I’ve recently taken on the role of a leader in 1st Marown Scout Troop, which means that time for Taggloo is drastically reduced. I just can’t find the time to support it amidst my other interests of technology, drums, guitars, Scouts, work and more work.

Taggloo has been very useful to me personally as a means of stretching my technological skills. It has been helpful to the community in providing another option for translation. It was developed as an experiment for own needs but has since grown into a resource that adds a further option to the community. It built on the existing translation options, integrating social media into the language, producing a living language which referenced real internet resources.

However, the social media landscape has drastically changed. First Facebook withdrew their APIs and now Elon Musk has made what was Twitter a hell-hole, removing more APIs and turning the site into a place Taggloo wants no involvement with.

This further reduces the role Taggloo had carved for itself.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning offered a tempting world of improved translation options. However, there isn’t the corpus available to make inference models reliable and useful. Some of the translations in the dictionary are not quite right, letting a computer loose on those would compound the effect; further reducing quality.

Before I started at Scouts, I had built out an API to allow for accessing the Taggloo corpus, including publishing the code on GitHub. That will remain in place for the foreseeable future.

Taggloo has taught me many things and has helped me in many ways, but I just can’t put the time in anymore. I intend to put the not insignificant energy I have put into Taggloo into Scouting and supporting the next generation develop skills and confidence.

3 responses to “Taggloo: Dooint”

  1. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    Gura mie ayd for all your work with Taggloo – I’ve found it a very useful resource over my few years of learning, especially the sound bites, and the twitter integration (back when that was a site worth posting on and visiting) gave a really good flavour of context and usage. It’s a shame to see it close, but understandable given that it is a personal project. Perhaps Culture Vannin could allocate funding for Manx IT development and pull all of these projects under a more central coordinated banner so that they are able to have the resource to continue for the long-term without ending up feeling like a millstone for any one person? Whatever happens, thanks for building it, and for being considerate enough to leave an API and repository behind!

    1. programx360 Avatar

      Thank you for your kind words. Unfortunately, as you suggest it’s not about the money. It is just me and that carries a lot of responsibility in supporting the site technically and legally. I have to maintain security to prevent it being hijacked, keep up to date with legislation (however nonsensical) and make sure it works. I’d love it to be a full time job, not a couple of hours on a weekend if I’m lucky. That said, it satisfied an itch which continues to nag me …

  2. Investigating using AI to derive translations – Live to work Avatar

    […] The Taggloo site was an experiment. It suffered the worst possible fate on the web: it was used by other people. What started out as a small site for me to combine my love of .NET and Manx Gaelic became a useful tool which cost me money but – worse – time. It conflicted with my life, family and worst of all, my role as Scout Leader. So I had to make the difficult decision to shut it down. […]

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