Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

You’re probably concentrating on Christmas at the moment but whilst you’re out and about doing your Christmas shopping, you should keep an eye on what’s available in the shops that would improve the look of your home as the sales will be starting shortly after Christmas is out of the way.

If you’ve picked out a few key shops you can easily find that you can get a lot more bits & bobs for your home than you’d manage by aimlessly wandering around the sales. Much better to target just a few shops as that way you’ll be there before the real bargains have been bought.

So, keep an eye out while you’re out!

Whilst I was doing the Spanish course, the big dictionary was the way to go. On degree level courses small dictionaries just don’t cut it and neither do electronic ones, most of which have a considerably fewer number of words than even the smallest of the paper dictionaries.

However, when you’re settling down to read a novel in a foreign language the only way to go is with one of the pen scanners. Large dictionaries aren’t really a runner unless you always read in the one spot as you’re never going to carry around any kind of sizeable dictionary, are you?

Normal electronic dictionaries are a bit of a pain when you’re reading too in that they’re pretty slow, particularly if you’ve to look up a couple of words in a sentence.

With the pen dictionaries all those problems disappear at a stroke. They look up a whole line of words for you in one go for a start and they’re a similar size to the smaller paper dictionaries. The only downside is that they’re a good deal more expensive than normal electronic dictionaries and indeed more expensive than even the largest paper ones.

Actually, this post is about none of those at all. They’re just some of the keywords that have been picked up recently by various news aggregation services that scan this blog so I can be fairly confident that this particular post will do well in terms of collecting inbound links for me.

The growth in news aggregators has led to a steady growth in the number of inbound links that I’ll collect for particular posts. Some are obvious: mention “Ireland” and I get picked up by the Irish blogs, “travel”, “credit” or “loans” and you get picked up by loads of financial aggregators. “Travel” is more hit and miss though as the travel aggregators tend to target particular destinations rather than “travel” in general.

“People search” is a peculiar one. Apparently it’s a very popular search term though I only came across it by chance.

I’m actually only throwing “sex” in for curiosity value. Rumour has it that it’s one of the most popular search terms on the Internet but, so far, I’ve never had a single inbound link from it!

Surprisingly, there are quite a number of blog aggregators which collect immigration information and it’s a topic that I touch on quite regularly.

Last, but not least, this particular post will mess with google’s algorithm in respect of this blog. Their algorithm relies on “natural” incoming links and this particular post will create quite a lot of them for me over the next few days. None will be paid for so on google’s argument they are legit incoming links which’ll boost my pagerank a little bit. Will any of them be  truly legitimate incoming links? Somehow, I doubt it.

I think that the underlying problem is that the origins of google’s algorithm are effectively an automated way to rank things similar to academic articles. There you never had the problem of people paying for references (ie links), or at least not quite so openly (the final couple of authors on papers are often there just so that they can get a “publication”).

Move on 10 years and, yes, money does come into it. Just ignoring paid links isn’t sensible in an Internet which is, these days, largely commercial.

Adding “nofollow” in attempt to effectively negate advertising does not seem to be a sensible way to go. This action on their part is just going to push it “underground”. Chances are that you’ll see more blogs put out by companies with very subliminal type advertising. It’s still advertising though and it’s still going to distort the results in google’s algorithm.

What they really need to do is to allow for advertising in terms of paid links. Just putting their head in the sand isn’t going to be a long term solution to this yet that’s exactly what they appear to be doing at the moment.

Come on guys: update the algorithm to allow for a commercial Internet.

It’s been six years since I started off on what subsequently became a modern languages degree and from the original 25 of us there are only two left in the “race” at this point.

It’s not so much that people have failed but rather that they’ve reached the point where they have achieved their intended objectives and therefore dropped out of the running towards the degree. The first three years saw a surprising number of us making it to the finishing post of a Diploma in French which, of course, was enough for quite a lot of people. In fact, I was the only one who continued on with languages at that point although one of the original cast has subsequently started down the path of a Diploma in Spanish and another has continued on in step with me but towards a different a different degree.

So, some six years on, two of us will be starting the final course of our respective degrees next February and, hopefully, will both be graduating in Versailles in September 2009.