The Blog

We now have learn10 live on Facebook. Click here to go to the Facebook page and select the blue ‘Add to Page’ button on the right.

Coming soon: a new feature which will put your daily words into your Facebook news feed every day.

As you know, we are seeking brand sponsors for learn10. A brand sponsor would have the following options:

• Brand appropriate colours & design of the widget surface (skin & style)
• Learn tab (homepage ) text advert or static 234×60 advert - (no moving images)
• Listen tab - introduction sound from the speaking avatar allowing free use of this service to users. Blue space behind the speaking avatar as well.
• Speak tab InCall advert - allowing free use of this service to users

Some examples of what sponsored content might look/sound like:

Sponsored avatars can be produced from any photograph, so can tie in closely with personality based advertising campaigns:

We will also be able to offer ‘widgety ads’ - these are any format of online advertising containing brand sponsorship and learn10 content. The advert will show learn10 content to anyone who is a learn10 member. To anyone else, it can look like an ordinary advert. Widgety ads will be available via our affiliate scheme:

As our visitors may well have noticed, we don’t yet have a professional design for our site, or logo. The priority has been the ‘proof of concept’ ie getting the widget out there to see if it’s something people will want to use. Now it’s time to think about the design.
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Today I have been thinking about link strategies - mainly because I need to add a paragraph about it for my mini case study on web 2.0 marketing for Chris Fill.

As well as looking at your web site content in terms of key words, spider bots will follow links to and from your website. If there are a lot of links, then this may influence your position on search engines. Unscrupulous e-marketers simply spam many different sites with irrelevant comments along with a link to their site. Luckily, as the logarithms used by search engines increase in sophistication, this technique becomes less effective.

Used intelligently, links can enhance brand values and the visitor experience. Many blogs encourage meaningful discussion by allowing comments and trackbacks (a link to a page which references an article), as well as link exchanges with other like-minded bloggers.

Our first spikes (when we had a rush of new registrations on version 1 of the learnit widget) were when we were written about on Mashable and Jane’s E-learning pick of the day. I have used the trackback facility on these sites, so if you now visit the links - you should be able to see a trackback to this article.

Are you a learn10 users who also edits Wikipedia pages? If yes, please think about adding to the learn10 stub on the Wikipedia site. We have included basic information on the page, but it must now be added to by somebody other than us!

The page can be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learn10

Many thanks.

 (10,000 users of learn10 beta)

We have made some amendments to the learn10 website over recent days, and in the background, we’ve been working on the next release of learn10 - one that incorporates a speaking avatar who will read out your word list, as well as a payment system. We have to charge for the sound because we are charged each time the speaking avatar is played.  The sound will only be available on verified languages, so we will be adding English & Spanish sound first, with others to follow soon.

We are really close to having the new word lists for Arabic, German and Japanese uploaded into the learnit widget. We just need to tweak the widget slightly first.  All three languages will included grammatical info (which will pop up if you hover over the text - like with Spanish) and our Japanese translator has included Romaji (westernised pronunciation) as well as Kanji, Hiragana & Katakana. It’s really exciting that we will soon be able to offer this additional content. As soon as we have some income from the sound, we will be able to add verified translations & pronunciations to other languages.

Another exciting development is the discovery of MyVox. This is an ad supported service where you can use an ordinary phone to record sounds for a web site. We could use this service so that learnit users can record their daily word lists for free.  Over time this will build a library of pronunciation sounds for each word in many different languages, including endangered languages that would never make it onto commercial systems.

We would like to build in some social features into our myvox system, so that, for example, other learners can vote on which is the best pronunciation of a word. I can’t wait to give it a go - I wonder if native speakers will be prepared to spend some time recording words for learners of their language, for example.  Hmm, maybe I should create a poll about it.

With 9678 users (12:00, 22nd March) we are slowly moving towards the 10,000 mark. There have been only a few new links to the site in the last 24 hours, but there are now 17,800 mentions of learnitlists on the Internet. A slower pace of growth suits me just fine as we have some kinks to iron out before we publicise the widget any more. As J & M have pointed out, our first new users started finding us one calendar month ago. I think 10,000 people isn’t a bad basis for a beta test.

I spent a large chunk of yesterday comparing word lists. My assumption had been that I would not know if there was a mis-translation between English and another language that I’m not familiar with. After we lost our French translator, I decided to have a look for myself. M built a system on Friday where words which were the same in both languages were highlighted, and then added another bit so that I could edit the word lists. So… several hours later I have made corrections (courtesy of Alta Vista Babel Fish) to Portuguese, French and Italian. These still need to be loaded up. I hope M will do that tomorrow. Once I have repeated the exercise for all languages in a western script, then we can think about conducting some awareness raising.