The new languages are Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, and Urdu and users can head on over to the Translation Center and start working today.

The Translation Center, launched in 2011, is a giant crowdsourcing program that allows users from dozens of languages to help translate Twitter (the product, not the actual tweets). Twitter says that over 425,000 people have helped with translations. Because of their work, Twitter is available in 22 languages – a number which is about to jump to 26.

Twitter had this to say in a blog post:

As we prepare to add Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu to Twitter, we’ve developed new ways to ensure that Tweets and hashtags will work properly in right-to-left languages. We’ve also made changes behind the scenes to give right-to-left language speakers a localized user experience. As soon as our volunteers have completed their translation work, we’ll make Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu available for everyone on Twitter.com later this spring.

Translation Center is now open to #Arabic, #Farsi, #Hebrew, #Urdu. Please help us translate Twitter to these languages! twitter.com/translator/sta…

— Translator(@translator) January 25, 2012

The most recent language addition to Twitter was Swedish, which became available earlier this month.

[Image Courtesy Dave Parker, Flickr]

Article II, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution:

“ He shall from time to time give to Congress information of the State of the Union and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient. ”

This years State of the Union is going to be a little bit different than it has been in the past. Via some new technology and work from the Participatory Culture Foundation, the Address will reach a significantly larger audience.

As soon as the Barack Obama’s words leave his mouth participant’s will begin the work of transcribing them into dozens of different languages and making it possible for people all over the globe to understand and react to the speech. brought to life by new technology from Mozilla, the president will open, a sort of, interactive online forum with his address.

All of this kicks off something called “Open Election 2012″ sponsored by Mozilla, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, PBS News Hour, and the Participatory Culture Foundation. The Goal of these organizations is to unite their resources to bring broader, more clearly understood coverage of the upcoming election campaigns and to make participation possible for people all over the globe. It’s going to become an interactive event.

Although fantasy role-playing might owe it all to Dungeons & Dragons, the game itself is struggling to stay relevant in a world full of RPG options. Gaming analysts say that D&D sales have been on the decline for years, and D&D publisher Wizards of the Coast’s ex-VP told the NY Times that the market peaked a decade ago and has been steadily falling since 2005.

Controversial rule changes, highlighted by the latest revision of the game in 2008′s 4th edition, have broken up the fan base. When you couple this with all of the modern RPG competition out there, you can see why the people at Wizards of the Coast feel like it’s time to try something new.

So today, manager of D&D’s R&D Mike Mearls announced that they are in the process of developing the next version of the game – and they are turning to D&D players to help them shape it.

From a post on the Wizards site:

[W]e are excited to share with you that starting in Spring 2012, we will be taking this process one step further and conducting ongoing open playtests with the gaming community to gather feedback on the new iteration of the game as we develop it. With your feedback and involvement, we can make D&D better than ever. We seek to build a foundation for the long-term health and growth of D&D, one rooted in the vital traits that make D&D unique and special.

We want a game that rises above differences of play styles, campaign settings, and editions, one that takes the fundamental essence of D&D and brings it to the forefront of the game. In short, we want a game that is as simple or complex as you please, its action focused on combat, intrigue, and exploration as you desire. We want a game that is unmistakably D&D, but one that can easily become your D&D, the game that you want to run and play.

So Wizards of the Coast is looking for fan participation. They have already started a small playtest for Friends & Family, which basically amounts to internal employees and friends. The next step is a special playtest at the D&D Experience convention later this month. The final step is the open playtesting that will involve the release of rules and other materials through the website. This will all begin sometime this Spring.

“We seek to reach as many people as possible, from the gamer who just started with D&D last week to the gaming group that has been together since the early-1970s,” said Merals. “For this process to work, we want to give a voice to all D&D fans and players of all previous editions of the game.”

Players that want to participate in the playtest can sign up for email notifications.

As indicated, to coincide with their tie-in with the Smurfs movie, McDonald’s has started a Plant A Tree movement, one where the company promises to plant up to 100,000 trees every time a code is entered from a pack of Apple Dippers, which are available in McDonald’s line of Happy Meals. In order to enter the code, you have to navigate to the McDonald’s Happy Meal page, one that is currently engulfed with an almost-overwhelming Smurfs theme.

The use of your computer’s mute button is a good escape if a loop of the Smurfs theme proves annoying.

Now for the crowdsourcing aspect of the story. Word of McDonald’s act of charity, one that’s albeit cloaked in a “please buy Smurfs stuff” appeal, hit the Reddit wires, and now, the Reddit community is committed to making sure McDonald’s hits the 100,000 planted trees mark. So much so, in fact, one Reddit user posted a reusable Apple Dippers code for other Reddit users to enter.

For those of you who’d like to contribute, the code is M4JE-3YKW-7L7J, and it was found courtesy of the the SlickDeals forum.

According to one of the Reddit users from an earlier comment, the McDonald’s Plant a Tree count was near the 50,000 mark. The comment was made four hours after the initial link was posted to Reddit, and now, two hours since the 50K mark post, the McDonald’s tree program stands close to 77,000 commitments.

Furthermore, I took a screenshot when I started writing this post, and the count was congruent with the 77K. I’ve since took another screenshot, which is about 30 minutes older than the first one I took. The difference in the count is almost 10,000:

Crowdsourcing is great for drawing attention to various movements, but the follow-through is just as important, or else these efforts are for naught. With that in mind, I would still encourage you to use the code provided and make sure McDonald’s reaches it’s 100,000 limit.

That’s why the news just put out by the Hollywood Reporter is going to ignite the speculation fuse, once again, about the possibilities of a reboot of the much beloved film.

According to THR, Steven Spielberg has been holding meetings with screenwriter Mark Protosevich and “kicking around ideas for how to reboot the Jurassic Park franchise.” So yeah, that’s happening (wheeeeee). Spielberg’s camp as well as Universal Picutres stressed that they aren’t banging out a script, as these are only super preliminary talks.

Protosevich has written the 2006 action remake Poseidon, the adaptation of the Will Smith vehicle I Am Legend as well as the criminally underrated visual masterpiece The Cell. So that sounds promising-ish.

Jurassic Park is a great film. Two and three, meh. But for anyone my age (or, like me, dinosaur obsessed at a young age) the original holds tons of sentimental value. For me, it was one of the first movies I ever truly loved. Many people feel the same way I do about it, thus the huge internet buzz whenever “4″ is mentioned.

The last big JP4 buzz happened back in 2007 when Laura Dern said that it was definitely happening. She told MTV -

“It is happening. Rumor has it [my character] Ellie Sattler may be back in the woods, back on the island,” Dern announced, saying the movie will hit theaters in 2008. She added with a coy smile, “You know, there is a guy I know who told me he wants me to have something to do with it. [So] I have a date with a dinosaur again. My 5-year-old will be thrilled.”

Then the reports emerged that the dinosaurs in the film were to be outfitted with government-grade weapons for battle purposes. And the internet collectively shit a brick. But that version of the film never made it to theaters and fans were left wondering if they would ever see Dr. Grant or Ian Malcolm on screen again.

But now it looks like things are moving in the right direction at least. Or wrong direction according to this writer at The Guardian –

First, let’s get the obvious out of the way. Jurassic Park IV will be terrible. All the signs are there. Michael Crichton is dead. Stan Winston is dead. The last time Steven Spielberg waited this long to revive one of his franchises, he ended up blowing Harrison Ford across the sky in a fridge. The portents are not good. In an ideal world Jurassic Park would be extinct, once and for all.

He suggests that we crowdsource the plot of the upcoming film to save it from whatever awfulness is bound to ensue. Interesting idea – let’s keep that in mind.

Twitter, as usual, is weighing in on the news –

Oh, and I discovered this. Did you know that Jurassic Park 4 has a rotten tomatoes page? It’s 93% fresh based on 444 user ratings. It says the film is from 2008 and stars Sam Neill and Keira Knightley. Holy hell, did I miss something?

Is the nostalgia in me clouding my judgment? Maybe so. Maybe I just want some of the old magic recaptured so bad that I’m getting excited about something that is doomed to disappoint. But let’s just hope it gets made and hope that it turns out to be awesome. I don’t think there is any chance in JP4 ruining the first one for me after sitting through JP2 and JP3. All I have to say is it better have Goldblum in it.

The emails were requested by many journalists during the 2008 Presidential campaign, as Palin was obviously a big player as the Republican VP candidate. The release of the emails has been delayed on multiple occasions, with Alaska officials saying they didn’t have the proper technology to accommodate the requests.

But in January, the Alaska attorney general directed that the emails should be released. And tomorrow, at 9am local time in the capital of Juneau, 24,199 emails will be made public. The emails will cover Palin’s time as Governor, spanning from the beginning of 2007 to September of 2008. Current Alaskan’s Governor Sean Parnell is keeping some 2,000 emails private.

Many of the major news outlets will have people on the ground tomorrow to begin to go through and analyze the emails for possible stories. Two organizations are requesting the help of amateur journalists to comb through the massive cache.

The Washington Post, on its blog The Fix, has a post today entitled “Help analyze the Palin emails.” They are limiting the participants to 100, who will be working in small teams to uncover any important information:

That’s a lot of e-mail for us to review so we’re looking for some help from Fix readers to analyze, contextualize, and research those e-mails right alongside Post reporters over the days following the release.

We are limiting this to just 100 spots for people who will work collaboratively in small teams to surface the most important information from the e-mails. Participants can join from anywhere with a computer and an Internet connection.

Here’s what their request form looks like:

The Washington Post has also set up a Twitter account simply for this purpose. @PalinEmails went live yesterday.

The New York Times is also getting in on the fun, asking readers to help investigate the Palin emails on their politics blog The Caucus.

We’re asking readers to help us identify interesting and newsworthy e-mails, people and events that we may want to highlight. Interested users can fill out a simple form to describe the nature of the e-mail, and provide a name and e-mail address so we’ll know who should get the credit. Join us here on Friday afternoon and into the weekend to participate.

If you requested copies of the Palin emails, they will cost you three cents a page. That adds up to $725.97. They will come in five 55 pound boxes.

Palin herself has commented on the email release, saying that everything there is to know is probably already known. She does have some worries, as she told Fox News host Chris Wallace:

“A lot of those e-mails obviously weren’t meant for public consumption,” she said, and people who read them will “never truly know what the context of each one of the e-mails was.”

This story is bound to become pretty political, and fast. Judging by the comments over on Politico, there is plenty of opinions coming in from both sides regarding the release. Some say that this is an example of the liberal media continuing to hound someone they don’t like. Others say that a transparent government is essential to democracy, and if Palin has nothing to hide, she shouldn’t be worried.

Thoughts?

The hunt has taken the form of a crowdsourced project.  Just as the Ideas Page for YouTube was created not too long ago for the sake of the whole site, the new Product Ideas Page for the YouTube Partner Program covers this single subject.  People can submit ideas and vote on which ones they think are best.

It’s an effective process.  On the YouTube Biz Blog, Filipe Lima noted with respect to the first effort, "It was a success, receiving almost 3,000 ideas and more than 300,000 votes.  We even launched a few features that directly addressed some of the requests – namely, an HTML5 Beta (there were many HTML5 advocates who participated) and a sneak peek of our new cleaner video page (some desired a ‘less cluttered’ YouTube)."

So now we’ll see where round two takes us.

The deadline for both new submissions and votes is April 12th.  If you have any suggestions, get them in earlier, though, for the sake of giving them more time to become popular.

(Coverage of the Online Marketing Summit 2010 continues at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

Researchers at Wharton recently studied user-generated content and social networks.  Eric Bradlow, Vice-Dean and Director of the Wharton Doctoral Programs, and Steve Ennen, Director of the Wharton Interactive Media Initiative, then used the findings to create a presentation called "Wharton Dispels Myths of Social, Viral and Online Marketing through Cold Hard Research."

Here’s one detail that shouldn’t be buried: the academics agreed there’s value in social media marketing.  They’re not advocating that advertisers stay away from Facebook, Twitter, and the like.

Indeed, a main point the two men made was that social media behavior can be indicative of buying behavior.  Put another way, this means that heavy social network users are often also heavy buyers.  And this correlation opens the door to an effective – if sneaky – marketing tactic, since businesses can give a lower price to their first customer and then exploit their second customer.

The theory is that as one person engages in an activity, their peers are more inclined to want to play.  So an optimal approach to making iPhone apps, for example, would be to give them away until they become popular, and then start charging.

Then one other interesting thing Ennen and Bradlow had to say related to the practice of crowdsourcing.  They suggested that the "wisdom of crowds" isn’t worth much, instead qualifying as an inconsistent method of producing useful ideas.  Businesses might still use crowdsourcing as a sort of marketing ploy, of course, but the academics asserted that it’d be smart not to depend on it for good product concepts.

On the Google Voice Blog, Vincent Paquet, a senior product manager, recently wrote, "Until now, the only feedback you could give was to let us know if the quality of the transcript was good enough to be useful or not, by checking the corresponding box next to the message.  You can now go one step further by letting us figure out why it was good or bad.  When you rate a transcript, you will be asked whether you would like to donate the message."

Paquet then explained the meaning behind that phrase by continuing, "The messages you donate may be listened to, manually transcribed by us and/or used to gauge transcription improvements over time, but they will never be made public or used for any other purpose than improving the transcription quality."

For every Margaret who’s tired of being called "maggot rot" and Taylor who doesn’t make clothes for a living, this is a nice option.  Even people who don’t opt to donate messages may appreciate it, since it reinforces the idea that Google doesn’t eavesdrop on conversations by default.

One other important note: this may represent a step towards launching Google Voice in the U.K. and Australia.

Related Articles:

> Google Voice Gets New Free VoIP Service

> Report Indicates Google Bought Gizmo5

> You Don’t Need A Google Number To Use Google Voice

In an email to WebProNews, a Googler explained, "[W]e are opening up the template gallery so that anyone using Google Docs can create and submit a template for inclusion in this public catalog.  If you submit a template to the gallery, other Google Docs users will be able to view a preview, create a copy for their own use, and rate your template to help others find the most useful templates."

This crowdsourcing effort represents a clever move.  After all, it’ll cost Google very little, and people like participating in communities and showing off their creations.  Also, this is a way in which desktop-bound software will find it difficult to compete.

Google doesn’t even have to worry about the Template Gallery filling up with junk, since sorting options like "Hottest," "Most Users," and "Highest Rating" should keep individuals from wasting their time.

So consider showing your creative side – or at least see what other people have to contribute – on Google Docs.