Such is the nature of the Internet, here today gone tomorrow.
I used to like smart.fm in it's original incarnation as iKnow. But it became too diffuse, turned off it's community boards, never made it easy to bulk upload vocab lists, and made it quite hard to get your work back off the site. (Fortunatly I got most of my lists off before they turned off the APIs.)
These days I prefer using my iPod offline with a flashcard program. I use Flashcards Deluxe, (cheap and fairly powerful and relatively simple to use, and I never really liked Anki). But there's a lot of choice on the app store. The main problem might be generating content, but there are sites out there to help with starting points such as
http://www.quizlet.com . Ideally you should be generating your own custom decks rather than relying on others. That said you can track down lists of JLPT vocab, or decks for kanken grade kanji, or the vocab from popular textbooks etc. (I've developed a tool that will help extract vocab lists from pieces of text your are interested in reading if anyone wants to have a look.
http://www.shiawase.co.uk/kanji-sieve/ )
For another online solution that isn't as graphically stylish but just as useful as iKnow, users can try WordChamp (
http://www.wordchamp.com/ ) instead. They have both a free model and a premium model that is less than one tenth the price that iKnow intends to charge. $9.95 a YEAR, compared to iKnow's 1000yen ($12) a MONTH. iKnow's tools aren't really worth that amount. The most expensive programs are probably about $50 on a Mac or PC and circa $20 on an iPod. content is still an issue, but maybe making it is part of learning it.
I think iKnow are pricing themselves out of the market and could well lose a substantial amount of their audience. (just like paywalls and newspapers)
It can't be cheap to run the site and I can't see much evidence of any revenue streams at the moment but a premium / free model would probably be better. The free generates the critical mass needed and helps generate the content and buzz, the premium pays for it and gets an enhanced product for their money. Like jPod and countless other sites.
I also think a lot of their users should be rightly angry, despite what Cerego say a substantial amount of content on the site was user generated.
I'm tempted to delete the lists I made but it'd be a bit churlish perhaps. I more or less knew I was providing free labour for Cerego, but saw it as part of the give and take of a sharing community. I certainly won't be making the transition to the paid site.
Maybe there's an opportunity here for jPod to host simple tab delimited lists of vocabulary that can be used in a variety of flashcard programs. Or a thread in the forums pointing to various resources perhaps...
