France Launches Multi-Lingual Tourist Website. It Goes Down And Stays Down.

Far be it from me to criticize the French . But yesterday France launched France.fr with a middling amount of press attention. But the site went down almost immediately after launching. This morning we gave it a pass, but tonight it’s still down. And we’re not sure anyone is working very hard to get it back up – it is just an information website, after all. From The Connexion on the launch: A NEW official website providing information about France in English has been launched by the French government. France.fr went live this morning to coincide with the fête nationale and is available in French, English, German, Italian and Spanish. The site aims to promote the country to tourists but also to provide residents with practical information about all elements of life in France – including studying, working, setting up a business and day-to-day living. The prime minister’s office, which is managing the new online project, said the site would grow in the coming months and it will contain some 12,000 links to other online resources including Météo France and tourist offices. And France’s senior government official overseeing the Internet, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet , even took the time to tweet “Lancement aujourd’hui du portail officiel de la France dans le monde” (“Today’s launch of official website of France in the world” ). A French friend says of the site (when it was live) “It just does not work, full of bugs, and the english translation is hilariously bad.” He won’t let me attribute his quote though, saying he’d like to remain in good standing with the French community. For now France.fr has a landing page saying the site is unavailable in a variety of languages. In French it goes into more detail, noting that the site is a victim of its own success. There’s the joke about how the only people France can beat at anything are the French themselves, usually noting the French Revolution. But I won’t repeat that here. Instead I’ll just say – Vive la France!

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France Launches Multi-Lingual Tourist Website. It Goes Down And Stays Down.

Book Review: The Winner’s Brain

The Winner’s Brain: 8 Strategies Great Minds Use to Achieve Success by Jeff Brown and Mark Fenske (with Liz Neporent) intrigued me because it brings up the nature vs. nurture argument.

NYT Bans The Word Tweet “Outside Of Ornithological Contexts”

Too funny. According to The Awl , The New York Times standards editor Phil Corbett yesterday reportedly sent out a memo (below) to NYT writers asking them to severely cut down on the use of the word ‘tweet’ outside of “ornithological contexts”. Corbett has been overseeing language issues for the paper’s newsroom since September 2009, and was previously in charge of revisions in the newsroom’s style manual as deputy news editor. Update: Dave Itzkoff, who blogs for the Times, tweets that the report is indeed not true . Which makes it a perfect satirical piece worth sharing anyway. Update 2 : Another New York Times staffer tells us privately that the memo is “100% real” and Itzkoff clarifies that it is not the memo’s existence he was denying, but that some journalists inside the NYT recognize “tweet” as a word and there is an internal debate ongoing about it. Basically, Corbett supposedly argues that the word ‘tweet’ is silly and – at least not yet – standard English, and that many people, particularly those not on Twitter, have no idea what the word means. But NYT writers have apparently used the word as noun or a verb 18 times in articles in the past month, across various sections, he adds. Yes, it’s kind of amusing that someone would actually keep count of that sort of thing, but it’s not that bad a point, in my opinion. I mean, I assume it’s fine for TechCrunch to regularly use the word tweet without having to wonder if our readers will grasp what we’re trying to say, but it might indeed be harder for your average Times reader. Anyway, here’s the full memo (which we’ve independently obtained a copy of ourselves): How About “Chirp”? Some social-media fans may disagree, but outside of ornithological contexts, “tweet” has not yet achieved the status of standard English. And standard English is what we should use in news articles. Except for special effect, we try to avoid colloquialisms, neologisms and jargon. And “tweet” — as a noun or a verb, referring to messages on Twitter — is all three. Yet it has appeared 18 times in articles in the past month, in a range of sections. Of course, new technology terms sprout and spread faster than ever. And we don’t want to seem paleolithic. But we favor established usage and ordinary words over the latest jargon or buzzwords. One test is to ask yourself whether people outside of a target group regularly employ the terms in question. Many people use Twitter, but many don’t; my guess is that few in the latter group routinely refer to “tweets” or “tweeting.” Someday, “tweet” may be as common as “e-mail.” Or another service may elbow Twitter aside next year, and “tweet” may fade into oblivion. (Of course, it doesn’t help that the word itself seems so inherently silly.) “Tweet” may be acceptable occasionally for special effect. But let’s look for deft, English alternatives: use Twitter, post to or on Twitter, write on Twitter, a Twitter message, a Twitter update. Or, once you’ve established that Twitter is the medium, simply use “say” or “write.” Don’t forget to rechirp this post. CrunchBase Information Twitter New York Times Information provided by CrunchBase

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NYT Bans The Word Tweet “Outside Of Ornithological Contexts”

Saplo Raises $500K For Semantic Text Analysis Technology

Saplo , a Swedish startup that uses semantic technologies for text analysis, has raised $500,000 in seed funding from Professor Göran Grosskopf, Chairman of the Stichting INGKA Foundation (the parent company of the IKEA Group) and Martin Liljeberg, Founder of the SOVA chain of stores (Sweden’s largest chain of bed stores). Saplo’s technology extracts data from articles, forums, blogs, wikis, and will evaluate opinions on a given topic, find related articles, or produce relevant tags. Saplo will be able to tag articles by classifying words, and extracting topics from text. The technology can also find articles in large text collections that have similar meaning and can be used for contextual recognition or sentiment analysis. These technologies can analyze text from blogs, news articles, Tweets, documents, web text and more. Currently, Sapplo only works for the English and Swedish languages. Media companies rely on these semantic technologies to tag and organize the enormous amount of content on their platforms. Saplo faces competition from Nstein, and others. CrunchBase Information Saplo Information provided by CrunchBase

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Saplo Raises $500K For Semantic Text Analysis Technology

Concerned About Its New Privacy Policy, German Minister Threatens To Quit Facebook

German Consumer Protection Minister Ilse Aigner has written an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg , expressing her concerns about Facebook’s plans to further relax data protection regulations on the social networking site. She refers to the recent tweaks the company made to its privacy policy in anticipation of new features that will likely be launched at Facebook’s upcoming F8 developer conference . Admittedly, there are a number of questionable passages in the new privacy policy: TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid has talked at length about some of the issues in this post , and a later one in which he foresees a ‘privacy wake-up call’ for Facebook. Nevertheless, the ending of the open letter is somewhat amusing. “Should Facebook not be willing to alter its business policy and eliminate the glaring shortcomings, I will feel obliged to terminate my membership,” writes Aigner. Curious to see how Facebook will respond to her threatening to quit the social network – we’ve contacted the company to find out. You can read the English version of her letter in its entirety after the jump, courtesy of Spiegel Online :

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Concerned About Its New Privacy Policy, German Minister Threatens To Quit Facebook