machine-envy

Yesterday was the official launch of a website I helped create earlier this year, ChinaDialogue (Pictures from the launch here). ChinaDialogue is the world’s first truly bilingual interactive publishing platform (I’m not really allowed to call it a blog), as not only do articles appear in English and Chinese, but so do the comments underneath them, thanks to a sophisticated backend which lets trusted volunteers log in to translate comments.

The site was built on a Ruby on Rails platform by Hamza Khan-Cheema, and designed by Fernanda Ferretti. Lots of people offered friendly advice during the build, including Francis Irving and Chris Lightfoot from MySociety, Tom Armitage over at Infovore, and Nart Villeneuve at Toronto’s CitizenLab.

It was a really proud moment for me, when Bill Thompson, who helped build the Guardian’s first website, gave ChinaDialogue his seal of approval in his launch speech. He counselled that, despite what techno-utopians might say, the internet was no longer a place without borders, and that our site was a perfect gateway across one of the most important borders in cyberspace.