PREPARING FOR MAX (OR MULTILINGUAL BLOG AGGREGATORS)

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 16 2003 @ 11:18 PM

I'm still not going. As a matter of fact I'm starting a new big project the very first day of MAX. However, I was looking into ways to keep up with the happenings of the event from here. I found MAX Bloggers.

Max Bloggers turns out to be the first aggregator that includes non-english blogs in the mix (in our little universe of Macromedia related stuff). However, I can't say MAX Bloggers is a multilingual aggregator, since it doesn't offer any way to filter the languages I am able to read. There's a discussion going on already over at Rewindlife on the subject, so I don't want to talk more about that specific site, but maybe about why popular aggregators do not support multilingual blogs.

Last time I checked with Macromedia, the Exchanges were english-only, and I would think the same policy could apply to MXNA. It would be great if somebody from Macromedia could either confirm or refute this. In the other hand, Full as a Goog and Flog haven't included non-english blogs as of yet, but being both very small operations, we can see multilingual support is nothing you can implement overnight. However, I know Geoff has something in hands at the moment, that's all I can say.

Programming language filters and multilingual feeds support is not much of a problem compared to quality assurance. Including a blog to a subject-specific aggregator usually requires a review to measure the blogs relevance. Thing is, how many languages do the people behind the aggregators speak? In order to include a broader selection of blogs, they would either have to learn some more languages or get some extra help.

Archived under: Flash. | Permalink | google | del.icio.us Is it delicious? | digg Do you digg it?