How many times have you tried to translate a sentence and have come up with embarrassingly incorrect results via a translation site? Or have you used Google Translate to translate a website from another language and cringed at the stilted results? Most of us who need translations for our work struggle with the available tools out there or bite the bullet and pay someone to do the translation work.

Linguee is a new web-based translation tool on the that combines artificial intelligence with human intelligence to bring more accurate, relevant and nuanced translations to bear. Linguee sifts through hundreds of millions of translations aggregated from high-level multilingual sources on the web, such as documents from the European Union and Canadian governments. The site’s “machine learning system” sorts and presents results for the variety of possible translations and users of the system can then rate definitions with a thumbs-up and thumbs-down system. Those human ratings “teach” the system to rate not only the particular entry but to rate the source as well.

The site is especially good at handling words with many meanings and gives you search results that include an expandable list of actual sample uses of words in context from a variety of sources. Next to each word translation is a pie chart showing the percentage of usage of each translation to identify the most common uses of the translated word.

Linguee also handles searches for common phrases and provides you with validation that your own translation is correct or gives you additional options based on the most common translations the system finds. The site is being used by professors, professional translators and others whose jobs depend on the accuracy and appropriateness of translations. Even for someone who has a working knowledge of another language, Linguee can add some extra assurance that one’s translations are correct.

Linguee’s tagline is “The web as a dictionary;” it melds machine processing and algorithms with crowdsourcing human input to deliver better translation results.

How are you translating content, and what kinds of materials are you needing to translate?

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Omnium is an ultra-lightweight, minimalistic note-taking app for Windows. It’s similar in style to CintaNotes and my favorite note-taking tool, Notational Velocity for the Mac; its small footprint provides a fast efficient and unobtrusive note-taking experience. And because it’s a portable app, you can put it in a folder in your Dropbox account (or some other file sync service) and then access it from anywhere.

Omnium is still in beta. Although it has regex search, it only searches note titles, and it crashed on me a couple of times while playing with it, so I think I’ll stick with CintaNotes on Windows for now. However, it does show a lot of promise, so it’s an app to keep an eye on if you’re a fan of lightweight note-taking tools, especially as Simplenote integration is among the features planned for the future

Omnium is a free download for Windows. It requires .NET Framework 4.0.

Let us know what you think of Omnium in the comments.

(via One Thing Well)

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Photo by stock.xchng user mrjamin

It appears that WorkflowPerfect, a useful web app for distributed teams that combined task and issue tracking with workflow management features, has disappeared. The site is currently inaccessible, and according to a comment left by Ton Walter on our old review of the app, the site has been down for three weeks now.

If you’re a WorkflowPerfect user frustrated by its seeming demise, I’ve gathered together a few potential alternatives:

• 

  ProcessMaker

  ProcessMaker: If the business process management (BPM) features of WorkflowPerfect were what drew you to the app, check out ProcessMaker. It’s an open-source BPM tool that offers more powerful features than WorkflowPerfect, such as process mapping, a form builder, business rules and LDAP synchronization. Two editions are offered: the free Community Edition, and an Enterprise Edition with a greater range of features.

• calc{list} With Passive Automation: This oddly named app is a CRM tool. It combines a contact manager, email system and company-wide workflow automation tool. Three editions are available, but for the Passive Automation features, you need to get the Pro edition, which costs $495. A 30-day free trial is available.
• 
  

  ProWorkFlow

  ProWorkFlow: ProWorkFlow is an easy-to-use project management, workflow and time tracking solution for small to medium businesses. Plans start at £10 ($15 USD) per user per month. A free trial is available.

• 5pm: If the task management — rather than BPM –aspects of WorkflowPerfect were why you were using the tool, you might like to check out 5pm. It’s an intuitive, easy-to-use project management app (see Jason’s review here). Plans start at $18 per month, and a free trial is available.
• LiquidPlanner: If 5pm is too simplistic for your project management needs, another app that’s worth considering is LiquidPlanner; Mike sang its praises in his review. It has dynamic scheduling, Gantt charts, estimation, time tracking and analysis features. LiquidPlanner plans start at $25 per user per month, and a free trial is available.
  

Unfortunately, none of the suggestions I’ve listed above are exact like-for-like replacements for WorkflowPerfect, but hopefully one of them will have the sort of functionality that you’re looking for.

One lesson to take from the disappearance of WorkflowPerfect is that if a web app has no obvious business model or means of generating revenue — WorkflowPerfect was only supported by Google ads on the site — there’s a greater risk it could disappear without warning. While most of the apps listed above are more expensive than the free WorkflowPerfect, they’ll hopefully have a better chance of staying the course.

List your WorkflowPerfect alternatives below.

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There are plenty of project management tools that allow you to work with team members all over the world. Tools like ActiveCollab or web2Project require you (or your IT team) to set them up on a server, but once you’ve got everything installed, your team members can access your tools from anywhere. The question is whether self-hosted tools are the right choice for your organization.

Control of Your Data

Keeping your data under your own control is an important consideration. When your projects are sitting on some other company’s servers, you may lose access to them. A small hiccup in the billing process could mean that your team is locked out of all the projects they have been working on. That’s a scary thought. In most cases, running project management tools on your own server means that no-one else can come between your team and your work.

Another reason to have your project management software running on your own servers is the question of security. If you are handling confidential information, you can add additional security measures. Furthermore, you’ll have a much better idea of what physical security is in place for your server if that server is your own.

All of that makes for an appealing set of reasons to run your own project management tools, but there are many reasons to go with a web-based application hosted by another company. There is the consideration of overall access: when a company stakes its reputation on keeping your projects accessible at all times, they’re going to be in a position to invest more in the infrastructure of keeping their servers up and running, quite possibly at a lower cost than your organization can manage, esepcally if running a server isn’t something that you normally need to do.

Managing the Costs

Many of the options for project management tools that run on your own server are open source, which means that they’re theoretically free to use. However, that may not be the way things work out. Of course you’ll need to factor in the costs of running your server. But there are other considerations, such as managing upgrades and even creating new features — and these can all add cost. Those costs are not necessarily more expensive than paying for a hosted application (that can depend on how many team members you’re working with, how many projects you have going and a variety of other considerations), but should be considered before making a choice one way or the other.

At the end of the day, whether or not hosting your own project management tools makes sense in terms of cost a question of core competencies. If you’ve already got team members who can effectively manage running a server and all the details that go along with it, your costs are going to look very different than an organization that needs to bring in outside help on a regular basis.

Do you host your own project management tools?

Image by Flickr user Rudolf Schuba

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For those of us who use Twitter tags purely for adding a layer of sarcastic commentary to our tweets, the idea of using tags properly — to categorize  tweets and make them easier for others to find — may seem a little humdrum. But as I realized last week, using Twitter tags properly can help you to reach a much broader follower base.

While playing around on Twitter over the weekend, I tweeted an image of some asparagus from my garden, and tagged the tweet #productivitytips. Suddenly, users from as far afield as China and Senegal were finding their way to my asparagus image. I’ve never had a follower access any of my bit.ly links from either country, so I guessed that these users had found my tweet by searching Twitter for the #productivitytips tag.

Putting aside the fact that users looking for productivity tips probably weren’t particularly satisfied with my asparagus picture, this story does point out clearly that — properly used — Twitter tags have the potential to expand your exposure and your follower base. If you (or in this case, I) used them properly, that expansion could be considerable.

The properly tagged tweet acts like a teaser for the would-be follower. They find your tweet via the tag, and, if they like it and any content it links to, they may follow you. Conversely, the tagged tweet can help you to access and qualify followers — using tags wisely, you can help to ensure that the people who follow you actually want the kinds of information you generally provide.

Since my asparagus adventure, I’ve been looking into some of the ways business-focused Twitter users might employ tags strategically to expand their follower base.

Tags as Keywords

If tags provide metadata about your tweet content, then it may make sense to see them as playing a similar role to that fulfilled by meta keywords on a web page.

You might decide to define a list of key tags you’ll focus on, and apply them to your tweets whenever they’re appropriate. This approach might help you to continuously fulfill the expectations of users who follow you on the strength of a well-tagged tweet.

As a tag misuser, I often gain followers from well-tagged tweets that are one-offs — they don’t relate to the topics I usually tweet and write about. The followers I gain with those tweets quickly become disappointed by my usual tweet content, and stop following me.

If I selected a number of “keywords” (tags) that actually — and accurately — described the topics I most often tweet about, and applied them consistently wherever possible, I expect I’d be more likely to keep the followers I gained, and to build a loyal, satisfied follower base.

Tags as Content Flags

Every piece of content I publish online is tagged somehow. So it might be a good idea to tag the tweets I use to promote that content with the same tags I’ve applied to the content itself. If I write a blog post that’s tagged “social media tips,” for example, it seems logical — and advantageous — to tag my tweet with the same words.

By creating consistency between my tweet tags and my content tags, I can qualify my follower base and ensure those users are satisfied by the content they access through the links I include in my tweets.

But, perhaps more importantly, consistent tagging could help me build rapport or respect with users. If a user’s looking for social media tips, they might find tweets using that tag through Twitter. Imagine  they then arrive at my blog, which offers access to more content tagged “social media tips” via my navigation or a tag cloud. Those users may be more likely to look at that information than if I used no tags, or tagged my blog content using different terms from those I used in my tweet.

In effect, consistent tags can help me to show that I speak the user’s language, and reduce confusion. Using Twitter tags as content flags could make new visitors to your site feel more at ease, help them access the information they need, and  — if you appear to be an authority on that topic — help communicate that you’re worth following.

Tags as Trend Tie-ins

There are plenty of tools designed to tell Twitter users what the trending topics are in particular fields. The astute Twitter user could combine a trending topic tag with their standard keyword or content-flag tags. This could help them to reach a much broader audience (via the trending topic tag) and tap into a sub-segment of that audience (via the topic-specific tag).

A marketer I follow on Twitter frequently writes blog posts that are sparked by celebrity news, scandal and other popularly trending topics. He writes about these topics from a marketing perspective — saying, in effect, “this is what we can learn about marketing” from Brangelina or Lady Gaga or Tiger Woods or, well, you get the idea.

He has a great opportunity to tag his tweets around the trending topics he writes on, and to appeal to a broad audience in doing so. True, only a comparatively small portion of the readers accessing those trending topic streams will be interested in his marketing angle. However, in its own right, that comparatively small portion may add substantially to his follower base, his retweet levels, and his audience access over the longer term.

These are just a few of the tagging techniques I’ve seen in action on Twitter recently. What tips can you add from your own Twitter tag experience?

Image by stock.xchng user speedy2.

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Despite the independent aspect of web work, it’s typical for many of us to gather at conferences and conventions. As Dawn mentioned in a previous post, we all have different goals when attending these events. If your primary goal is to learn, then note-taking is essential, especially if you’ll be attending lectures.

But how can you focus on note taking when you have other things on your mind such as networking, the other sessions you have to attend, and possibly some additional work you have to do? Here are three things you should keep in mind:

• Remember that being present and attentive is your priority. This means actively listening, looking at visual aids, and paying attention to the lecture itself. While you can record audio, video, or view live tweets, these must be for reference only and not a substitute for the real thing. It makes no sense to sit in an auditorium for an hour only to repeat that hour via a recording because you were too busy taking notes or getting to know the person beside you to digest the finer details.
• Know why you’re taking down notes. Is it for faster recall or to record your own insight? Will you be using your notes to write a blog post or make a presentation at work? The reasons behind your note-taking will help you determine the best approach and tools to use.
• Get as much information as you can about the tech specs of the event beforehand. Will there be free internet access available? How reliable is it and will be be available throughout the entire venue? Will you be able to plug or charge your devices easily? This information can help you choose your tools accordingly.

With that out of the way, it’s only a matter of getting your notes down as efficiently as possible.

Using Tools to Improve Note-taking

According to a research paper on note taking, in an academic setting the average note-taking speed for students is 0.3 to 0.4 words per second, while lecturers speak at around 2 to 3 words per second. With this speed discrepancy it’s no wonder that most people find it hard to jot down concise yet complete notes. Still, there are ways to work around this:

• Don’t rely solely on text-based notes. While many of us are used to pen-and-paper note-taking methods, the difference in speech and writing speed means that we can’t rely on them alone. This is why we should look beyond written notes. We could include mindmaps, photos (of important slides, for example), or audio recording. Some apps that allow you to record in a variety of formats include Evernote, Springpad, FolderBoy (which Charles reviewed here), and Notepub.
• Use fast tools. Don’t just look for fast loading time or responsiveness, but note your own speed when using the tool. This means that some options aren’t ideal for many people, such as alphanumeric keypads and apps for handwriting or speech recognition. You can even use SMS abbreviations, shorthand, macros, and word completion apps to increase speed further.
• Process your notes. Directly after the lecture is the best time to enter the second phase of note-taking: information processing. This is where you’ll start to consult external sources for additional information and make connections among the things you’ve learned. You could do this by organizing all the material you’ve gathered and by making annotations. Some handy annotation tools include Apollo and A.nnotate.

Taking a cue from student life, don’t be afraid to borrow the notes of other attendees. You can borrow notes directly from people you have a strong rapport with, or wait for bloggers to post their own notes or articles summarizing the talk. They might include some points you’ve missed or make connections that you didn’t think of. Just be sure to offer to share your own notes and express that you’re looking for something supplementary. You don’t want to leave the impression that you’re asking them to do all your work for you.

It may take a lot of practice to become very effective at note-taking, but the important thing is to get better each time.

Share your note-taking tips below.

Photo by stock.xchng user christgr

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Here are some interesting posts from around the ‘Net to catch up with over the weekend:

• Mashable: “4 Tips for Writing SEO-Friendly Blog Posts”
• CMS Wire: “Don’t Create a Social Frankenstein”
• Social Times: “Mommy, I Want A Blog Too…”
• Zen Habits: “The Minimalist’s Guide to Cultivating Passion”
• The Economist: “A virtual counter-revolution”
• NewTeeVee: “Is Flash on Android ‘Shockingly Bad’ or ‘Shockingly Great?’”

What are you reading this weekend?

FilerFrog is a neat Windows utility that adds a bunch of useful file handling tools to your context (right-click) menu, handling tasks like moving files and image resizing. As it only adds one top-level item, it won’t clutter your context menu, but all the tools are just a couple of clicks away. FilerFrog used to be a commercial product, but it’s now available for free.

Here’s a rundown of the things that FilerFrog can do:

• Extract from folder: Move a folder’s contents to its parent folder
• Extract to folder: Move any number of files or folders to a new folder.
• Copy/move: Copy and move files and folders without hunting through My Computer looking for the same often-used destination folder.
• Delete empty files or folders: Search for and delete empty files and folders.
• Copy path to clipboard: Copies the current path to the clipboard.
• Invert selection: Files that were selected are unselected, and the others are selected.
• Split and join: Split a large file of any type into smaller pieces.
• List of files: Makes a text or HTML listing of the files and folders selected.
• Encrypt/decrypt: Encrypts and decrypts files using, RC4 stream cipher encryption.
• Resize image: Resizes images.
• Put logo on image: Places a logo or other graphic on an image.
• Image album: Creates and album of images.
• Sort desktop: Arrange your desktop icons and forms them into groups.

FilerFrog is a free download, with versions available for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows machines.

Let us know what you think of FilerFrog in the comments.

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(via Ghacks)

Most of us are probably an expert in something, and we naturally get questions from people who want to learn more about our area of expertise. It is relatively easy to just jot down a few paragraphs, grab a couple of links and send off that email to the person asking the question. But think about how many times you’ve answered a similar question over the past month or the past year. Those 15 minutes chunks start to add up really quickly when you multiply them out across dozens of requests. That’s where reducing, reusing and recycling your work can have huge productivity benefits over time.

Today, for example, I met with someone who is moving into her first community manager position. After the meeting, I sent what looked like a pretty impressive list of 17 links to relevant information, but it took me less than five minutes to compile what she needed because I had most of it available in canned responses and other online documentation. Being prepared and ready with common answers allows you to be extremely responsive with details and comprehensive answers to questions without spending much time on them at all. Here are a few of the things that I do to reduce, reuse and recycle my work.

Online Documentation

Don’t underestimate the power of online documentation. These frequently asked questions are a great way to come up with ideas for blog posts or other documentation that you can reuse over and over. I use my personal blog to publish most of my community management posts, and I have a “getting started” page where I’ve collected the posts that provide a good introduction to community management. A wiki is another good option for reusable documentation when you are working as part of a project, team or online community. The community that I manage has a wiki where we collaborate on FAQs, guidelines, technical documentation and many other documents. When I start to see questions coming up in the community on a common topic, it is often a sign that something isn’t well documented.

After your core set of documentation is established, many individual questions can be answered by sending a link or two. Whether you use a blog, wiki, collaboration tool or website, spending a few minutes writing online documentation now can save hours later when you reuse it again and again.

Collections

Once you have a good set of online documentation, you can start organizing it into collections and FAQ documents. I mentioned that I have a “starting point” page on my blog that simply links to collections of documentation, organized by topic. I also do this in the online community with FAQ documents and pages that organize information to make it easier for people to find. In many cases this lets me send people a single link or a couple of links that provide them with a whole collection of information on a particular topic. As I add new content, I go back occasionally to these collections and add additional information or links to some newer documentation on the topic.

Canned Responses

When someone emails you with a question and you take the time to put together a complete, thoughtful answer, you should store it as a canned response ready for the next person who asks a similar question. I often use the canned response functionality in Gmail to do this, and your email client might have something similar available, but if not, you can always store snippets of emails for reuse in a text file or your favorite note-taking application. Now, I’m not saying that you should just blast these out to people as-is. I usually take the time to personalize them and add a little more information that is especially relevant to their situation. Each time I use one of these canned responses, I also take the time to see if it needs to be updated with some new information or additional links and then I save those changes for the next time I need to use it.

Most of my canned responses are actually collections of links to online documentation, so three ideas aren’t separate as much as they build on each other. You could also use the same techniques within a corporate environment with private collaboration tools inside your firewall. Whether the information is public or private, having great online documentation formed into collections and used as canned responses to inquiries is a great way to reduce, recycle and reuse your work.

What are your tips for reusing work?

Photo by Flickr user Nick Bramhall used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Enabling the Web Work Revolution

Kohive is a web app that provides shared collaborative workspaces for teams. In use, the app looks very much like a computer desktop — down the left-hand side of the screen is a series of icons that provides access to different “apps,” while each workspace (called a “Hive” by the app) is accessed via a tabbed interface at the bottom of the screen.

Out of the box, Kohive makes a number of different “apps” available for collaborative tasks:

• Overview: Provides a list of recent activity on the Hive.
• Messages: Allows users to send messages to individuals and groups
• Bookmarks: A bookmarking facility, including tagging.
• Stickies: Online sticky notes.
• Tasks: A fairly powerful task management tool, with tags, assignments, due dates, milestone and file links.
• Notepad: Online notes, with tagging.
• Status updates: A microblogging tool, which can be linked to Twitter.
• File cabinet: A place to store files.
• Gallery: A photo gallery. You can upload images, or get them from URLs or Flickr.
• Videos: A video gallery that’s somewhat limited in that you can’t upload videos — they must be hosted elsewhere.
• Doodle: Online drawing tool.
• Chat room: An IRC-style chat room.

Continuing the desktop metaphor, each app opens in its own window that can be dragged around the desktop and resized as required. Content is updated in real-time, so users can see changes from other team members instantly.

The Kohive interface looks very slick and its functionality is impressive for a web app. However, while I like the idea of a comprehensive online space that can be used as a repository and workspace for everything related to a project, it’s not particularly snappy. On my machine, page elements take a while to load, and submissions were slow, which would probably make for a frustrating experience if it were to be used for a real project.

Kohive is currently in beta, so hopefully the performance issues will be addressed, and is free.

Let us know what you think of Kohive in the comments.

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(via Lifehacker)