We’re pleased to announce that our Linux version of Democracy Player now supports translations, with localization on the way for our other platforms. We’ve already got our first two translations, Georgian and French, thanks to our friends Aiet and Claude, with many others already in the works. You can peruse and review existing translations in this folder, sorted by two-letter language codes.

Our localization efforts are completely volunteer-driven. For a native speaker, writing a translation shouldn’t take more than an hour. If you’re interested in seeing Democracy in your language, you can help out by going to our Translation Guide and getting started.

Update: Polish and Italian have also recently been added.

Colin has just posted a major update to Broadcast Machine, with lots of bug fixes, UI improvements, and most notably, two beautiful new themes by Matt Brett. Take a look and upgrade your install: Broadcast Machine homepage.

And let us know if you have any problems… feedback(at)pculture.org

As most of you know, we have 4 different products in development (Democracy Player, Video Bomb, Broadcast Machine, and the Channel Guide), and testing each of these thoroughly on each operating system, distribution, and broswer can be a daunting task. Right now there are a few very dedicated people who step up every time a new build comes out and file helpful bug reports, but the amount of time it takes is overwhelming.

 As I’m relatively new here, I’m aware that there’s a few people who volunteer in ways that are really important to our operation. These are people who take the 5 minutes needed to post the new build of Democracy on a popular download site, post about it in their blogs, etc. These people are largely unknown to me, but the few minutes these people spend every now and then frees up a lot of minutes for myself and the rest of PCF to focus on other things that need to get done.

Anyway, I’ve been put in charge of coordinating testers and volunteers. Right now our testers mailing list is large and inefficient, so we’re going with a more personal approach. If you do anything, no matter how small, to help out Democracy or PCF in general, I want to hear from you. Also, if you’re interested in helping out with testing or any other small tasks, let me know. We have a bunch of Democracy t-shirts laying around the office, and I’ll give a few out to volunteers who answer the call. So if you’re helping out right now, or would like to in the future, shoot an e-mail to oppy@wpi.edu and let me know. Thanks.

We’ve just pushed live some nice updates to Video Bomb. Most of the changes are design and interface, but there’s also bug fixes and some new functionality. We have a new bomb animation from Michael Bell-Smith which looks great and makes bombing videos feel very satisfying.

The design of the individual videos pages has been refined, including this bright new email button. We’re also showing more videos in the sidebar so that you’ll always have interesting stuff at your fingertips.

But the biggest new feature is a user rankings page called Top Bombers, which gives you a bunch of stats about the most prolific people on Video Bomb. That should get some competitive juices flowing.

Another feature that we added recently gives each user 2 separate video feeds: one feed is for everything you’ve bombed, the other feed is just for the videos that you’ve submitted. That way you have a channel of the content that you’re publishing and you also have a channel of everything you like.

See what’s new (and try the new bombimation): Video Bomb.