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Posts Tagged ‘English Language’

Is Twitter a Mental Vacuum?

When we talk to our less technologically-inclined friends about Twitter, we often run across the objection that they really don’t care what so-and-so ate for lunch today or what movie they are seeing tonight. And every time, we try to extol all the other benefits of the world’s most popular microblogging service. But could we be wrong? Is Twitter mostly people talking about themselves and what they ate for lunch?

Well, SemanticHacker, the blog of contextual ad platform Textwise, has crunched some numbers and we may have to eat our hat.

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Parlez vous Twitterspeak?

The blog used Twitter’s streaming API to gather nearly 9 million tweets from over 2 million individual users. Before looking at the data for meaning, the company first took a look at the language distribution of their sample.

While the SemanticHacker team expressed their surprise at the language distribution, particularly the strong showing of Portuguese, we at ReadWriteWeb couldn’t help but wonder about the 10% labeled as “Unknown/Misclassified.” Are these tweets simply so horribly misspelled that the language-guessing program they used on the data could not venture a guess? Or could it be that 10% of the Twitter populous is now writing in that contracted form of text message Twitter-speak that it could no longer be classified as a recognizable language? (If you’re looking for a good example, find a 12-year-old and exchange text messages or just give Sarah Palin’s Twitter a look.)

What We’re A-Twittering About

The folks at SemanticHacker then took a random sample of 1,000 English-language tweets and broke them down into eight categories.

According to their findings, it seems that Twitter really is full of people talking about themselves. A full 57% of the sample falls into tweets about what a person is doing, or private conversations between individuals.

That leaves just 43% for other purposes, but when we take a look at that, the findings seem to become even more dismal. If we take away another 8% for “Other Messages” and “Unknown,” and another 8% for “Spam” and “Advertising,” we’re left with a mere 27% of the information on Twitter having some sort of value.

Maybe it isn’t as bad as it looks, though. We’re willing to bet that if we wrote down everything we said in a day, the meaningful parts might not even reach the 27% mark.

Oh, did I tell you about the tasty lentils I had for lunch today?

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QiGi’s Smartbook is more like a WinMo 6.5-powered MID

We’re going on the assumption here that the lads and ladies over at QiGi haven’t actually heard that “smartbooks” have a vaguely defined look and feel, as the outfit’s latest handheld definitely looks nothing like the smartbooks that we’ve seen emerge over the past few months. In fact, the Windows Mobile 6.5-equipped device looks more like a MID than anything else, boasting a 5-inch 800 x 480 display, only a few face-mounted buttons and 1GB of memory. Hit the read link if you’re interested in a poorly translated review, and good luck finding one of these in the open market (at least with an English-language operating system).

QiGi’s Smartbook is more like a WinMo 6.5-powered MID originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 28 Nov 2009 09:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Xtreamer e-TRAYz NAS boasts up to 4TB storage, artistic license with English language

Loving your Xtreamer media player? The company’s gearing up for a much larger, more versatile NAS complement that supports up to 4TB of storage across two bays, and anyone who’s purchased last year’s model by November 1st will get a chance to pre-order this one for €59 (US $84) when the listing opens on that day. It’s bring-your-own-disk drives, but otherwise you’re getting a Windows 7 / Snow Leopard-compliant server that supports RAID 0 / 1, torrent management, 802.11n (with dongle), and a surveillance webcam for remote snooping that’s due out by Christmas of this year. After November 1st the price jumps to €99, and those who don’t have the current Xtreamer will have to pick up both as a €198 set. No ship date yet, but we’re supposed to be hearing more details, including full specs, in the coming days.

[Via Engadget Spanish]

Filed under: Storage, Networking

Xtreamer e-TRAYz NAS boasts up to 4TB storage, artistic license with English language originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 31 Aug 2009 02:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Biergert & Funk QLOCKTWO gets an English version, our sincerest admiration

This is exactly what we need: a clock that politely dispenses with the math (no matter how simple) in favor of words. Biergert & Funk handmake this one, called the QLOCKTWO, with both German and English language faces — and there lots of color options. The price is a stunningly uncheap €1099 (about $1600), so get to saving your dollars and cents. There’s a video showing off the QLOCKTWO after the break, but you’d better speak German — or do what we did, and mute it and listen to AC / DC while you watch it.

Continue reading Biergert & Funk QLOCKTWO gets an English version, our sincerest admiration

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Biergert & Funk QLOCKTWO gets an English version, our sincerest admiration originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 20 Aug 2009 12:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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