Popling was recently featured in the Make Use Of directory of cool applications. If you can, take a minute to drop by their site and digg, stuble, twitt and/or add the site to delicious, so’s popling can reach the Make Use Of home page!
In the last few days, I’ve created a few simple Hindi poplings from wikitravel’s Hindi phrasebook. They are great for travelers who want to interact with locals, or people just gettings started learning Hindi.
All vocabulary and phrases are transliterated to roman characters which means you don’t have to dicipher that lovely script. You can however see the script in the notes if you have a compatible font installed.
For the web geeks out there, Userfocus (a usability consultants and training center), created a usability trivia popling. It’s short, but refreshes some usability concerns that should be on all web dev and designers minds. I shudder to think about all the usability errors I’ve introduced to the Popling website and application. 
According to this article at Arstechnica, Medical researchers are manipulating electrical activity in the brain with electrodes and have found that stimulating the primary motor cortex can help people learn.
The authors focused on a learning task, one they describe as similar in principle to the process we go through when we learn a new sport. …One group of subjects received a current; the controls had electrodes attached, but received no current.
By the end of day one, those who had an anode placed near the primary motor cortex were already pulling away from their peers (a cathode had no effect), and had opened up a large and significant gap by the end of day five.
Can anyone get a good deal USB powered brain altering electrodes? On second thought, there may be some liability concerns here…
Everyone knows it’s much easier to learn when you are immersed in your subject matter. Popling widgets aim to place the stuff you are learning where you’ll see it frequently… your blogs, your start pages and other pages around the web.
Add a widget to your start page and you’ll see recent cards every time you open your browser. Put them on your blog or website, and your friends can see what you are learning and help you along. You can see mine in the sidebar of this blog. Roll over the cards to reveal the answer!
Widgets currently work on iGoogle, Blogger blogs and sites you can paste Javascript script into. I’d like to make more sites available, so let me know what your favorite startpage or website is in the comments below and I’ll try to add it to the list!
If you’ve installed Popling, you’ve also installed Adobe Air, which means you can get lots of great apps for doing things like updating your twitter status, building photobooks, tracking time and well… just about anything.
To help you wade through all the applications available, check out the beautifully designed refreshingapps.com. Their review of AlertThingy (which helps you manage your ‘lifestream’) got me started using the service.
