcoxjr (10:35:30 AM): presence is very important. I know "where" you are by your AIM presence, for example.
cwcoxjr (10:35:51 AM): eventually, Radio will know where you are by your AIM [or Jabber] presence
cybrarygal (10:36:07 AM): or your news aggregator
cwcoxjr (10:40:39 AM): makes no sense to deliver the newspaper to your house when you're on vacation" [The Peanut Gallery]

Part of an IM chat Will and I had this morning that highlights why I told Adam that I think aggregators have to start going mobile. One reason I like Radio's aggregator is that I can access it remotely, but I don't think it would hold up well on a PDA (although I have never verifiied this). I want my news whenever and wherever I am.

"Yahoo groups in your news aggregator. Somehow I had totally missed this feature of Yahoo Groups. In the case that somebody else might have missed it too, if you submit: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Group_name/messages?rss=1 to your aggregator, you will get all posts submitted to that group in your favourite news reader. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]

Cool, I subscribed to klog and will probably subscribe to a few others as I figure out which email lists I'm on use Yahoo." [Adam Wendt's Agnostic Audiophile Smorgasborg]

It's too bad the flashing ads and outages are forcing so many lists off of Yahoo Groups, because this is a great idea. If we were to start using Mailman at SLS, is there a way to set this up so that messages sent to a list can go to an aggregator as well?

We want to share information. Really, we do.

At SLS, we have something called "The Weekly Reader." It's a folder full of announcements, program flyers, and newsletters from other libraries and Library Systems - all on paper. There's a list of 15 people on the front, and it gets routed from one person to the next. Right now, I'm reading the WR from the week of March 16, which is actually pretty good. It takes me a long time to get around to reading WRs when I get them specifically because I have to find time to integrate it into my daily routine. I received this edition on June 3, and I'll pass it on to the next person today, June 12. That's a great turnaround time for me, but the whole process is way too slow for sharing information. Most of the stuff in it is from January and February, which means I'm now six months behind the information curve. Monthly newsletters just aren't cutting it anymore.

And apparently I'm not the only one that's having trouble reading the WR in a timely fashion because I'm second-to-last on the list, so it's taken three months to get to me. What's the solution? Ideally, news aggregators. Half of the paper in the folders tends to be newsletters from the other 11 Library Systems in Illinois. If they were blogging the news on a daily basis, I would have seen the news items THAT DAY, rather than months later. I know it will be even longer before I can get my member libraries into my aggregator, but we as System agencies really need to examine how to use RSS and news aggregation for information exchange, archiving information (once the WR pages go to the next person, I'll never know where to find them), and knowledge management.

My goal is to have SLS on the forefront of such a movement using Radio by the end of the summer. I want to be the proof-of-concept that illustrates the benefits and advantages of this approach. We can no longer afford to remain months behind in sharing information!

P.S. Illinois State Library, you're next on my list!

RSS Hits Exceed Home Page Hits

"Yesterday, my RSS feed got more hits than the home page, and my RSS feed has been up for less than a week. Home page hits are off significantly, which tells me that a number of people who used to hit the site several times a day (you wonderful people) have plugged my site into their RSS aggregator. Granted, depending on the feed reader you use, you might be hitting the site 50 times a day with it, so there's no way to tell how many people are actually using the RSS feed (well, there is, but not with the tool I'm using for log analysis), but it does seem to have taken off like a rocket." [rc3.org]

"Paolo: 'It's important to consider that 'set of news sources' could also mean reports generated by your accounting software, status of your servers, posts in a discussion group, orders from your e-commerce site, updates from your co-workers workflow management software..' Thanks Paolo, that's absolutely true." [Scripting News]

Kind of ties in with my earlier post about Adam's aggregator ideas, too.