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1. INTRODUCTION [TOC] This page provides some links to Internet 'Portal' sites dedicated to language learning. The word portal is used here in the sense of a site which really is a collection of links to other sites and resources. In this sense a portal is a kind of hyperlinked encyclopaedia. 2. NOTES [TOC] This page can also be seen as the documentation of the 'web-promotion' process which, as I see it, is the process of making other people aware of a resource on the Internet (presumably one that you yourself have an interest in, or have created). This is a process which I have very little experience of, but feel is important. An interesting example is the site 'matts script archive' [*]http://www.scriptarchive.com/) which contains a very limited and non-particularly-great set cgi-scripts but which has (and has had for about 5 years) a very strong Internet presence. The actual scripts themselves are not of particularly high quality and there are only about 10 of them and yet all the search engines (including google) seem to return this site on a search for 'cgi scripts' or 'web scripts' or something similar. The web presence of this site is so strong that the contributors to CPAN, the major Perl web code repository have deliberately written replacement scripts for all those obtainable on Matts script archive so that people will not be so tempted to use them. 3. A DISCUSSION OF THE PRINCIPLES OF WEB PRESENCE [TOC] By web-presence, I mean the profile and exposure of a web-site or a web application. This profile can be measured by such things as search engine rankings (and specifically in this day and age -may 2003- the Google search engine ranking), the ease with which a site is found through a search engine, as well as the number of distinct users of a web-site/application. This web-presence can be extremely important from a business point of view, but it can also be over-rated; some businesses (even software businesses) can function perfectly well without it (in my opinion). The discussion below is slightly garbled since many of the ideas occurred to me as I was writing, and necessarily, the ideas do not have firm 'statistical' or evidencial bases but are rather suggestions and proposals. One factor in the 'web-presence' of this site mentioned above (Matts script archive) is probably simply its age, and the fact that it was one of the first sites to do what it does, and offer something useful, and its predominance has continued to pervade. This is perhaps the first law of Internet presence; 1. Internet presence is a quality that must percolate through web-space and real-time in a way that cannot be described through any analytical formula. The percolation of web presence it essentially a chaotic and 'entropic' process which relies as much as anything on the passing of time. This law is demonstrated by Google itself which is gradually achieving total dominance, despite having no formal 'advertising' campaign. It is strange to consider, that Google's dominance has been achieved entirely through a kind of 'word of mouth'. This perhaps leads to the second law of 'web-presence' 2. Web presence cannot be dictated by any one central authority structure. The percolation of web-presence is completely decentralized (like the Internet itself) and therefore the traditional capitalist 'marketing' techniques are almost completely in-effective in obtaining 'web-presence'. This leads to my other putative principal of web-presence: That the action of quality and time through the medium of the Internet actually achieves everything that traditional marketing techniques have achieved in traditional capitalistic markets. My main evidence for this are the following enterprises. Google, Yahoo and Linux. While linux is more debatable, both Google and Yahoo offer stable, very high quality systems which through the action of time and Internet diffusion have become over-whelmingly dominating in their respective web spheres, despite limited traditional capitalistic marketing techniques. Also in the case of Yahoo, this may be debatable, considering the continued predominance of 'Hotmail' in the collective psyche. 3. This action of time leads to my third principle of web-presence: Continuity and Evolution. Since the web is such a dynamic and constantly fluxing medium, web users perhaps have a psychological need to have 'cornerstones' which allow them to orientate themselves. These cornerstone sites are web-sites/ applications which maintain continuity. It is the web-sites which can provide this continuity and stability which gradually but surely win the war of web-presence. The second part of this principle is 'Evolution'. A web site can harness the dynamism of the Internet by building an application in a very non-(software)-traditional way. That is: instead of having fixed, 'discreet' releases of software (or web-pages), the web site builders, can evolve the web-site/ web-application. An interesting (to me) example of the evolutionary approach to web-based (or lets say 'distributed' in order to be more general) software, is Google's automatic language translation engines. These engines for quite some time now, have been really quite poor. They make lots of obvious mistakes which rival translators dont make. But this hasn't stopped Google from publishing these web-based translation engines and providing the service. This is because Google employs an evolutionary approach and it knows that the low quality of its language translation engines is not going to in any way destroy peoples affection for their very high quality search engine service. This is a simple idea. Because the Google's translation engine service and the search engine service are completely seperate things (although it would be possible to integrate them) Google are able to employ an evolutionary approach to the development of their automatic language translation service. At this time (may 2003) I am beginning to notice that the Google translation engines are beginning to significantly improve, as I was sure that they would (not through prescience, but through consistency with the quality of their other systems). The point is that Google have actually achieved something significant by publishing their (low quality) translation engines when they were still in a kind of 'beta' state (which they acknowledge). They have achieved my 3rd principle of web-presence (and web-advertising) which is Continuity. Since traditional advertising is not particularly effective on the internet and the target users of a web-system (or distributed system) are too diverse both geographically and in 'personal profile' to really use normal capitalistic marketing techniques (advertising etc) , then the only way to notify people of a new feature or system, is to publish that system and use the natural entropy of the hyperlink to essentially do your advertising for you. At first most users wont notice the 'Translate this page' link on the Google search site, but gradually the system will percolate through to the 'collective consciousness'. It does this via the normal ways that information has been distributed in a traditional society (ie pre-capitalistic), through individual to individual communication, whether it is verbal or written, rather than through centrally dispersed advertising. In traditional software development this type of evolutionary development has been frowned apon and regarded as dangerous because of the possibility of introducing 'bugs' and errors into code that has already been tested. While this will probably seem a clicke, I feel this web-promotion process is analagous to casting a fishing net. The net must be very carefully prepared (all holes mended) but the net must be cast wide and be left for a significant amount of time. Also it must be expected that only a very small number of fish are going to be 'caught' for each square metre of net. In the case of web-promotion I think it is important that the need to cast a wide and comprehensive net does not tempt the promotor into using insensitive mass marketing techniques. Because the Internet is 'automatable' is is tempting to automate human relations and communication on the internet. By automatable, I mean that it is possible to use software, and develop software to solve problems of web-promotion and web-advertising. However, in my opinion, it is very important never ever to delegate the true communication process to software. For example, in some cases it may be justifiable to send a 'bulk email', that is an email to multiple recipients, in the style of a traditional 'form letter'. And in some cases it may even be justifiable to automate this bulk emailing process (using some kind of scheduling service for example). However, as I see it, the more comprehensive and powerful the software solution employed is, the greater the danger that the true communication process will be mangled and destroyed. One reason for this is that human beings have a natural dislike and instinctive revulsion to fake communication. This is possibly an important 'survival instinct'. My argument is that the genuine communication process is far too important in the web-promotion process to endanger it by using facile and simplistic software solutions. In exaggerated terms, to send a bulk email to 5000 people may well have less long term effect than one well written email to one carefully chosen person. 4. POSSIBLE WEB PRESENCE TECHNIQES [TOC] The posting of your site onto 'portal' type sites. This I suppose is the equivalent of putting a notice in a shop window. Since most modern and good Search Engines seem to use the web of hyperlinks in order to index and categorize the Internet, it seems that one crucial factor in the web-promotion process is establishing links that point to the desired site. Since it is not possible to 'force' the owner of another web-site/ server to create links which point to the desired site, this process is slightly delicate. The delicate automation of this process of posting onto portal sites is another possible technique. This could involve automatically sending update notifications to portal sites. However this must be done with great care and with a firm eye on netiquette, since the old abusive techniques of web-promotion have been generally shown to be fairly counter-productive (I think). The emailing of selected people who may be genuinely interested in your endevour. Once again to be used with care. Traditional mediums of notification, such a post and phone. I believe these are very under-rated. Place the google search engine component on the site which you wish to promote. This may encourage google to index the site (although I am not sure about this). Since Google appears to work using a 'cached' index and cached pages, it may be the case that google has to cache the desired site in order to seach it. [*]http://www.google.com/faq_freewebsearch.html This is the FAQ for the google site search functionality Some kind of database of previous notifications sent via various means (email, web-posting, snail-mail, etc) must be kept in order to not duplicate notifications, and in order to be able to maintain some-kind of progress information, such as Who has replied? What portal sites have put up a link to you? 5. SOME LINKS [TOC] [*]http://www.free-translator.com/links2.html#cur some links to on-line language learning courses. 6. ILOVELANGUAGES SITE [TOC] [*]http://www.ilovelanguages.com/ links to language resources, postable. This site also includes some decent catalan links. This site seems to be updated only infrequently. For examples it does not seem to have been update in the last 2 months (as of may 21, 2003) [*]http://www.ilovelanguages.com/index.php?category=Languages%7CCollections+of+Links This is the page which links to other portal sites [*]http://www.ilovelanguages.com/index.php?addsite=yes The add site form for the above. POSTED catalan tutor 1may2003 May 21, 2003: Sent a query as to why the site has not been added 7. OBEROI SITE [TOC] oberoi@peoplepc.net [*]http://www.geocities.com/~oberoi/language.html Another 'collection of links' site. This does not appear to have been updated since July 2002 Contact: On may 21, 2003 I sent the following email Result: mail delivery failure Dear Mr Oberoi, I am not sure if you still actively maintain your web page at [*]http://www.geocities.com/~oberoi/language.html but anyway: I created a Catalan Audio Language Tutoring program which is at [*]http://www.geocities.com/matth3wbishop/ which I believe is quite useful. Yours sincerely matth3wbishop 8. SI SPAIN SITE [TOC] [*]http://www.sispain.org/english/index.html Contact: barrio@DocuWeb.ca This is a portal about all things spanish. It seems quite big and well established. Communications: On may 21, 2003 I sent the following email to the email address above.
Dear Sir/ Madam
I have made a web page which is an audio tutoring
program for catalan and spanish. The URL is
http://www.geocities.com/matth3wbishop/
I would appreciate it if you would include a link
to it on your site.
Querido/a Señor/a
(perdone mi castellano)
he hecho un página web donde se puede
aprender Castellano y Catala. SerÃa bien si usted
puede incluir un vÃnculo á mi página por su sÃtio
El URL está
http://www.geocities.com/matth3wbishop/
gracias
matthew bishop
[*]http://fp.ehba.org/ info@ehba.org <info@ehba.org> Another spanish/ english portal site. Comm: 21 may 2003, sent a notification about the audio tutor. 9. ANOTHER SITE [TOC] Contact: [*]http://college.hmco.com/cgi-bin/SaCGI.cgi/college/catalog.class?FNC=GoWriteToUs__Fcust_serv_midpage_html [*]http://college.hmco.com/languages/french/resources/students/links/index.html A french language learning portal site. Comm: 21 may 2003, sent a notification about the audio tutor
Dear Sir/ Madam
I created a web-page which is designed to
teach french vocabulary using sound files:
The URL is
http://www.geocities.com/matth3wbishop/
If you think this is useful I would
appreciate any kind of suggestions
yours sincerely
matthew bishop
10. SPANDICT SITE [TOC] [*]http://www.spanishdict.com/ contact: webmaster@spanishDICT.com contact: SuggestEnglishWord@SpanishDICT.com This is an online spanish english dictionary which contains sound files of many of the words. A number of the sound files are not of particularly good quality. 11. OTHER SITES [TOC] [*]http://www.yourdictionary.com/grammars.html Another collection of links to language courses and resources. [*]http://www.yourdictionary.com/about/contact.html The contact page for this site. Contacted: re audio tutor 1 may 2003 I received an emailed reply from this site in early may 2003. The administrator stated that he would post a link to my site soon "Brad Ross-MacLeod" <brossmac@yourdictionary.com> May 19, 2003: The link still has not been posted [*]http://babel.uoregon.edu/yamada/guides.html Another portal or collection of links. This is the University of Oregon site. Contains reasonable catalan links. ylchelp@darkwing.uoregon.edu email address for above site [*]http://www.word2word.com/course.html another portal [*]http://www.word2word.com/contact.html Their contact webmail form Their postal address: Word2Word Language Resources 12. PO BOX 6013 [TOC] San Jose, California 95150-6013 [*]http://www.worldlanguage.com/Languages/Catalan.htm?CalledFrom=210325 Another type of language portal. This has links to commercial language learning products. The site appears to be highly 'commercially' orientated. [*]http://www.worldlanguage.com/Contact.asp The contact page for this site The contact details for the above organization World Language Resources 2130Sawtelle Blvd. Suite 304A Los Angeles, CA 90025 Tel: 310-996-2300 Fax: 310-996-2303 13. USA [TOC] Contact: On may 19, 2003, I sent a email using the contact web-page above notifying about the audio tutoring program. [*]http://www.language-learning.net/ A language learning portal site info@language-learning.net [*]http://www.lll.uiuc.edu/ The University of Illinois Language Center. This doesn't appear to contain very many links to on-line learning resources. [*]http://www.lll.uiuc.edu/resources/dictionary.html A list of searchable online dictionaries. Many of the links appear out-of-date lll_webmaster@yahoo.com The email address for the above [*]http://www.berlitz.com/default.htm The Berlitz site [*]http://www.fodors.com/language/ The Fodors language tutoring interface for some European Languages. This seems to be the usual 'point-and-click' interface. The site contains sound files, WAV format. The sound files are not very numerous (perhaps a few hundred. The Fodors company also have a series of guide books and phrase books. [*]http://www.fodors.com/about/write/index.cgi?editorial=on&cgireferer=http%3a%2f%2fwww%2efodors%2ecom%2f& The contact page for above. Contact: may 21, 2003 I used the contact page indicated immediately above in order to notify the Fodors people 14. TRAVLANG [TOC] [*]http://www.travlang.com/languages/ This is a site which contains a large number of 'tutoring' pages for a large number of languages. The sites include sound files which are in some odd format (I am not sure which). Each language does not contain the sound files for very many words. Perhaps 100 or so. They appear to be migrating to a 'real-audio' format. The design of the site is very cluttered. webmaster@travlang.com [*]http://www.travlang.com/comments/ This is the 'feedback' form for 'travlang'. The site invites comments and suggestions as to how to improve the site as well as requesting contributions of new sound files. Contact: On may 21, 2003 (Wednesday), I sent the following email using the contact form above Result: Replied saying that he was interested in a new interface but that my program does not work on a mac. true. See the file 'tutor-travlang.txt' for email correspondance with the maintainers of the travlang site. 15. THE BBC LANGUAGE SITE [TOC] [*]http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/languages/spanish/ The BBC spanish online audio tutoring site. This contains a comprehensive set of Real Audio Sound Files with transcripts and translations The interface used in the site is based on 'flash' and is quite effective. It avoid the usual errors. [*]http://www.bbc.co.uk/feedback/ The feedback form for the BBC language site Please see the file 'tutor-bbc.txt' for details of email correspondance with the maintainers of this BBC language site, in regards to the 'audio tutor' 16. OTHER SITES [TOC] [*]http://www.ilovelanguages.com/ A large language site portal [*]http://www.ilovelanguages.com/index.php?addsite=yes [*]http://www.languagelearn.co.uk/index.htm A British language teachers association [*]http://www.languagelearn.co.uk/language_links.htm Some links 17. FRENCH SITES [TOC] [*]http://home.att.net/~korost/frtutor.htm A Java Applet French/ Spanish/ Russian Language Tutor which uses sound files. The french version only appears to contain about 10 words. And the same with the Spanish version. 18. CATALAN SITES [TOC] [*]http://www.cookwood.com/personal/learncatalan.html This is Elizabeth Castro's catalan site. This contains virtually NO content. lcastro@crocker.com <lcastro@crocker.com> This is a probably out of date email address for Elizabeth Castro May 19, 2003 Sent an email to this address, notifying Ms Castro about my catalan site. Saved the email at Yahoo 19. GERMAN [TOC] [*]http://dict.leo.org/?lang=en A large on-line searchable English/ German dictionary. Claims to have 350,000 entries |