Why hasn’t Starbucks moved into Italy yet?

Interesting: in Japan, half of the top sellers in books are written for mobile phones. The writer goes on to say: “I can’t see anyone in Western nations waking up tomorrow and seeing mobile phone composed novels on the top seller lists, but usually Japan is years ahead on many tech fronts”.

That right there is an expression of a common misunderstanding I think: that there is a technical road that all cultures follow. That technological evolution is somehow independent of the culture in which it grows. That there is a “road”, on which Japan might be “ahead”. Which is the wrong way to think about this. Japan makes different choices as a society, including different technology choices. They’re not necessarily ahead or behind; they’re on their own path.

Related: even when different cultures use the same technology, they’ll often assign different values to it. This post on Japanese bloggers illustrates that nicely: “Japan’s conformist culture has embraced a technology that Americans often use for abrasive self-promotion and refashioned it as a soothingly nonconfrontational medium for getting along.”

Now we’re talking.

A good overview of what’s happening on the internet in Estonia (ie. lots).

Via zephoria: a paper (download PDF) on “Language Networks on LiveJournal”. Livejournal has a huge Russian community, apparently disconnected from the English (and Japanese) communities. Fascinating stuff.

Chinese Youths Crazy for English Alphabet Tattoos. Funny: “The guy at the tattoo shop told me this means brave and proud warrior in English.”

How do you count words automatically (so you can charge by the word) as a translator for languages like Japanese, Thai, Khmer, Cambodian or Chinese, that don’t separate words with spaces or any other delimiter?

The penchant for cuteness, especially in Japan, is well known. So I wasn’t surprised to see these emoticons on dongA.com. Much better than the western popular varieties, that tend to be quite boring.

I love checking out Japanese websites, even though I still don’t speak Japanese.

I went to check: it turns out Yahoo’s country list doesn’t have Iran in it anymore. Here’s a screenshot:

And the Iranians are understandably not happy: Letter to Yahoo: "Yahoo mail has recently removed "Iran" from the list of world countries in its signup page! We, the nation of Iran, assume it contrary to professional ethics to deny a nation and violate fundamental human rights for any reason, including the so-called political tensions between states and governments."

So what internal or external politics caused this to happen? Are other US-based companies doing this? I don’t think it’s right, and I would be *very* offended if this happened to my country.

I was playing around with the excellent Google translate tool, and I noticed something cool:

They let users suggest better translations. Nice example of crowdsourcing translation!

(I’m not the first one to notice and be fascinated, either.)

(via Silver Oliver who works at the BBC): Do tag clouds work in Chinese? (Chinese translation of this article). Rex Wong talks about the alphabetical ordering problems of non-alphabetical languages, problems sizing up Chinese fonts, and the mixing of Chinese characters and English words.

At the end of the day, though, tag clouds do seem to work fine in Chinese, as they do in Japanese. The alphabetical ordering algorythm is kind of irrelevant because tag clouds guide the eye mostly by size (a tag cloud is not used for known-item searching, where alphabetical ordering matters, but for serendipitous discovery).

Also, collation algorythms that order these languages in a “good enough” manner already exist and are built into the infrastructure we use (programming languages and databases), so you can probably safely forget about this.

I’ve been told that in Japan, tag clouds are pretty popular and work well.

Chinese tag cloud:

Japanese tag cloud:

How about tag clouds in other languages? Please point me to examples of tag clouds in as many languages as you can find, I want to try to make a collection.

Another issue of course is if you aggregate lots of content and tags, how do you deal with mixed-language tag clouds? Here’s an (older) example of mixed languages in a tagcloud:

The best approach seems to be to separate out tagclouds in different languages. There are automatic ways to do that (I have to research some more what the best ways are), and then present a tagcloud to the user in their language. (Some more thoughts on this.)

A note about alphabetical ordering of none alphabetical languages (like Chinese or Japanese): it often is possible to order these languages, using an alternative collation system called radical and stroke ordering. Below is a screenshot of an “alphabetical” index in Japanese.

And a question to finish this off: for our Japanese speakers: what is Taggy?