PW2 Web Blog

Integrating Media, Marketing, and Technology.

Regular features include S’M (Social Media) Tuesday, Thriv’Able Thursday, and S’Monday (Social Media) Tips.

 

Thriv’Able Thursday (I): Linguee Translation Tool

Contributed by Rick DeVan on September 9, 2010 at 7:00 am ET

Resource: Linguee — The Web as a Dictionary

With Linguee, you can search many millions of bilingual texts for words and expressions. Every expression is accompanied by useful additional information and suitable example sentences.

Translation tools such as Google Translate are very useful when translating well-written, non-emotional texts with good sentence structure. Articles in LeMonde translate almost perfectly to English.

Problems may arise, though, when translating common Web sites of ordinary people, Facebook posts of the functionally less-than-literate, and Twitter tweets of Laotian Justin Bieber fans (there must be a few of them).

Linguee may offer a solution. (There is no solution for Justin Bieber fans but that’s OK. The world needs teen idols and bodyguards need jobs.)

I translated one of my favorite expressions — For goodness sake! — into German and came up with: “Um Himmels willen!” or “For Heavens sake!” and “in Gottes Namen” (you can figure that one out).

Google Translate gave me “um Gottes willen!” or “for God’s sake!”, which is subtly closer to the meaning in the original English.

What makes Linguee different and very useful is that it provided a list of twenty or so alternate uses and translations in context and used in sentences.

Linguee is now in my bookmarks.

Achtung! Deutschsprachigen.

 

Resource via WebWorkerDaily.

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Filed under Life, Work, and Society, Thrivability

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Comments and discussion are welcome on the PW2 Web Facebook Page up to four weeks after publication date.

 

Getting It: Seth Godin

Contributed by Rick DeVan on September 7, 2010 at 5:30 pm ET

Resource: If you want to learn to do marketing…

The best way to learn marketing is to do it.

If you know Seth Godin’s work you know he gets it”… big time.

If you do not know, you need to.

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Filed under Business and Commerce, Marketing

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Comments and discussion are welcome on the PW2 Web Facebook Page up to four weeks after publication date.

 

Getting It: Perspectives

Contributed by Rick DeVan on at 5:07 pm ET

Resource: Open House: Are Fans Loyal, Opportunistic or Just Suckers for a Pretty Face?

The NYTimes.com sends both their art critic and Sunday magazine editor to cover the U.S. Open.

Wonderful.

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Filed under Getting It, Life, Work, and Society, Media

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Comments and discussion are welcome on the PW2 Web Facebook Page up to four weeks after publication date.

 

S’M Tuesday (I): Twiget for Opera

Contributed by Rick DeVan on at 7:00 am ET

Resource: Stay on top of Twitter with Twiget

Twitter addicts rejoice! The Twitter Opera widget gives you an easy way to tweet and check your twitter feed without opening a browser.

If you are reading this from the U.S. you may have no idea that a browser named “Opera” exists. It does and although it represents only about 1% of Web browser usage worldwide, that is more than 12,000,000 users. Miniscule compared to IE’s almost 1 billion users, but bigger is not always better. You could ask Howard Hughes about this concept if he was not a dead recluse.

Opera is my browser of choice.

Twiget is very easy and it sits comfortably right on your desktop. My only issue with it so far is that I would like be able to re-size the display window.

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Middle Class Is Vanishing, The Next Big Thing Is Still Unseen

Contributed by Rick DeVan on at 7:00 am ET

Resource: Middle class vanishing as new hires divide into high-paid professionals, low-paid everyone else: Analysis

Job creation will likely remain weak for months or even years. But once employers do step up hiring, some economists expect job openings to fall mainly into two categories of roughly equal numbers:

Professional fields with higher pay. Think lawyers, research scientists and software engineers.

Lower-skill and lower-paying jobs, like home health care aides and store clerks.

And those in between? Their outlook is bleaker. Economists foresee fewer moderately paid factory supervisors, postal workers and office administrators.

Technology spurred job growth after the 1982 and 1991 recessions. The PC became revolutionary in the early 1980s. Internet use exploded after the Mosaic Web browser was introduced in 1994. Housing eventually lifted employment after the 2001 dot-com bust.

“There’s a lack of clarity on what the next big thing is going to be this time,” said David Card, an economics professor at the University of California.

Resource: Weekend Reading: Optimism, Pessimism, Realism… and Opportunity

First, say “Ugh”. Then, find the opportunity. These are not just economic changes.

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