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In anticipation of the upcoming European Union elections, Berlin-based language site Babbel just launched a "Politics and Voting" section to their Vocabulary Trainer. Co-founder Markus Witte believes the training package will help his 330,000 members exchange opinions despite their language barriers.

Web 2.0 is pretty cool - so cool in fact that it's got its own buzzwords and lingo that not everybody knows. Everybody has a lot to gain from participation in this new cultural phenomenon, though, so there's no reason why everyone shouldn't know the background on the lingo. We did a little research just to cover our own bases! We thought we'd share it with you.

Think you know where catchwords like FTW and Fail! came from? Think you know who came up with the phrase Web 2.0? Do you know what the first Rickrolled link claimed to be? We did some hunting around to find out - below are our best ideas for the history of these and other popular terms around the web these days.

Earlier today we mentioned a plugin for AIM that would translate what you type on the fly into another language. That's an exceptionally useful tool, but the far more fluid and accurate way to speak to people in another language, is to actually learn the language. Thankfully, there are a wide variety of ways to learn languages online, many of them available for free. Below is a list of more than 20 ways you can go from knowing how to say "Hello" to fluency.

Have you ever wondered what the English language looks? Yeah, neither have I. But a group of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and New York University did, and tapping into the billions of images freely available on the Internet, they came up with a visual map of the English language using nearly 80 million of those images. The images are arranged based on the semantic relationship between words, and thus, according to the researchers, the project explores "the relationship between visual and semantic similarity."