digitalBuzz!

 Yet another milestone from PollDaddy. If you have not already heard, PollDaddy is a platform that powers polling and survey widgets, which has served over half a million online users around the world to date. PollDaddy is owned by Automattic, the creative and industrious company behind one of the most popular blogging platforms ever (my humble opinion), WordPress.

Polling and survey applications are always popular and useful, allowing interactions between website owners and visitors. An independent third-party platform like PollDaddy is also especially important to web entity which does not provide native support for polls and surveys, i.e. blogger.com.

As blogger.com user myself, I have easily integrated PollDaddy widgets into my blogs and I am glad that they work reliably and professionally. There are no doubt other poll widgets for blogger.com but unfortunately I could name any which has as much potential and as easy to use as PollDaddy widgets. PollDaddy recently announced that its Facebook App is now ready for use:

Announcing the new PollDaddy Facebook App

PollDaddy provides many ways for user to participate in polls and surveys. Its widgets can be integrated in any websites or blogs that support Javascript (like the one on this blog’s sidebar, can you find it?), it has its own Facebook and Myspace apps, there is a plugin for WordPress blogs, Flash poll is also available for sites that don’t support Javascript and one can also send emails containing polls for the recipients to participate in conveniently.

PollDaddy has two types of account: free and pro account. The free account is powerful enough for most individual website owners. You can always try out its features with a free account and only upgrade to pro account if you have such need. Don’t take my words for it, try it out yourself today.

HAPPY POLLING

And don’t forget to share your findings with us

Comments are welcomed. What do you use for polling/surveys? What you think of PollDaddy’s service?

Are you living an internet lifestyle? No, I don’t mean sitting all day long at home with your pajamas and cashing your checks the same way too (for work at home entrepreneurs or business owners). Sorry, I meant social internet lifestyle. In plain words, do you “hang out” in MySpace and Facebook?

Who doesn’t? Right.

What about Twitter, LiveJournal, Blogger, plurk, Wordpress.com, etc? Do you use them too?

If your answer is yes, I am sure you find it troublesome to upload same set of pictures, videos, documents, audios and other files on different social networking sites, micro blogging sites, platforms, etc. in an attempt to share your latest exploits of life with family and friends.

If you do not feel so yet, you most definitely would in the near future as you take a deeper plunge into internet interactivity, which  only about 1/5 of the world’s population are doing as well. The emergence of more social community sites and even more micro niche sites just made sure of that too, even if the crowd you hangs out with do not grow (much) larger.

Fortunately, the solution is never far from the problems. Pixelpipe is the solution to our problems of having too many accounts to update. It is a content distribution service, a photo can be uploaded to all of your social networking sites or only those of your choice. You just have to upload once and Pixelpipe takes care of the rest. In the LOTR lingo, we would say it is the “1 service that distribute them all”.

How many sites can Pixelpipe distribute to?

At least 115 sites. The latest supported sites can be seen here.

How  to optimize my experience with Pixelpipe?

Pixelpipe aims to impress and make your life easier. To that end, it has many useful tools for (almost) everyone. For starters, you can have a media uploader right in your browser. You can also upload content with MMS through your mobile or with specific apps designed for different platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, Nokia, Android). Those tools are available here:

http://pixelpipe.com/tools

Lastly, content can also be shared by easily sending an email to a special address designated for your Pixelpipe account. Ain’t that convenient?

Kudos to the people at Pixelpipe! I am looking forward to busying myself learning how to use Pixelpipe to my advantage.

To people who are skeptical and paranoid, please don’t use this service. It require you to input your usernames and passwords before it can distribute content to your accounts. So by all means, stay away!

Less than a week ago, Google surprised us by announcing its new instant translation feature of its reliable language translation service Google Translate. Although this feature is nothing new among dozens of language translation and multi-language dictionary softwares, it took Google a few years before the Translate button is done away with. Now we can look forward to receiving instant translation as we type each word, it even analyzes and cross check with its database every time we type or remove an alphabet!

This is indeed a good news to both web users and developers. With this tool, language barrier among people from different regions is literally removed.

Unfortunately the structure and grammar of each language differ so much from others that it is almost impossible for Google translate to get all words and phrases right. Therefore, to help improve this tool, everyone should contribute to a better translation. When there are sufficient suggestions of better translations, they would be retained while the odd or incorrect translations would be discarded, making this tool more efficient than ever.

Google translate is actually performing quite well and I have used it often enough to tell that it does not take too much of an effort to be a universal  language translator with (little) errors in translation. Imagine the sheer amount of information which will be available to our children in the future. It’s a little scary, to be honest!

Apart from instant translation, other new features include transliteration, show romanization and text-to-speech. Transliteration helps translate from phonetic Hindi, Persian and Arabic when the user does not have the appropriate fonts or keyboard layout. With the show romanization option, a phonetic pronunciation guide will be provided to help you with less familiar script. Text-to-speech feature is currently only available when translating from other languages into English. The voice synthesiser is pleasant but it is not able to correctly speak of everything yet (a web address, for instance).

Finally, if any Google engineers are reading this, can you please improve the Google translate interface? I know Google does not place much emphasis on aesthetic values but a fresh design could mean more publicity and users for Google translate. Can you at least take this suggestion into consideration?

How often do you use Google translate? Do you use its translation page or use it on your site or your browser? Is there other services which you used to translate from one language to another?

AFP reported that Google has been ordered by the Brazilian court in Sao Paulo to pay $500,000 in damages to F1 racer Rubens Barrichelo for hosting fake online profiles of the driver on its popular social networking site Orkut.

You can read the story on many news site simply by googling the following suggested keywords:

google barrichelo orkut

The cost of damages may rise up to $700,000 because the case was lodged in July 2006 and Google runs the risk of a daily fine of $590 as long as the pages referring to Barrichelo were not removed.

It is believed that this case features the biggest amount of damages ever awarded for false web profiles and online libel in Brazil. The court arrived at the decision after determining Google’s responsibility which

was proved because it managed the site and established the rules for its use.

Sometimes the law is really a bitch, ain’t it? Especially when someone decides to take action according to the letter of the law and not the spirit of the law. This is prevalent and evident in civil cases. With all due respect to the Brazilian court, I understand that it is carrying out perfectly valid judgment according to civil law system. However, I cannot help but sympathize with Google and I feel that it is as much a victim as Barrichelo himself in this situation.

 WHY?

Take note that I am not learned in law, therefore my reasons were my personal opinions.

1. No doubt Google managed and still manages Orkut and it established the rules for its use. I am not sure if the terms of service (TOS) of Orkut has been updated since this case was lodged. However, a quick browse of the TOS revealed that the following is part of the rules for use of Orkut:
   

   5. Use of the Services by you

   5.1 In order to access certain Services, you may be required to provide information about yourself (such as identification or contact details) as part of the registration process for the Service, or as part of your continued use of the Services. You agree that any registration information you give to Google will always be accurate, correct and up to date.

   Obviously Google did not encourage anyone to create fake profiles and has stipulated that if users do not comply to any of the terms of the TOS, they are not allowed to continue using the service.

2. Even though Google’s responsibility to manage the site cannot be denied and it should periodically weed out questionable profiles, it is merely a service provide, not the person or party responsible for committing an offence. Ideally Google should be ordered to cooperate with complainant’s representatives to help identify the offenders and remove fake profiles of Barrichelo. A fine or subsequent fines should only be imposed if Google refuses to cooperate or delays carrying out administrative duties despite repeated complaints from Barrichelo’s represensatives.

Well, it is not in my place to discuss the morality of the civil law system, but it is worth spending some minutes thinking about it and taking measures to protect yourself.

Lastly, I hope the offenders who create fake profiles are identified and subjected to criminal charge. I think there must be some laws against unlawful impersonation with malicious or questionable intent.