I believe the future of language learning methods is with the web. The standalone language packages (like Rosetta Stone) take too long to develop, are limited in the amount of material they can package and do not leverage community effort (which WordChamp does with user translations). The biggest challenge with the web based services is to convince people to pay for them. As with many web 2.0 companies (e.g., MySpace, YouTube), WordChamp is currently free, but obviously this cannot continue forever.

I have written about Spock - the supposedly computational linguistics heavy search engine - before. I have to admit that I could not see what people were getting so excited about. Recently, I have received an invitation to the Spock’s beta. And I am still not very excited. Similarly to constantly shifting FreshNotes/Knover, this company started from being all about using information extraction to build content and relations and then quickly moved to mostly human-powered content.

I am looking into Struts 2 and finding its multi-layered defaults somewhat confusing. Specifically, it took forever to fully understand blank demo application that comes bundled with it. Specifically, I could not understand how the example switches between the languages. From the jsp page, it was clear that it was using the parameter request_locale to indicate the language. But then the parameter just disappears. It actually is not mentioned anywhere else in the source code.

Getting Things Done (GTD) is an interesting system for managing one’s time and making things happen. It was originally pitched at CEO, with a lot of different projects on their plates at the same time. Lately, however, I have noticed a significant uptake of it by system administrators, programmers and other IT geeks. Being a geek myself, I think it is because we also have to juggle multiple projects simultaneously. Some people I know could probably beat most CEOs by number of projects they are involved in.

I really like WordChamp to help me with learning foreign languages. It was good for me when I was learning French. It is good to me now that I am learning Spanish. And the last couple of months it was getting better nearly on a weekly basis. That did not used to be the case. I looked at them just over a year ago and they had some interesting ideas, but the best features (like Web Reader) were for paying customers only.