POPjisyo is a useful application that adds pop-up dictionary capabilities to any site. It’s mainly targeted at Asian audiences whose English may be a little shaky, and who would benefit from a few helpful translations on websites. The service does this by acting as a proxy through which you browse the web. POPjisyo appends a bit of javascript to the page that adds a mouse hovering pop-up to all words with a translation.

Obviously, the pages load a bit slower than before, due to the numerous javascript tags that need to be placed around each word on the page. But, if it helps me understand the text better, I don’t really care about the extra load time. The key advantage that POPjisyo has is that it’s unobtrusive–if you need a definition for a word, simply hover your mouse over it. If you don’t need it, the extra pop-up doesn’t bother you. It’s a great design for novices that are beginning to get a foothold in a new language. This is unlike other services like Google’s Language Tools, which translates the whole page (most of the time, with many errors), which leaves the language student to their own devices to match up the words between the untranslated and translated page.

Apps like these are literally closing in on the language barrier, allowing people to derive value from pages that would otherwise be too difficult to read through. They currently support English to Japanese, Chinese, Korean. Also, they have an English dictionary and English computer dictionary, which will pop up dictionary terms on the fly. They even have a matching game where they pick off random words from the page, and you have to match the English terms to their Asian language counterparts–great for learning a language within the context of real reading material.

I would love to hear about your experiences with POPjisyo if you’re a regular user, and how it helps you out on a daily basis. Also, comment if you know of any other apps that provide language translation services that are equally easy to use.

What I would like to see is a reverse translation for Asian languages to English. It would be nice to finally be able to read and understand the Far East side of the web.

There’s certainly been a lot of blog searching buzz in the past few days, including announcements of new features from the big dogs like Bloglines and Technorati. Among the buzz is the newly launched, Australian based gnoos, which is trying to break into the blog searching world with a slightly different angle.

Their interface is as clean and sleek as their response time is quick. These are key factors in persuading users to return to your site time and time again. Michael mentioned that he would be able to spend quite some time on gnoos without being fatigued, and I whole-heartedly agree with him. There’s just something pleasant about the design decisions that were made for gnoos’s front end.

Some of the differentiating features include the ability to tag, rank, comment, and show the text of each blog post result. The first three features are similar to swicki’s social search aspects, the difference being that gnoos isn’t necessarily tied to a specific site, and is more of a general purpose blog search. Technorati could learn a thing or two about the type of community search that gnoos is bringing to the table via user interaction with search results.

The fourth feature is gnoos’s ability to pull up a blog post when clicking on the “more” link. The entire blog post is shown inline with the search results. Depending on who you’re speaking to, this could be a blessing, or a wolf in disguise. gnoos is allowing visitors to view blog content without visiting the blog or RSS feed. For sensitive content producers, this could be controversial, either due to financial or copyright concerns. gnoos does have a copyright policy in their Terms of Use page, where they say that they

will never knowingly infringe (or be involved in infringing) the intellectual property rights of others.

In addition, gnoos might run up against the same wall as Google did with their page caching, where private posts that were deleted might be easily recovered. Hopefully gnoos won’t ever have to deal with privacy and copyright issues. Personally, I don’t mind my posts being on 3rd party search engines. The way I see it, the more exposure my content gets, the better.

Perhaps the most interesting tactic that gnoos is bringing to the table is localization. gnoos is heavily localized to Australia, and shows it by allowing visitors to filter by “Aussie Blogs” and “Aussie Media.” I find that localization is something that has been overlooked by many startups, and indeed, it is the secret weapon that gnoos has to gain significant market share in Australia. What would be cool is for gnoos to take the lead in localization and start localizing blogs for other parts of the world. However, I doubt that this is their strategy.

Currently, the content on gnoos is much smaller than Technorati. Their fast querying speed may be a result of their small database. If this is the case, we’ll have to see how well they scale up as they index more of the blogosphere.

Good luck to the underdogs!