
 = An Internet Language Learning Portals Page

 INTRODUCTION

   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. 

 NOTES
 
   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.

 A DISCUSSION OF THE PRINCIPLES OF WEB PRESENCE

   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.

  
 POSSIBLE WEB PRESENCE TECHNIQES

   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? 


 SOME LINKS

   http://www.free-translator.com/links2.html#cur
     some links to on-line language learning courses.
     
 ILOVELANGUAGES SITE
 
   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 

  OBEROI SITE
  
   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
  --<<
 
 SI SPAIN SITE
 
   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. Sería bien si usted
      puede incluir un vínculo á mi página por su sítio

      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.

 ANOTHER SITE
   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
  --<<

SPANDICT SITE
  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.

OTHER SITES  
   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
     PO BOX 6013
     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
     2130 Sawtelle Blvd.
     Suite 304A
     Los Angeles, CA 90025
     Tel: 310-996-2300
     Fax: 310-996-2303
     USA 

  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

TRAVLANG

  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.

THE BBC LANGUAGE SITE

  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'

OTHER SITES
 
  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

FRENCH SITES

   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.

     
CATALAN SITES

   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

 GERMAN
   
   http://dict.leo.org/?lang=en
     A large on-line searchable English/ German dictionary.
     Claims to have 350,000 entries 
   
     
