English Profi is a directory, job board and a language services marketplace. We organize and promote freelance English language specialists worldwide using Internet solutions to get you new customers.
In Focus: Twitter – A Waste of Time or Useful At All Times?
Written by Mary Joy Buendia
September 30, 2009 Hits: 1881 0
Twitter's overnight internet recognition stems from one plain question: "What are you doing?" You have 140 characters of text to respond, and as soon as you hit Update, the site's millions of users can spot what you're up to. This small initiative has blossomed into an extremely popular trend with its users covering the entire globe. What it does, in a simple and impressive way, is to unite a number of fascinating trends in IM status messages , social software usage, lightweight occurrence indicators, and personal blogging —into a fascinating blend of permanence, public and private. This is the "social-networking and microblogging" site where you can read interesting and everyday quick takes such as "ate an apple" or "just had a great dinner date." But in spite of the service's apparently insignificant function, which causes many to ignore it and can at times make it like listening to other peoples' cell-phone chat, Twitter fills a space left by other forms of communication.
There are several dictionaries available on the internet. There are ones created by users. There are visual dictionaries and there are just dictionaries of pronunciation. But Word Ahead has built up an impressive amount of videos explaining words and providing rich visuals too. They currently have over 515 videos of words to choose from. Most of the words are extremely difficult words that are found on standardized college-entry tests. This is a great resource for English language learners or high school students preparing for college in the states. You can even upload your own videos to the library. Also note that they have a widget available that can be embedded into any blog articles. And it's all free!
Corpus of Contemporary American English
Written by Neal
Chambers
February 23, 2009 Hits: 4615 0
One of the best corpus available online. It has been made freely available by Brigham Young University. It was created by Mark Davies and is regulary updated about every 6-9months with new texts. You can do a variety of searches including searches for collocations and particular parts of speech. It seperates the data into fiction, speech, newspaper, magazine, and academic as well as by about 4 year blocks of time from 1990 to the present. This is a very effective tool to do in depth research about collocations and word usage.
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