Translating and Transcoding the Blogosphere

I have arrived safely, but groggy in Paris where it's now late morning and rainy. In leading up to my visit here, I have started reading some French blogs in my RSS reader, such as Marketing Alternatif - a great resource on street marketing.

As noted here before, the blogosphere is a truly global medium. Only 25 percent of the content bloggers pump out each day is written in English. This means that most of us here in the US are missing 75% of the b'sphere.

The big RSS newsreaders and the blog search engines can help fill in this void by translating foreign language content on the fly much as Google does for Web results.  BL Ochman and others have noted that machine language translation is limited. That's certainly true. However, it's the best option we have right now. (Edelman's partnership with Technorati is tackling the opposite challenge. T'Rati is creating localized front-ends and morphological analysis tools for our teams in Europe and Asia.)

Feed readers need to do a better job of transcoding content too. I have been playing around with the mobile versions of the Google Reader and Bloglines. Both make it easy to read feeds on the fly but neither offers the options to format the sites they link to for a mobile device. Again, Google has mastered this for Web search. If you use Google Mobile, all of the results it links to are automatically formatted for mobile devices.

As they become more popular and the world gets flatter, RSS readers need to get smarter in how they translate and transcode content.