Over the next 3 weeks we will have a daily post describing some of the new features and changes coming to the next version 3 of the ChinesePod service. Continuing on from our previous post - Access Improvements - today we discuss some of the new usability improvements.
Inconsistent Translations
As a result of how the current ChinesePod platform was designed, sometimes the Javascript rollovers of Chinese characters produced inconsistent Pinyin and English translation results. In January, David Lancashire of Adsotrans joined the ChinesePod team and has since been working developing a more dynamic Academic Management System that will not only ensure consistency in translations, but also be able to link individual vocabulary terms to the podcast lessons, in which they were used.
An Orphaned Advaced ZH Site
On the current site we separate out our 6 levels into two websites, one in English and the other in Chinese. Our newbie, elementary, intermediate and upper intermediate levels are on the English WWW site, while the advanced and media levels are on the Chinese ZH site. We initially thought advanced students would benefit from the all Chinese site, but we found in practice (a) switching between the two sites is quite awkward, (b) maintaining changes on both sites was difficult, and (c) many people didn’t even know about the extra, advanced lessons! As a result, we will combine the 2 weekly ZH podcasts with the 5 weekly WWW podcasts into one feed, publishing one each day of the week. All will be accessible from one, easy-to-use archive interface.
By the way, I neglected to mention in the previous post that the dialogue will now be available in the MP3 meta ID3 information and in the RSS feed if you are using an iPod.
Hard to Track Conversations
There are currently many ways to contribute to the conversation around ChinesePod - in the lesson comments, in the blog comments, in the wiki and in the forum. We like to participate in these conversations as well and have been trying to find better ways to keep up-to-date with what is going on. We currently use WordPress software for both lesson publication and the various language blogs, phpBB for the forum and MediaWiki for the wiki. To unify all of these would require us to either build our own custom software or modify what we are currently using. We have decided to take a middle-ground approach. First, we will start a new section called ‘Connect’ with basic social networking features that will each user to initiate their own posts into the community (similar to the forum) and also comment on the posts of others. These posts and post comments, in addition to lesson comments will all be linked to individual user accounts that can be tracked in their individual Connect pages, or via the respective RSS. The current blog, wiki and forum system will remain untouched.
We will get into this more in detail in a future post.
Overall Level of Awkwardness
We are also avid users of the ChinesePod service as we try to improve our Chinese. There are features of the site, specifically (a) lesson search, (b) lesson review, (c) my course and (d) vocab study, that we feel could be presented in a more intuitive and useful manner. The core functions of these features will remain, but we have made quite big changes to how they have been implemented. More to follow on this as well.
Tomorrow’s Post: New Brand Look
There is a forum topic titled “Downloading pdf’s in batches”. Apparently the facility was discontinued (Eileen Oct 16th 2006). Was it not seen as a useful service? Is there any intention to re-instate it?
I’m rather excited about new versions of things
But as with all change there is an element of uncertainty is the change for the better… My thoughts
Inconsistent Translations:
This sounds interesting, will ChinesePod users have access to this database somehow? it would be great to be able to import a word list choose a level (or levels) and see where your words are being used for a quick listen (even better if it pops out the dialogue line it came from for you to look at as well)
An Orphaned Advaced *Advanced oops* ZH Site: This sounds like it can only be a good thing… Really if your at the level where you want a Chinese only site to play with your not exactly limited with choice. If it makes things easier for you guys and frees up resources to improve other things then all the better :-D.
The dialogue in Id3 announcement is worthy of its own heading It the single most exciting thing as it has no uncertainty that it is a huge improvement. Would you consider releasing a page with all the existing dialogues on it so that we can manually place them into our ChinesePod libraries?
Hard to Track Conversations: This middle road has me squirming and sounds like it will actually exacerbate the problem.
I really think you should either develop your own or heavily modify something like Drupal (or Joomla). Wordpress isn’t really a CMS so much as it is a blogPortal that is trying to become a CMS. The limitations you put on your interactions with the big brain and us back to you by using WordPress is rather disappointing. Drupal and the like already have a lot of the social networking features you would use. Also I think an off the shelf approach is defiantly not going to work for ChinesePod due to the truly unique requirements that ChinesePod has. I can see the benefits of the system your describing but your just adding another system to your already clouded waters.
I’ve always thought the wiki should dump the wiki name and be called something like the “ChinesePod resource centre”… then explain to people that they can add their own resources. My father who has been using wikipedia for a long time only found out that he could make changes after I told him to just fix something he was complaining about being inaccurate. I think the word wiki is growing in recognition but not quite there I think wikipedia is actually removing some of its meaning by “branding” the word A: “Today I bought an apple” B: “The computer or the fruit?”.
Overall Level of Awkwardness: I think this has a lot to do with ChinesePods development model. There hasn’t really been proper release control. Features were added inclemently thus making things more fractured. Sometimes it seemed more like “this is a really good idea lets implement it” but while the idea was good it wasn’t very well jelled in with the rest of the site. “100 good ideas don’t make one great one” (I just made that up). Some release structure would be good … 1.0.0 -> 2.0.0 release add fatures 1.0.0 -> 1.1.0 release extend existing features 1.0.0 -> 1.0.1 bug fixing. I remember in the old days of ChinesePod I used to send bug report emails to you guys as I’d load up the site and find something new that would work really weird
That’s really made me nostalgic it would seem that the first email I sent to ChinesePod was in Jan 2006, I made my first comment to the blog in april 2006 (it’s only recently I’ve started on lesson comments) and the first lesson I listened to was “Ken can’t dance”. On another note ChinesePod is the only social website that I have ever continuously contributed to. No other site has lasted past the one month honeymoon period. By the way what ever happened to www.bablepod.com?
Charles,
I’m not involved in the web tech, but, as to your point about releasing features: I agree that it was quite messy at times. We made a distinction in the past between stuff we could do on an ad hoc basis and stuff we couldn’t. The ad hoc bits were done partly to make improvements but also show responsiveness to users’ needs. There was also huge element of experimentation because there was no precedent for what we were doing.
The big changes will come in V3. These have been tackled systematically. That’s the way we want to do it in the future.
Ken Carroll
the challenges of such a fast growth… I can’t comment as to whether or not execution will make things easier, but I’m really excited to see these issues being addressed, in particular the blog/comment/wiki/forum thing and zh- being folded back in. All seem like moves in the right direction.
Yv
Probably a bit late for pointing things out. This is pretty much social networking done right. Much better than MySpace and it’s ilk. It’s certainly a evolution on the format. Has a very usable format.
http://virb.com/
“This sounds interesting, will ChinesePod users have access to this database somehow? it would be great to be able to import a word list choose a level (or levels) and see where your words are being used for a quick listen (even better if it pops out the dialogue line it came from for you to look at as well)”
@Charles — that’s the hope. We’re busy on the backend with a lot of the preparatory work porting the existing lessons to the new site (400+ lessons) so I doubt we’ll have many new features right at site launch that will exploit the data, but one of the best reasons for generating this sort of rich lesson-level data is definitely to be able to call up sample sentences, lessons with accompanying audio.
Version 4 - Just cause, you know.
1. There’s that library you all have of all those Flash expansion sentences, and the dialogues too. In my magic world, if David L’s database can pull those up to go along with the text, and it somehow get’s packaged and put into my iPod. I guess you’d have a lunatic with an iPod glued to his hand.
2. For the Intl. Women’s Day podcast I commented about some photos I had taken. A reporter asked if she could post it on www.NowPublic.com which turns out to be a collaborative ‘bigbrain’ sort of news site. If Cpod used whatever application they are using, it would mean a whole new world of Chinese language materials collaboratively put together. The limitations of the Wiki and Forum applications don’t allow this kind of production which makes it easy for individuals to write a story, pull photos and in essence build a web of interest.
3. There used to be this visual link-mapping thing on the internet that disappeared or at least I don’t know where it is anymore. It made a visual representation of any set of info that you entered into it. This would be so much fun with hanzi and our vocab collections. I don’t know if it would help with my Chinese..but it would be FUN.
The late Doctor Lawrence Peter wrote a book called “The Peter Principle”. In this book he hypothesized that everyone eventually rises to a level of incompetence. For example, you take a very good worker and promote him to foreman. Unfortunately there are two different sets of skills required so you remove a very good worker from production and install a very poor foreman to oversee the production. The results are negative. I wonder if the same thing could be said of web sites. More bells and whistles will require more quality assurance and I find the present level of quality assurance lacking on ChinesePod. For example, if I click on the logo for this blog nothing happens. If I click on “Home” nothing happens. This type of thing occurs quite frequently. In the latest Upper Intermediate lesson there is a gap in the audio. Most of the time these errors are reported by subscribers. Why? Is there no system to check and double check audio, lesson headers, .pdf dialogs, etc. Are there clearly defined responsibilities assigned for this? Are non-conformances documented and shared so that they can be avoided in the future? Without beating this issue to death I have one more question. Does C-Pod actually have a formal Quality Assurance program in place? Having said all that I am definitely in favor of progress as long as it is in a planned and delivered in a correct logical manner.
How about more/different premium content? such as more audio content. It just take a bit of exploring to get your way around the website.
Here is more from my personal point of view: The real gem of Chinesepod is the podcast. So supplementary content in that format would be something I would really want. The other features of the website are good, but are not “gems” because there are better solutions out there: the mouse-over pop up is good, but Firefox/ChinesePera-kun is much better because it also translate the individual characters in addition to the word. The Glossary/dictionary may be good, but not as good as ABC on a Palmtop or even CEDICT. The social network is good, but often I find myself that I “just spent an hour reading the boards and maybe I should have spent that hour studying”…
I find it tedious to rewind to the start of the dialog to re-listen, after I have gone through the entire podcast. I like to listen at least 4-6 times to the dialog alone.
Would it be possible to put fast-forward/rewind breaks in the lessons, at the beginning of the dialog?
Like in the Ricky Gervais podcasts…they have managed to put breaks in the podcast where the photos are, and if you rewind it goes to that section.
Do you guys know what i am talking about? Just a suggestion.
Thanks! [BLUSH] I didn’t even know about the “advanced”, all-Chinese site until Ken mentioned it in this announcement![/BLUSH]
Cheers,
Auntie
Hey Bob,
We certainly do have people on quality assurance - everyone is on quality assurance! I don’t want to make excuses, but let me tell you that the problem with the changing links comes from bugs in the Wordpress software. That will be solved with V3, or maybe even before the launch.
You keep us to a high standard, Bob, and that’s good. We’re doing our best to deliver 100%, nothing less. We’re not there yet, but I think you’ll see some changes in the coming weeks.
Ken Carroll
Ken,
I love you guys. I only want to help make things better. Honest feedback is the only way that I know how. I am encouraged by your reply. Hat’s off to you and your staff of very fine and intelligent people. I know that there are growing pains. ChinesePod is one of the best things that ever happened to me. Please keep up the good work. No need to say that either. I already know that you will. Onward ever, backward NEVER!
@Lantian,
These are good suggestions. Let me know if anything stirs your memory about the “visual link-mapping thing.” It sounds interesting, but I can’t remember anything like that myself. Some sort of clustering tool?
Phil in Tianjin,
It has been over a year since we discontinued this feature. It wasn’t that it wasn’t useful, it just became a little unmanageable when users had 200+ lessons in their My Course and the server had to output a ZIP file. We haven’t confirmed it yet, but we will likely try to add the PDF as an enclosure in the RSS file, much like we currently do with the MP3 file, to help increase convenience.
Charles,
- John Pasden is re-indexing all the lessons and PDF’s as he re-combines the advanced lessons. We will offer a torrent file with all the new audio when we get it all complete.
- There was some corporate restructuring in 2006, that separated EnglishPod and BabelPod out from the Praxis Language family. At that time, EnglishPod was re-named OnDemandEnglish and BabelPod was shut down.
guillermo,
You make a good point about there ‘being better solutions out there’. While we are committed to continually improving the quality of what we are doing, what is currently lacking is integration of all these disparate solutions in the marketplace. This is one area in which we feel we can contribute.
A Jin,
We will have dialog-only MP3’s in both the player on the lesson review page and available for right-click download on the same page. Again, we hopes this makes things easier.
@Dave and Lantien
I think I’ve seen something like what Lantien mentioned I believe it was a tool through O’Reilly’s site. O’Reilly is always talking about data visualisation.
I’ve got to get my copy of flash working in wine so I can get back to my games demo project… If I find the site I’ll post again
I’m fairly sure what I was thinking of is Tree Mapping That way you will be able to visualize which podcast has the highest occurrence of items from your list.
This is one of my favourite things about data visualization… http://www.visual-literacy.org.....table.html
Some sort of association map through the PodCasts would be fantastic. Which podcats link up with what based through vocab, grammar or function. Making that sort of stuff usable may be the biggest challenge though. a hypobolic tree or a semantic map.
Oh and is there going to be official support for ontologies and other semantic elements? From what your saying it sounds like there is a huge informal basis for it.
Sorry I’m a bit of a stats monkey.
Thanks for bringing the advanced lessons back in from the cold.
Any chance that you will make English transcripts for them? (I’d like to be able to verify my understanding is correct.) You can hide it somewhere, have it as a premium feature …
(I’m not quite advanced, yet, but I’m hoping more input will help. I can usually read the intermediate and upper intermediate transcripts easily, but sometimes a phrase in the advanced lessons just stumps me.)
Interlinking lessons, vocab, grammar and comments (and maybe later Expansion, Exercises, Characters, Chengyu & Suyu, Writing Lectures, Etymology, Flash Game Collection…) is a magical idea.
Right now you heap up your content in a linear fashion (which is already impressive): one or two lessons a day tightly interlocked with Expansion, Exercises, and Dialogue. Independent units.
If you hack those (logically) into small chunks, add primary keys to all resulting pieces and define several generic relationship types you can set free overlinear growth, as each “knowledge nugget” (I usually hate this kind of lingo, but here it fits) automatically builds links to older lessons, example sentences etc.
A tresure chest of knowledge, that has n-fold more value compared to the collection of individual competing recsources (BTW I do not like ChinesePera-kun, and the vocab base of CEDict is only twice as big as your Glossary). And you can do all sorts of data mining…
And welcome back home, Advanced!
How will you handle the numbering? Will Japanese-Horror (zh.01) become the new No. 23?
I also like the idea of spreading the publication of new lessons evenly over all 7 days of the week very much.
I know it is purely irrational, because of course I have the freedeom to work through the lessons whenever I like, but right now on some days I feel left hungry while on others the meal seems to be way to big (e.g. when there an UI and an Advanced published on the same day).
Henning, Not CEDICT, I meant www.mdbg.net…
Hi guillermo,
I switched my preferred online-dictionary a while a go. It became dict.cn as they have lots of contemporary stuff in there and because they already did the vocab-example-sentence-interlinking.
@Charles and Lantian:
Many Eyes:
http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/
Swivel:
http://www.swivel.com/
either of these them?
www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php has many features that would really enhance Cpod’s site if like options where available.
As a premium subscriber, I am encouraged that so much work is going into the product in hopes of making it better. Like seen in a discussion recently “pay the pod, throw the stone”. (rosetta stone)
As also seen recently, the gems of Cpod are the podcasts (especially the people who deliver them). I agree with this. For my money, the PDFs are good. Yet, as I reflect upon my connection with Cpod, I find that I think those who use Cpod for free get more for their money not spent, then I get for my premium dues:( Now if I am not the only one with these thoughts, I fear that a source of Cpod’s money might not be all that stable. I don’t want this to happen. I want Cpod around for the long haul. Learning a language well, takes a good amount of time.
To further my concern, I heard in the wind (an email from China the the United States) that traditional characters may be dropped in the production of PDFs. I have tried to encourage additional usage of traditional characters in the advanced lessons like the intermediate and upper intermediate lessons, but the opposite is occurring. For me, this would be a major disappointment and handicap.
An additional item to ponder: in my experience in knowing non-Chinese Mandarin learners, many have found learning the characters “too hard” and not tried to acquire them. In the long term, it seems that these learners hit a plateau in their learning because of this choice, and it seems when the intermediate range comes around the learning significantly slows down compared to the students who have chosen to fight with the characters.(sry about the run on sentence) This being said, I would hope that even though Cpod is highly audible, that at the very least, promotion of learning how to read be highly encouraged.
So, why my hang up on traditional characters? First, I am bias, I have studied Chinese using traditional since 1993(this is not a reason why Cpod could use both). Secondly, native speakers seem to be rather able to fluently read both simplified and traditional, yet many of the native speakers I know seem to have the opinion that traditional to simplified is easier than simplified to traditional. Further, traditional is the origin of simplified and holds a lot of the Chinese people’s history and culture. Another reason might be that many international business people will also do business in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and with many Chinese operating businesses run around the world that still use traditional. There are many more reason, but enough for now. My real point is, please consider maintaining both simplified and traditional.
Peace,
@Dave Swivel is probably what I was thinking of but there is also this www.visuwords.com
Mark (马克） asks Any chance that you will make English transcripts for [the advanced lessons]?
Yv
Just received a copy of the 现代汉语词典 [Chinese-English Edition, 2002 年增补本] and I notice that a great deal of the vocab definitions from zh-advanced are just lifted from there verbatim.
So at the very least, putting the English version alongside should be no sweat (and wouldn’t change the copyright situation much
I’ve seen a few comments about Search under New Site Architectureor Brand - New Look that I don’t entirely agree with.
What’s not entirely clear is what level of search will be available. What I really miss is a search across all lesson comments, possibly filtered by level. It doesn’t have to be Type and Wait to Search as on this blog, I don’t personaly search transcript or even vocab therein, I can do that on my local files. But there’s a wealth of stuff in the comments, albeit very unstructured, that could be put to better use if it was searchable. And yes, the search box should be readily accessible.
Yv
I LIKe it.
These new changes sound very exciting. I love using Chinesepod and I’m stoked it will only get better.
If I had one wish, it would be this:
Don’t change the logo.
The new logo sucks. The old logo was fun, hip, cool and screamed “Chinese on the internet!”. It looks good on t-shirts, ipods, and especially on my brand new chinesepod mug.
The new logo looks exactly like Aramark’s logo. That one you see all over the US delivering food to restaurants in their beat-up 18-wheel trucks; their triangular logo splashed over the entire side of the trailer. The new logo screams “corporate mediocrity.” I wouldn’t have even wanted my free mug if it had that logo.
Emporer Carroll could you put up a vote on the Chinesepod homepage and let the users decide?
Respecfully,
Jonathan in Los Angeles
China Speeds - I was putting off harping again about downloads speeds within China hoping that the new S3 Amazon environment would help things out.
I’m sitting here at a turtle-speed of 4.2 kb/sec downloading a SpanishSense mp3….
Maybe things are better in Shanghai and Beijing, but as I’ve also seen comments from others, us in the other parts, not so good. It seems also that whatever cables they might have still needed to fix going to Taiwan, probably ain’t gonna get any better than now. Things to me still seem slower than pre-quake.
About the SpanishSense, a couple things I noticed. Aaron speaks in that I’ve been living overseas for so long that I speak English-kind-of-slow-and-choppy. It happened to me in Japan. I was especially turned on to Chinesepod in the early days because it didn’t have any of that.
Aaron’s translation also aren’t the Ken variety where he gives two general English forms, Aaron just does a slow one and an English one. The English being kinda too fast, even for my native ears. I think this takes away from the pedagogy, and is a bit off putting.
They do seem to do a lot of grammar, I dunno, it never really helped me much in my high school Spanish. But I’ll hang with SpanishSense for a while, as a Los Angeleno it would be good to bring up my ol’espanol.
Lantian,
These are early (read ‘beta’) days for SpanishSense. There’s a ways to go but I’m confident we’ll get it done. Your observations are, btw, excellent.
Ken
I agree with much of what Guillermo has to say on his March 13 post. I have four requests/hopes:
Social networking: My most valuable finds there are links to other useful websites. I also often realize I have spent valuable study time reading posts.
1.What I DREAM of being able to do there is to find other CPers in my area who would like to practice together. A very simple interface for this specific goal would be ideal: plug in your city & email address.
2.”My Studies” In addition to being able to create a list of words, and a list of lessons, it would be lovely if one could click on the end on a sentence in the expansion section to create a list of sentences. Many of the lessons sitting around in “my studies” are only there for one tricky sentence in the expansion section.(Which I have a hard time finding again)
3. More More & MORE traditional characters!! Beginning conversationalists often just want to get a little comfy with the sounds before tackling those daunting characters. I didn’t want to see a character for a couple years of learning conversation. Now I can’t get enough. I hope to be able to read pre-Mao texts, also works from Taiwan, etc. It’s perfect to be be able to see both. Ideally, all my pop-up words would be traditional, with the simplified version in a small ().The rumor that you are considering eliminating the little trad. copy you have is making me a tad nervous.
4. The podcast: Having an easy way to separate & download only the meat - the 3X conversation. (If one wanted it 6 times, they could import it twice)
That said, CP is the ONLY reason I am still studying Chinese.
Thanks again.