Loogic English

I loved getting to know Forvo, a site where users can record the pronunciation of words in their language and other users can get to know those pronunciations. I liked it because the site is very well developed, the system to record the words works well and the design is also pretty good.

The goal of Forvo is to be a great database of the way all kinds of words are pronounced in the maximum number of languages possible. If you would like to access the site, you could do it using the code frvloogic and you will see that they already have 518 words and 285 pronunciations in 185 languages.

An interesting aspect is also that many people can pronounce the same word which enables us to do comparisons so we can improve our own pronunciation of words in a language which is not our own.

By the way, I also used Forvo to clarify how to pronounce Finzr.

We first wrote about Tuenti on the 29th of December, 2006 (I think it was our first exclusive in Loogic).

On the 4th of March 2008, the CEO of Tuenti, Zaryn Dentzel, announces in Mobuzz TV that they have reached 2.000 million page views a month.

Incredible isn’t it? I’ve been talking often to the folks at Tuenti and the truth is that they are a role model for all of us who are into creating a business on the internet. Let’s have a look at some of the reasons for their success:

1) A young but very well prepared team that doesn’t like to boast of its achievements, but that has been hardened by the thousand battles they’ve had to confront with in the last few months to meet the demands of an enormous growth in traffic.

2) Highly influential investors with great experience (Bernardo Hernandez and Rodolfo Carpintier among them) who have had their role in advising the team of Tuenti, and that has been decisive in taking them where they are today.

3) A closed model (one can enter only through invitation) that has led them to turn into a social phenomenon, so much so that there’s talk of Tuenti on the streets, and even some people have created songs, recorded them with their friends and uploaded them to YouTube.

4) No advertising, at least for the moment, which has allowed them to dedicate all of their time to grow without worrying about making money. Now the time will come when they can make good use of all that traffic to earn money.

5) Right time and right place to start. They started a year ago when Facebook was not looking towards Spain as a market to expand, and a country where the users were navigating in portals and forums, not in social networks. For Tuenti, being the first in their market has been a great idea.

Impressive, right? The best thing is that the success of Tuenti is a reality and I’m sure that it will be an incentive for all.

I’ve been informed of various initiatives that are developing products with the objective of making companies aware of user opinions in blogs, forums and social networks. It looks like BuzzTrend has already been able to come out with something on these lines.

We came to know about BuzzTrend when we talked of La Lista Wip (The Wip List) and now we are introduced to Swotti, a search engine for opinions.

Swotti is a search engine that utilizes semantic web technologies to extract the opinions of users in blogs and forums about companies and their products.

You can try how Swotti works for a couple of searches like Nokia Maps or Asus eee and see how the search results are shown. To begin with, the graphics stand out and above all the list of words with the rating obtained for each of them. On the other hand are the results of the search in different websites, where the users’ opinions are rated as positive or negative in each case.

What I think doesn’t function in the right way is when it shows results of the words found in blogs but is not able to show the article of the blog, something that makes it difficult to find the exact place where the opinion is reflected. What it shows instead is a results page or even the main page. On the other hand, what I did like is that it was able to find opinions expressed in the comments of the blogs, something that is generally overlooked by the search engines.

Via Genís Roca.

Vote for Swotti in Loogic Rank.

It seems people are inspired to set up Twitter clones and what was seen with skepticism a year ago has now turned into a phenomenon on the internet.

As I say, new Twitter clones are springing up in Spanish and Jisko is the last one we have heard of.

I quite liked the look and feel of Jisko, how the web is structured, and even the mascot I think is more funny than the bird of Twitter. One thing that caught my attention is the integration with Twitter which means that a user could be in Jisko but at the same time, could follow the messages that his friends send in Twitter.

But perhaps what stands out the most is the system of karma that seeks to measure the participation of a user in the community and assign him a numerical value to determine his importance on the web. And it’s also worth mentioning that the site is being translated into multiple languages.

Seen in Genbeta.

Vote for Jisko in Loogic Rank.

I couldn’t hold anymore to talk of Twittday. Its appearance in the official blog of Twitter and the announcement of Twittok herald the arrival of this informal meeting of users of Twitter that began with a first meeting on the 2nd of October, 2007.

The architects of this movement are the argentinians Marilín Gonzalo and Juan Gigli who with the excuse of getting to know other argentinians based in Madrid, have been able to attract a lot of people who think that Twitter is a new way of communicating, sharing and getting to know.

A number of Twitterers and bloggers have joined the organization of the event and are helping spread Twittday to other Spanish cities and looking at Twittok, it seems also internationally.

For more information on Twittday, I recommend you read the interview given to Pisito en Madrid.

Via Mauro.