fanfou, twitter, blogs, nciku.com, and google translator working together

I am leaving or China in 5 days and thought I would check to see how possible it would be to post to Twitter from China. I will be renting a cell phone, but text messages to the US are expensive, and texting to Twitter from China means sending an SMS to the U.K. A quick google search turned up this very helpful workaround from Pandapassport: sign up for Fanfou.com, China’s version of Twitter, then send the feed to Twitter using Twitterfeed. Nifty. But fanfou is all in Chinese! I managed to sign up for fanfou (jolifanta’s fanfou page) by deciphering some basic Chinese. Fanfou’s UI is exactly like Twitter, so I could pretty much guess what the text was based on placement on Twitter. I had some help in this with nciku.com, my favorite online Chinese dictionary, which lets you DRAW the characters! You just need a basic knowledge of stroke order rules and voila, you can look up any word without knowing those pesky radicals.

Signing up for twitterfeed was easy in comparison (although I have yet to see my fanfou upodate appear in my Twitter feed…crossing my fingers). Next problem–how to verify my Chinese phone for fanfou?? Crap, my Chinese isn’t good enough to tackle this: despite the photos, I have no idea what this is saying. It is way too much for nciku translation, one character at a time. So I tried Google agian. I googled the url for this page and in google search results hit “translate” – voila! “No plug rice blog!” Well, yeah, it’s not the perfect translation, but it was enough for me to get the gist. And I could even navigate within the translator to other pages, where I found the SMS phone number that I will (hopefully) be able to use to send updates to fanfou. Phew…we’ll find out in a few days if all this works.

New Year’s Reading

I am gradually coming out of my December hibernation (during which I did a lot of knitting and cooking) and have been scanning the ethernet over the past couple of days, seeing what’s new out there. Reading, absorbing. As usual, Beth’s Blog is superbly entertaining and useful. She and others have been writing a lot about Twitter lately. A colleague also sent me a link to an excellent blog about education and technology on PBS’s site called Learning.now. There, I discovered Twittories, which are basically exquisite-corpse-like stories written collaboratively in 140-word episodes using Twitter posts. Super cool! I subscribed to one Twittory authored by a class of middle schoolers.

Another hot topic out there seems to be finding new ways to learn from and leverage user traffic and search data. Through Seb Chan’s post on the Pwerhouse museum blog I discovered the New York Times’ awesome (i.e. incredibly useful) blog Open. Yesterday on this blog the NYT announced a new feature using their search data to cluster queries. It’s called Also Try. Of course, Seb is interested in this because of his own work with metrics on the Museum front. And then there was the study by some folks at UTAustin to de-anonymize a sub-set of Netflix data. Yikes! This is scary stuff. This study was referenced by quite a few posts that I found through my wordpress technology tag feed such as “Breaking the Netflix Prize Dataset“.

Finally, I played some games. A paper on the Journal of Online Education led me to this great wiki: Teaching Educational Games Resource. There is a link to a great documentary there about the current state of the video game world: Beyond Pong. Then I found Larry Ferlazzo’s list of the top 10 online learning games of 2007. That list kept me busy. My favorites there were Launchball and Qtoro (I noticed quite a few British sites on this list, especially from the BBC – somebody across the pond knows what’s up!). Qtoro is a sort of social networking site merged with trivial pursuit. I predict that something revolutionary will happen here….