For anyone who wants to see them, I’ve finally managed to upload the slides from my SXSWi talk “Taking over the World: the Flickr way”, a broad-sweep view of some of the issues and solutions we encountered whilst taking Flickr from an English-only site to supporting multiple languages.

You can find them over at the talks page, along with the details of my next scheduled talk at XTech in Dublin on May 5th 2008.

(Photo of me by Gareth on Flickr, used by permission)

I’ve started vague plans in that direction which will hopefully coincide with my rapidly-approaching 30th birthday.

But in the meantime, I’ll be at South by Southwest in Austin TX from this Thursday. The interactive portion of the festival will mean actual work for me, schmoozing with people who make me feel tremendously stupid in comparison, and speaking a couple of times.

If you want to see me and my new haircut fumbling their way rustily through public speaking, you can catch me at the following times:

Monday March 10th, 7-9:30pm – 20×2 at The Parish, 214 E. 6th St., Austin TX

Tuesday March 11th, 5-6pm – “Taking Over the World the Flickr Way“, Room A, Austin Convention Center, 500 East Cesar Chavez, Austin TX

The second event is the one which has me stressing manically over slides, being an hour-long presentation by little ol’ me on exactly how we turned Flickr from an English-only colossus into a globe-spanning 8-language slightly-bigger-colossus.

I promise that, as much as such things can, it’ll be fun.

I’m trying to keep photos up to date on Flickr – the Collection will give you a good overview of the weird and wonderful experiences we’re having out here.

In the past week, I’ve…

• …attended 2 Flickr launch parties.
• …given a talk to Korean developers.
• …luxuriated in the second best hotel room I’ve ever stayed in.
• …been to a Crazy Bar.
• …visited to the Korean DMZ
• …frequented a bar where all the waiters are dwarves… with a guy who’s dwarf-phobic.
• …eaten Balut.

A quick bit of site update news – I’ve added a Talks page in the uber-optimistic hope that I’ll be giving more presentations on Flickr, Internationalisation and related topics in the near future. For now, it just contains one set of slides from the Korean talk, notable for the fact that the lovely folks at Yahoo! Korea translated all the text into Korean, to make things easier for those developers who didn’t have perfect English.

The talks page is here:

http://hitherto.net/talks/

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to fly to Kuala Lumpur…

This is not a new observation, but it’s something which just popped back onto my radar, sitting as I am in a hotel in Seoul, Korea.

Google really did introduce a horrible flaw when they first internationalised their site; one which hasn’t been corrected to this day.

The flaw is simple: they assume (seemingly by IP detection and nothing else) that the country you’re in is the language you speak, and that you will get a site localised in that language for as long as you’re surfing the web from there.

Whilst only mildly annoying when in, say, France, this is utterly disastrous for most western travelers to places like Korea, because we have no idea what the page is saying. Even worse, there’s no obvious way to navigate back to the English site, barring a small link on the site homepage (which you won’t see if you’re visiting the results page from a browser plugin; and is still bloody useless if you’re, say, German).

It’s always interesting when a company like Google – feted for their flawless execution, makes a schoolboy error like this, because it tends to reveal interesting things about that company’s culture.

In this case, it belies a certain arrogance, a “we know best” sort of attitude in forcing you down a path without really trying to work out what you might want. They don’t look at your site usage history (which they cookie to death, so there must be room somewhere for “is usually happy using the site in English), or your browser’s default language (less unreliable than it used to be), or… well, anything. “We know best, and we can’t be arsed to help you.”

As I say, there are some routes back to a site you can actually read – the link on the homepage or visiting the site via www.google.us (or .co.uk, or whatever – still no good for browser plugins). Somehow, these make it worse, though. Even a half-assed solution is an admission that there’s a problem somewhere; and if you know there’s a problem, why not… just fix it properly?

Yahoo! goes in completely the opposite direction with localisation, providing fairly “siloed” international sites, one for each territory they operate in, each with its own URL. This nicely sidesteps the issue of Google’s “forcing” a localisation on you without really knowing which one is suitable, and it allows Yahoo! to develop versions of a product which are truly geared towards the national community which they’re trying to serve, rather than seeming like an ivory-tower Silicon Valley linguistic concession to the rest of the world.

The major downsides are potential duplication of effort (is uk.answers.yahoo.com really different to answers.yahoo.com?), and the tying of language (or, more properly, localisation) to jurisdiction and other internationalisation concerns, which can marginalise sizable populations of foreign-language speakers who are living abroad. I believe this last point is only becoming more important as global mobility continues to increase.

These issues all interest me because I had to make my own decisions about them when designing the international model for Flickr, and (perhaps predictably), with Flickr we tried to take a more flexible “middle path”.

It’s not the kind of thing which should be readily apparent to visitors of the site, if I’ve got it right because it should “just work”.

On Flickr, we try to take into account your browser settings, where you are, where you came from (if you arrived from an external site) and various other factors to provide what I hope is a pretty accurate “best guess” at the correct language to serve you in (and, seperately, the best “place” to tie internationalisation concerns to).

As a fallback, every page (barring our really complicated javascripty maps and organizr features) has a set of links – in native language – to help you get to the language you want, if needed.

They may all be small markets, but ultimately I want to cater to the German living in Missouri, the Frenchman in Seoul and the Korean in São Paulo.

There may well be flaws in the approach as it stands today, but if so I hope they’re fixable (and I’ve not seen any negative feedback on language weirdness, so I assume we’re doing okay). Certainly, I hope that, unlike Google, our efforts aren’t a definite FAIL.

Veering onto another topic entirely, though, today’s major preoccupation is international in nature. Right now I’m working n a talk I’ll be giving soon to a bunch of Korean developers in Seoul, regarding Flickr’s API. What’s interesting about this is the peculiar challenges it raises.

Firstly, I’m not 100% confident that my inevitably-slightly-manic English presentation will be all that understandable to a diverse group of Korean speakers. I’ve brewed up something of a defense against this – designing slides for the presentation which contain both an English component (so that the presentation matches the talk, and I know what’s going on, more-or-less), and a Korean translation. Hence the hurry to get the slides done – so that a Korean co-worker can translate! Nevertheless, it means that every design has to be somewhat “symmetrical”; and that there’s half the usual space per slide for any given concept.

But the really weird thing is how much uncertainty a foreign culture injects into the process of building entertaining presentations. In the circles I move in (amongst my fellow Flickr-ites, for example, and other talented presenters such as the lovely Mr Coates), the Done Thing these days is to illustrate one’s slides with somewhat-relevant photographs, usually as a background to the slide.

The approach makes a lot of sense for the Flickr team (we are, after all, in the business of hosting awesome photos), and has taken off in general due to the ease with which anyone can find good creative-commons licensed imagery through Flickr.

Using photography in this way also has the advantage of making the presentation immediately more visually appealing, and allows for a host of sly (or not so sly) jokes in the form of tangentially-related imagery, or flat-out visual punnery.

For example, one might illustrate a slide on the “flexibility” of various feed formats like this:

A bad pun, but good enough for a sympathetic laugh to humour the hapless presenter…

Such puns fall apart when you’re thinking in more than one language, though.

I don’t speak a word of Korean, so I have no reliable way of telling whether the concept of “flexibility” is as, um, flexible in that language. It’s quite possible that “human flexibility” and “versatility of web feeds” are two entirely different words. At which point the pun falls apart and I start to look like a pervert who likes pictures of people stretching their feet above their heads. It might still get a laugh, but for oh so wrong a reason.

I have no timely way of finding out which puns will work and which ones won’t, so my only sensible course of action is to limit the punnery as much as possible, which in turn limits the images I can use.

Even where puns aren’t involved, some concepts may not be universal. It took me 15 minutes of research to determine that, yes, Korea uses the “no entry” sign prevalent elsewhere.

And finally, there’s the issue of cultural sensitivity. I’m thinking of introducing myself with this awesome picture that Stew took of me wearing his “Bacon of the Month Club” nose…

…but I really should ascertain if there’s any Korean taboo around pigs or animal noses. Nothing says “awkward” like debasing your own image five and a half thousand miles from home.

This, in short, is like doing a vast, multi-cultural jigsaw puzzle. It’s kinda fun in a way, but also pretty weird.

Images from Flickr, and by (in order) marekj, elle_rigby and the inimitable Stewart