Microblogs and the monolingual

Twitter-like microblogging seems a nice granularity for following thoughts expressed in languages you don’t speak.

In 1988 I passed my French language GCSE exam; it’s been downhill all the way since. A year ago in Argentina, I got to the stage where I could just about express myself in Spanish. But it’s been fading. Nevertheless I’m on the websemantique (french) and web-semantica-ayuda (spanish) lists (this is the good influence of Chaals from W3C and SWAD-Europe days), and will try to follow and occasionally respond (usually just a perhaps-relevant link). It’s a good exercise for English speakers to do, to remind them how many folk experience the primarily English-language dialog that dominates the technology scene.

So just now I happened to notice CharlesNepote’s name on Twitter, from the websemantique list. And in reading his twitter stream, I realised this: twitter posts in a foreign language are easier to follow than either full blog posts, email threads or realtime IM/IRC chat. It’s a nice level of granularity that can bridge language communities a little, since someone with fading schoolkid or tourist knowledge of another language can use and reinforce it by reading microblogs in it.

A related SemWeb use case: yesterday in #foaf we had someone asking about RDF who would rather have spoken Italian. It should be easier to find the members of a multi-language community who can help in such cases. We have SemWeb vocabulary that lets people declare what language they speak, read, or write; and there are ways of expressing interests in topics, or membership of a community. What we’re missing is stable, reliable and queryable aggregates of data expressed in those terms. I think we can change that in 2008…

Syndicated 2008-01-04 16:10:26 from danbri's foaf stories