Hacklog: Blogamundo — poking holes in the language barrier since approximately 1 month from now

The Google folks have updated the blog post about releasing a veritable avalanche of ngrams, which we mentioned here a while back.

Unfortunately, unless I’m mistaken, it seems the data’s all English. Which is really a great thing, if you’re interested in English exclusively, but not so much for us, since we aren’t. It’s also $150, which I suppose is fair enough, considering the amount of work that must have gone into spidering all that data, and converting 24 gigs to UTF-8 (no mean feat, that), and then filtering out everything but English.

(That last bit is where I cry.)

Anyway, here’s hoping there will be some similarly cool multilingual content somewhere down the road.

Today’s a sad day in the geek world. Rob Levin, known as lilo, the founder of freenode.net, passed away.

After a bit of reflection I realized just how much this project owes to the existence of Freenode. If Jonas & I hadn’t started chatting about Portuguese, Python, and translation in the #joiito channel a few years ago, none of this would have ever started. We wouldn’t have decided to team up with my brother John and try to make a go of turning Bam into a serious project. We wouldn’t have known about amazing projects like Global Voices. We wouldn’t have been able to learn so much by talking directly to the Wikipedia community.

Freenode is a pretty amazing place, too easy to take for granted.

Thanks so much lilo, idle in peace.