What is Blog ?

A blog (a contraction of the term “weblog”)[1] is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (artlog), photographs (photoblog), sketches (sketchblog), videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog), and audio (podcasting). Micro-blogging is another type of blogging, featuring very short posts.

As of December 2007, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 112 million blogs.
Contents

Types

There are many different types of blogs, differing not only in the type of content, but also in the way that content is delivered or written.

Personal blogs
    The personal blog, an ongoing diary or commentary by an individual, is the traditional, most common blog. Personal bloggers usually take pride in their blog posts, even if their blog is never read by anyone but them. Blogs often become more than a way to just communicate; they become a way to reflect on life or works of art. Blogging can have a sentimental quality. Few personal blogs rise to fame and the mainstream, but some personal blogs quickly garner an extensive following. A type of personal blog is referred to as “microblogging,” which is extremely detailed blogging as it seeks to capture a moment in time. Sites, such as Twitter, allow bloggers to share thoughts and feelings instantaneously with friends and family and is much faster than e-mailing or writing.

Corporate and organizational blogs
    A blog can be private, as in most cases, or it can be for business purposes. Blogs, either used internally to enhance the communication and culture in a corporation or externally for marketing, branding or public relations purposes are called corporate blogs. Similar blogs for clubs and societies are called club blogs, group blogs, or by similar names; typical use is to inform members and other interested parties of club and member activities.

By genre
    Some blogs focus on a particular subject, such as political blogs, travel blogs, house blogs,[3][4] fashion blogs, project blogs, education blogs, niche blogs, classical music blogs, quizzing blogs and legal blogs (often referred to as a blawgs) or dreamlogs. Two common types of genre blogs are art blogs and music blogs. A blog featuring discussions especially about home and family is not uncommonly called a mom blog.[5][6][7][8][9] While not a legitimate type of blog, one used for the sole purpose of spamming is known as a Splog.

By media type
    A blog comprising videos is called a vlog, one comprising links is called a linklog, a site containing a portfolio of sketches is called a sketchblog or one comprising photos is called a photoblog.[10] Blogs with shorter posts and mixed media types are called tumblelogs. Blogs that are written on typewriters and then scanned are called typecast or typecast blogs; see typecasting (blogging).

    A rare type of blog hosted on the Gopher Protocol is known as a Phlog.

By device
    Blogs can also be defined by which type of device is used to compose it. A blog written by a mobile device like a mobile phone or PDA could be called a moblog.[11] One early blog was Wearable Wireless Webcam, an online shared diary of a person’s personal life combining text, video, and pictures transmitted live from a wearable computer and EyeTap device to a web site. This practice of semi-automated blogging with live video together with text was referred to as sousveillance. Such journals have been used as evidence in legal matters.[citation needed]

Community and cataloging

The Blogosphere
    The collective community of all blogs is known as the blogosphere. Since all blogs are on the internet by definition, they may be seen as interconnected and socially networked, through blogrolls, comments, linkbacks (refbacks, trackbacks or pingbacks) and backlinks. Discussions “in the blogosphere” have been used by the media as a gauge of public opinion on various issues.

Blog search engines
    Several blog search engines are used to search blog contents, such as Bloglines, BlogScope, and Technorati. Technorati, which is among the most popular blog search engines, provides current information on both popular searches and tags used to categorize blog postings[12]. The research community is working on going beyond simple keyword search, by inventing new ways to navigate through huge amounts of information present in the blogosphere, as demonstrated by projects like BlogScope.[[[Wikipedia:[citation needed]|[citation needed]]]]

Blogging communities and directories
    Several online communities exist that connect people to blogs and bloggers to other bloggers, including BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog[13].

Blogging and advertising
    It is common for blogs to feature advertisements either to financially benefit the blogger or to promote the blogger’s favorite causes. The popularity of blogs has also given rise to “fake blogs” in which a company will create a fictional blog as a marketing tool to promote a product.[14]

Popularity

Researchers have analyzed the dynamics of how blogs become popular. There are essentially two measures of this: popularity through citations, as well as popularity through affiliation (i.e. blogroll). The basic conclusion from studies of the structure of blogs is that while it takes time for a blog to become popular through blogrolls, permalinks can boost popularity more quickly, and are perhaps more indicative of popularity and authority than blogrolls, since they denote that people are actually reading the blog’s content and deem it valuable or noteworthy in specific cases.[15]

The blogdex project was launched by researchers in the MIT Media Lab to crawl the Web and gather data from thousands of blogs in order to investigate their social properties. It gathered this information for over 4 years, and autonomously tracked the most contagious information spreading in the blog community, ranking it by recency and popularity. It can therefore be considered the first instantiation of a memetracker. The project is no longer active, but a similar function is now served by tailrank.com.

Blogs are given rankings by Technorati based on the number of incoming links and Alexa Internet based on the Web hits of Alexa Toolbar users. In August 2006, Technorati found that the most linked-to blog on the internet was that of Chinese actress Xu Jinglei.[16] Chinese media Xinhua reported that this blog received more than 50 million page views, claiming it to be the most popular blog in the world.[17] Technorati rated Boing Boing to be the most-read group-written blog.[16]

Blurring with the mass media

Many bloggers, particularly those engaged in participatory journalism, differentiate themselves from the mainstream media, while others are members of that media working through a different channel. Some institutions see blogging as a means of “getting around the filter” and pushing messages directly to the public. Some critics worry that bloggers respect neither copyright nor the role of the mass media in presenting society with credible news. Bloggers and other contributors to user-generated content are behind Time magazine naming their 2006 person of the year as “you”.

Many mainstream journalists, meanwhile, write their own blogs — well over 300, according to CyberJournalist.net’s J-blog list. The first known use of a blog on a news site was in August 1998, when Jonathan Dube of The Charlotte Observer published one chronicling Hurricane Bonnie.[18]

Some bloggers have moved over to other media. The following bloggers (and others) have appeared on radio and television: Duncan Black (known widely by his pseudonym, Atrios), Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit), Markos Moulitsas Zúniga (Daily Kos), Alex Steffen (Worldchanging) and Ana Marie Cox (Wonkette). In counterpoint, Hugh Hewitt exemplifies a mass-media personality who has moved in the other direction, adding to his reach in “old media” by being an influential blogger. Equally many established authors, for example Mitzi Szereto have started using Blogs to not only update fans on their current works but also to expand into new areas of writing.

Blogs have also had an influence on minority languages, bringing together scattered speakers and learners; this is particularly so with blogs in Gaelic languages. Minority language publishing (which may lack economic feasibility) can find its audience through inexpensive blogging.

There are many examples of bloggers who have published books based on their blogs, e.g., Salam Pax, Ellen Simonetti, Jessica Cutler, ScrappleFace. Blog-based books have been given the name blook. A prize for the best blog-based book was initiated in 2005,[19] the Lulu Blooker Prize.[20] However, success has been elusive offline, with many of these books not selling as well as their blogs. Only blogger Tucker Max cracked the New York Times Bestseller List.[21]. The book based on Julie Powell’s blog “The Julie/Julia Project” was made into the film Julie & Julia, apparently the first to do so.
Legal and social consequences

Blogging can result in a range of legal liabilities and other unforeseen consequences.
Defamation or liability

Several cases have been brought before the national courts against bloggers concerning issues of defamation or liability. U.S. payouts related to blogging totaled $17.4 million by 2009; in some cases these have been covered by umbrella insurance.[22] The courts have returned with mixed verdicts. Internet Service Providers (ISPs), in general, are immune from liability for information that originates with third parties (U.S. Communications Decency Act and the EU Directive 2000/31/EC).

In Doe v. Cahill, the Delaware Supreme Court held that stringent standards had to be met to unmask the anonymous posts of bloggers and also took the unusual step of dismissing the libel case itself (as unfounded under American libel law) rather than referring it back to the trial court for reconsideration.[23] In a bizarre twist, the Cahills were able to obtain the identity of John Doe, who turned out to be the person they suspected: the town’s mayor, Councilman Cahill’s political rival. The Cahills amended their original complaint, and the mayor settled the case rather than going to trial.

In January 2007, two prominent Malaysian political bloggers, Jeff Ooi and Ahiruddin Attan, were sued by pro-government newspaper, The New Straits Times Press (Malaysia) Berhad, Kalimullah bin Masheerul Hassan, Hishamuddin bin Aun and Brenden John a/l John Pereira over an alleged defamation. The plaintiff was supported by the Malaysian government.[24] Following the suit, the Malaysian government proposed to “register” all bloggers in Malaysia in order to better control parties against their interest. [25] This is the first such legal case against bloggers in the country.

In the United States, blogger Aaron Wall was sued by Traffic Power for defamation and publication of trade secrets in 2005.[26] According to Wired Magazine, Traffic Power had been “banned from Google for allegedly rigging search engine results.”[27] Wall and other “white hat” search engine optimization consultants had exposed Traffic Power in what they claim was an effort to protect the public. The case was watched by many bloggers because it addressed the murky legal question of who is liable for comments posted on blogs.[28] The case was dismissed for lack of personal jurisdiction, and Traffic Power failed to appeal within the allowed time.[29][30][31][32]

In 2009, a controversial and landmark decision by The Hon. Mr Justice Eady refused to grant an order to protect the anonymity of Richard Horton.[33]

In 2009, NDTV issued a legal notice to Indian blogger Chetan Kunte for “abusive free speech” regarding a blog post criticizing their coverage of the Mumbai attacks.[34] The blogger unconditionally withdrew his post, replacing it with legal undertaking and an admission that his post had been “defamatory and untrue” which resulted in several Indian bloggers criticizing NDTV for trying to silence critics.[35]
Employment

Employees who blog about elements of their place of employment raise the issue of employee branding, since their activities can begin to affect the brand recognition of their employer. In general, attempts by employee bloggers to protect themselves by maintaining anonymity have proved ineffective.[36]
In late 2004, Ellen Simonetti was fired for what was deemed by her employer, Delta Air Lines, to be inappropriate material on her blog. She subsequently wrote a book based on her blog.

Delta Air Lines fired flight attendant Ellen Simonetti because she posted photographs of herself in uniform on an airplane and because of comments posted on her blog “Queen of Sky: Diary of a Flight Attendant” which the employer deemed inappropriate.[37][38] This case highlighted the issue of personal blogging and freedom of expression vs. employer rights and responsibilities, and so it received wide media attention. Simonetti took legal action against the airline for “wrongful termination, defamation of character and lost future wages”.[39] The suit was postponed while Delta was in bankruptcy proceedings (court docket).

In early 2006, Erik Ringmar, a tenured senior lecturer at the London School of Economics, was ordered by the convenor of his department to “take down and destroy” his blog in which he discussed the quality of education at the school.[40]

Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, was fined during the 2006 NBA playoffs for criticizing NBA officials on the court and in his blog.[41]

Mark Jen was terminated in 2005 after 10 days of employment as an Assistant Product Manager at Google for discussing corporate secrets on his personal blog, then called 99zeros and hosted on the Google-owned Blogger service.[42] He blogged about unreleased products and company finances a week before the company’s earnings announcement. He was fired two days after he complied with his employer’s request to remove the sensitive material from his blog.[43]

In India, blogger Gaurav Sabnis resigned from IBM after his posts exposing the false claims of a management school, IIPM, led to management of IIPM threatening to burn their IBM laptops as a sign of protest against him.[44]

Jessica Cutler, aka “The Washingtonienne”, blogged about her sex life while employed as a congressional assistant. After the blog was discovered and she was fired,[45] she wrote a novel based on her experiences and blog: The Washingtonienne: A Novel. Cutler is presently being sued by one of her former lovers in a case that could establish the extent to which bloggers are obligated to protect the privacy of their real life associates.[46]

Catherine Sanderson, a.k.a. Petite Anglaise, lost her job in Paris at a British accountancy firm because of blogging.[47] Although given in the blog in a fairly anonymous manner, some of the descriptions of the firm and some of its people were less than flattering. Sanderson later won a compensation claim case against the British firm, however.[48]

On the other hand, Penelope Trunk, writing in the Globe in 2006, was one of the first to point out that a large portion of bloggers are professionals and that a well-written blog can help attract employers.
Political dangers

Blogging can sometimes have unforeseen consequences in politically sensitive areas. Blogs are much harder to control than broadcast or even print media. As a result, totalitarian and authoritarian regimes often seek to suppress blogs and/or to punish those who maintain them.

In Singapore, two ethnic Chinese were imprisoned under the country’s anti-sedition law for posting anti-Muslim remarks in their blogs.[49]

Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer was charged with insulting the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and an Islamic institution through his blog. It is the first time in the history of Egypt that a blogger was prosecuted. After a brief trial session that took place in Alexandria, the blogger was found guilty and sentenced to prison terms of three years for insulting Islam and inciting sedition, and one year for insulting Mubarak.[50]

Egyptian blogger Abdel Monem Mahmoud was arrested in April 2007 for anti-government writings in his blog. Monem is a member of the banned Muslim Brotherhood.

After expressing opinions in his personal blog about the state of the Sudanese armed forces, Jan Pronk, United Nations Special Representative for the Sudan, was given three days notice to leave Sudan. The Sudanese army had demanded his deportation.[51][52][53]

In Myanmar, Nay Phone Latt, a blogger, was sentenced to 20 years in jail for posting a cartoon critical of head of state Than Shwe.[54]
Personal safety
See also: cyberstalking and Internet homicide

One consequence of blogging is the possibility of attacks or threats against the blogger, sometimes without apparent reason. Kathy Sierra, author of the innocuous blog Creating Passionate Users, was the target of such vicious threats and misogynistic insults that she canceled her keynote speech at a technology conference in San Diego, fearing for her safety.[55] While a blogger’s anonymity is often tenuous, Internet trolls who would attack a blogger with threats or insults can be emboldened by anonymity. Sierra and supporters initiated an online discussion aimed at countering abusive online behavior[56] and developed a blogger’s code of conduct.
History
Main article: History of blogging timeline
Main article: Online diary

The term “weblog” was coined by Jorn Barger[57] on 17 December 1997. The short form, “blog,” was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May 1999.[58][59][60] Shortly thereafter, Evan Williams at Pyra Labs used “blog” as both a noun and verb (“to blog,” meaning “to edit one’s weblog or to post to one’s weblog”) and devised the term “blogger” in connection with Pyra Labs’ Blogger product, leading to the popularization of the terms.[61]
Origins

Before blogging became popular, digital communities took many forms, including Usenet, commercial online services such as GEnie, BiX and the early CompuServe, e-mail lists[62] and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). In the 1990s, Internet forum software, such as WebEx, created running conversations with “threads.” Threads are topical connections between messages on a metaphorical “corkboard.”

The modern blog evolved from the online diary, where people would keep a running account of their personal lives. Most such writers called themselves diarists, journalists, or journalers. Justin Hall, who began personal blogging in 1994 while a student at Swarthmore College, is generally recognized as one of the earliest bloggers,[63] as is Jerry Pournelle.[citation needed] Dave Winer’s Scripting News is also credited with being one of the oldest and longest running weblogs.[64][65] Another early blog was Wearable Wireless Webcam, an online shared diary of a person’s personal life combining text, video, and pictures transmitted live from a wearable computer and EyeTap device to a web site in 1994. This practice of semi-automated blogging with live video together with text was referred to as sousveillance, and such journals were also used as evidence in legal matters.

Early blogs were simply manually updated components of common Web sites. However, the evolution of tools to facilitate the production and maintenance of Web articles posted in reverse chronological order made the publishing process feasible to a much larger, less technical, population. Ultimately, this resulted in the distinct class of online publishing that produces blogs we recognize today. For instance, the use of some sort of browser-based software is now a typical aspect of “blogging”. Blogs can be hosted by dedicated blog hosting services, or they can be run using blog software, or on regular web hosting services.
Rise in popularity

After a slow start, blogging rapidly gained in popularity. Blog usage spread during 1999 and the years following, being further popularized by the near-simultaneous arrival of the first hosted blog tools:

    * Bruce Ableson launched Open Diary in October 1998, which soon grew to thousands of online diaries. Open Diary innovated the reader comment, becoming the first blog community where readers could add comments to other writers’ blog entries.
    * Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal in March 1999.
    * Andrew Smales created Pitas.com in July 1999 as an easier alternative to maintaining a “news page” on a Web site, followed by Diaryland in September 1999, focusing more on a personal diary community.[66]
    * Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan (Pyra Labs) launched blogger.com in August 1999 (purchased by Google in February 2003)

Big idiot at youtube

Big idiot at youtube

Roman Polanski and the Art of Justifying Rape

Roman Polanski and the Art of Justifying Rape

Apple Now Own Google Maps Competitor Placebase

Back in July, Apple stealthily acquired Placebase, a mapping company that provides a service similar to Google Maps, but with more robust customizations and set of APIs, called Pushpin, for layering data sets over maps.

Google and Apple have been steadily moving from friends to frenemies of late, with the advent of Android and CloudOS, the whole Google Voice and Google Latitude rejection brouhaha, and Google’s CEO leaving Apple’s board. TiPb’s conjectured that Apple might see Google as trying to take over everyone else’s platform as well, so it makes a certain amount of sense (especially given their history with the Mac) to have in-house backups for all the services Google currently offers for the iPhone. A billion-dollar data center might factor into that as well…

Given that Apple wrote the iPhone Maps app themselves, and just used Google for the backend, a switch to Apple Maps might even be transparent to the end user. TiPb’s also discussed Apple’s philosophy that the interface is the app, which again shows why Apple might be hesitant to give UI over to Google through Google Voice or Latitude — they can’t swap that out as easily.

Regardless, it will be interesting to see what an Apple Maps might look like…

Open Source Group Buys Microsoft Patents to Ward Off Patent Trolls

Artwork: Chip Taylor

Open Invention Network is reportedly buying up a number of Linux-related patents that Microsoft sold the rights to earlier this year. The move allows OIN to retain legal rights to the patents and license them freely to the open source community, thereby ensuring that less-scrupulous buyers don’t acquire them and initiate frivolous patent-infringement cases.

The open source community operates from a different point of view as it relates to intellectual property ownership and in generally abhors the concept of patents. However, patent and intellectual property rights exist and the open source community has been forced to both defend itself from patent infringement suits and pursue those who misappropriate open source code.

The open source community, by its very nature, is a grassroots, volunteer experiment in collaboration. The premise of open source software is for the community to work together to develop software products which are freely distributed and used.

OIN helps the open source community- particularly the Linux community- to straddle the fence between the collaborative sharing of open source code and the legal world of intellectual property and patent rights. According to its web site, OIN “was formed to promote Linux by using patents to create a collaborative environment.” The site also states “Patents owned by Open Invention Network are available royalty-free to any company, institution or individual that agrees not to assert its patents against the Linux System.”

That brings us to the tension between OIN and Microsoft. OIN members include industry giants such as IBM, Redhat, and Sony, but Microsoft is notoriously absent. By not officially joining OIN, Microsoft is sending a tacit message that it still retains the right to assert its patents against Linux developers and OIN members.

You might think facing a steady stream of accusations of patent infringement such as the i4i patent infringement case against Microsoft Word and other legal challenges would make Microsoft less trigger-happy about initiating its own patent suits. However, Microsoft has never been shy about asserting its intellectual property rights. In 2004 Microsoft pursued Lindows for being too close to the Windows trademark. Earlier this year, Microsoft reached a settlement in a suit against GPS-maker Tom Tom for code which is actually part of the Linux kernel.

This purchase is an opportunity for OIN to continue to fulfill its mission of protecting the Linux community by purchasing up patents which could be used in frivolous patent infringement cases. Because these patents were already on the open market, OIN is really protecting the open source community from patent trolls. But, because the patents came from Microsoft it also means fewer patents in the Microsoft arsenal so its like killing two birds with one stone.

Geek Alert: Process Hacker Tweaks Your PC For Free

Process Hacker is an astoundingly useful and full-featured tool for monitoring and, yes, hacking ongoing processes on your PC. There is an astonishing amount of functionality crammed into a clean, well-designed, interface. And it’s free.

Process Hacker gives you an enormous amount of information about–and power over–your PC.

When I first found this software, I admit to a bit of eye-rolling. “Great, someone else tossed a quick skin on something Windows includes for free and thinks he’s made something useful.” I was very, very, wrong.

Process Hacker is to the included Windows “Task Manager” what a 747 is to a three-year-old with a towel around his neck about to learn a painful lesson about gravity. Even if Process Hacker were limited to just the information it shows in the main GUI–such as a hierarchy of which processes are owned by which applications, which services are in which SVCHOST, and (if you want to turn it on) a graph for each service of its CPU usage–it would be worth downloading. However, it goes far beyond even that.

Right-click a process, and you get a huge list of options, one of which is the seemingly trivial “Properties”. This menu item, though, opens the doorway into a realm of more data than I knew existed. Nine subtabs await you, some with tabbed pages of their own, detailing everything from the security privileges the process is allowed (Microsoft Word, for example, is not permitted to shut down someone else’s computer). Further, and this is very cool indeed, Process Hacker can show you the memory a process uses–not how much memory (it does that too, in detail) but the contents of it, and you can copy or edit it. Note: Editing memory of running processes can be very, very, dangerous. This feature is mostly useful for programmers looking for obscure bugs, or checking for security flaws.

Process Hacker lets you do things that are difficult to do in Windows proper. For example, it can scan for, and kill, hidden processes. This feature is only available on 32-bit systems, due to security limits on 64-bit systems, but it’s useful because it can reveal viruses, spyware, or undocumented Windows processes.

Flaws are few. Process Hacker is mostly stable, but I did experience a crash when doing some memory searches. As is perhaps fitting, this program tends to assume you know what you’re doing–help is functional but sparse. The FAQ includes some other warnings about known bugs and issues. Process Hacker offers tremendous power to change things few users should be changing; this isn’t a flaw, but it does mean that even geeks should proceed with caution.

If Task Manager makes your eyes glaze over, Process Hacker isn’t for you. If you’re a system administrator, a programmer, or a hacker in the noble sense of the word–a person who wants to know all there is to know about a system, including getting down and dirty with the bits and bytes–this tool may prove more of a timesink than tvtropes.org. I haven’t mentioned a tenth of the cool things I found while testing this program. Too many free programs are overpriced, this is freeware which would be worth paying for–a rare thing, indeed.

Do Uninstallers Uninstall?

The uninstallers that come with Windows programs are, for the most part, notoriously sloppy. A typical application’s installer will sink its talons deep into Windows. Then the uninstaller clips those talons, leaving them in the operating system’s wounded flesh.

The result: Windows develops new problems with almost every install and uninstall. That’s a large part of the reason why so many people reinstall Windows and start from scratch every year or two.

(It’s worth noting that using Control Panel’s Add or Remove Programs feature, called Programs and Features in Vista, won’t help. All that does is launch the program’s own uninstaller.)

But a lawsuit? I doubt it. If there was any danger of that, we would have heard of these lawsuits, already. Besides, the lawyers could remove any danger with a clause in the EULA (the end-user licensing agreement–that impenetrable legalize you must agree to with a click before the program installs).

So what can you do? Use a program like Revo Uninstaller or Total Uninstall. They run the application’s own uninstaller, then clean up the mess that the uninstaller left behind. They’re not perfect, but they get most of the junk. Each has advantages over the other. Revo is free, and there’s a portable version that you don’t have to install. Total costs $30, but it supports 64-bit programs (not an issue if you don’t have a 64-bit computer) and has a better user interface.

See the original forum discussion here.

Add your comments to this article below. If you have other tech questions, email them to me at answer@pcworld.com, or post them to a community of helpful folks on the PCW Answer Line forum.

Google Widget to Let Your Visitors Translate Your Page

Google released a new translation gadget. Drop the small HTML snippet on your page, and your visitors will then see a bit of interface pop up allowing them to instantly translate the current page’s text into another language. You can give it a try on my sample page, originally in German.

Google says they will only show the widget when the browser settings would require it – i.e. when I put German as my language I wouldn’t expect to see it pop up for a German text – but I was not able to successfully reproduce that. Whenever I visited the German page, even with German content preference settings in Firefox, I was asked if I wanted to translate it to English. (The same problem occurs with Gmail’s translation widget.)

Another thing I found suboptimal was the design of the top bar, which puts the Translate button rather far away from the rest on wider screens, and will have the Google logo placed prominently on top of your page. Other than that, this is a nice gadget… it’s just worth keeping in mind that only a traditional static translation will be indexed by Google, and thus appear in results.