[Foundation-l] Where do our readers come from? Q&A

[William Pietri]

On 01/18/2010 09:29 AM, Joan Goma wrote:
> There are 3 phenomena acting simultaneously against the number of visits to
> small projects: The bilingual effect, the size effect, and the Google
> effect. For Catalan case we estimate a penalization factor of 8.3 (that
> means that visits are 8.3 times less that what they should be).
>    

In the long term, it seems like we could compensate for all of these 
effects in software.

I'm imagining a user experience where we make it easy for multilingual 
users to switch back and forth. That would include passive detection of 
multilingual users, hinting when good content is available in other 
languages, and making it easy for multilingual users to help translate 
content. It might also be worth looking at URL schemes that are not 100% 
language-specific, to focus the Google effect more usefully.

That would require a lot of technical work, and would raise a number of 
non-technical issues, but I don't see any insurmountable barriers to a 
more fluid experience for multilingual users.

William