Google will begin rolling out service the end of this week that will automatically generate text captions to many videos on its site!

YouTube has supported closed captioning on the site already, but this new service will allow users to upload a video, the closed captioning will be automatically generated, and allow the owner to review accuracy of the closed captioning before the content is published.

The service will be piloted on a limited number channels at first, including channels from Stanford, Yale, Duke, Columbia, PBS, National Geographic, Google itself, and our very own MIT! Google hopes to gradually expand that number.

If you’re interested in closed captioning your own video, Google also rolled out another service that allows anyone who uploads a video to YouTube the option of uploading a text file of the words spoken in the video. This service then “auto-synchs” the text file and the video, turning the text file into captions and automatically matching the spoken words with the files.

The new service will allow event promoters to create email invitations to users, create a customized registration page, and an event homepage (optional). Promoters can also choose how registrants pay to attend: no charge, at the door, check, or credit card via PayPal. Additionally you can set the maximum number of registrants, or a registration window for RSVP’s.

You can take the tour of this new service on the Constant Contact Website.

Sources: TechCrunch, Constant Contact

Video hosted on MIT TechTV

Joly provides a nice, light-weight introductory questions to consider about your audience, publication, and your business before making any decisions. This is a great article to begin framing your thoughts of greening your publications and then talking to some of the great on-campus resources available for making your publication webby!

Definitely an article to check out!

Source: Joly, Karine. June 2009. University Business. “2010: Print to Web Odyssey? A five-step plan for assessing and negotiating the transition from print to web publications”

It’s important to see what browsers people are viewing your sites on! Read more of the article here:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9137358/IE_tumbles_Firefox_regains_market_share_mojo

Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier.

I was surprised to find that email is deader than ever among teens. As more of their parents and teachers are getting on Facebook (or MySpace), they see little reason to email with anyone. Thus, email is increasingly needed for having an account on various sites and for getting access to or sending attachments. But even when teens do use email for “work”, they do not use it for social purposes.

…Many teens have ZERO interest in interacting with teachers on social network sites, but there are also quite a few who are interested in interacting with SOME teachers there. Still, this is primarily a social space and their interactions with teachers are primarily to get more general advice and help. In some ways, its biggest asset in the classroom is the way in which its not a classroom tool and not loaded this way. Given that teens don’t Friend all of their classmates, there are major issues in terms of using this for groupwork because of boundary issues.

…They don’t use Twitter. When asked, teens always say that they’ll use their preferred social network site (or social media service) FOREVER as a sign of their passion for it now. If they expect that they’ll “grow out of it”, it’s a sign that the service is waning among that group at this very moment. So they’re not a good predictor of their own future usage.

…Do they really care about/use school library websites? Twitter? Pageflakes? Libguides? or only if teacher insists?

Nope, they don’t. All but Twitter are categorized as school tools and are only used when absolutely necessary and Google won’t suffice.

KIDO’Z is a pretty nifty Adobe AIR-powered desktop browser app that gives kids a safe and fun environment to play games, watch videos and/or visit pre-approved websites. When you first install the AIR app as a parent, you can configure the age and gender of your offspring as well as your location and preferred language (there are 17 available).

What’s nice is that all these settings are taken into account at a content level, so KIDO’Z automatically caters the media it think is most suited for your kid(s) at first launch. As a parent you get password-protected access to an admin panel where you can add more or restrict access to certain content, set limited time frames for usage, and so on.

All content only shows up when a KIDO’Z team member approved the content beforehand, and to add more layers of security all scripts, file downloads, pop-ups and any other attempts that could lead to content which has not been approved, are thoroughly blocked.

To use the app, kids won’t need to know how to read or write since obviously the whole UI is quite visual of nature, and very colorful to boot. The main menu of the KIDO’Z browser currently consists of three categories: games, videos and websites. All media can be opened and viewed inside the app’s interface, and in fact kids can only leave the KIDO’Z environment by exiting the browser altogether. CEO Gai Havkin tells me the tool will later be extended to a closed network of communication tools, including e-mail and instant messaging features (see last screenshot), making it more of a social experience but without the security and privacy hazards of existing services.

Topic: Web Apps: The Collision of Design and Business

Speaker: Jared Spool, UIE

Time: 12:00p–1:00p

Location: 46-3001

Who has the best practices for web app design and what do they do to make world-class applications? Jared will share the latest research in the techniques and methodologies that can make a huge difference.

Thousands of sites have the same web app: the e-commerce checkout process. They all do essentially the same thing: exchange the site’s products for the customer’s money, simultaneously arranging for delivery and payment. Yet, every single one is different and despite their prevalence, frequently hard to use and frustrating. Why is this?

Creating easy-to-use and delightful applications, such as checkout, while meeting the needs of the organization is one of the most difficult challenges designers face. While many sites struggle, some design teams have learned how to do this especially well.

In this presentation, Jared will share UIE’s latest research on designing successful web-based applications. He’ll describe the techniques and methodologies used by the best designers and the common traps they’ve learned to avoid.

Open to: the general public

Cost: Free

Sponsor(s): WebPub

For more information, contact:
Lisa C. Mayer
617-452-4225
webpub-owner@mit.edu

This event is categorized as: personal development, interest clubs/groups

Web design guru Scott Jehl from Boston’s The Filament Group discussed “Access-Oriented Web Design: Building highly-interactive web apps that work for everyone” at our April 2009 WebPub presentation.  Scott specializes in website design and development, is a member of the jQuery and jQuery UI design teams, and runs WriteMaps, an application for planning websites. We learned a great deal about access oriented web design, and Scott has graciously provided us with his presentation slides from the session.

IE 6, released in 2001, is the scourge of web programmers, user-experience designers and technical-support staff alike. The browser is stacked with quirks that cause web pages to render differently from all other browsers, and special considerations must be taken by web builders to accommodate users running IE 6.

Most wish the browser would just go away, eliminating the need to continue supporting it. Numbers vary from country to country, but somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the web’s worldwide users are still running IE 6 — some because they simply don’t know any better, some because they are stuck with whatever software their companies install on their machines. Finn.no notes that 17 percent of its users are running IE 6. Numbers like that are currently too large for web builders to ignore.

More fun, here’s a site that “is all about the campaign to rid the WWW of Internet Explorer 6 that has devastated web developers and held back the evolution of everything that blocks the tubes for far too long. This can not go on any longer! Off with its head!”

Enter the URL in which you’re thinking of asking to link to your site,  and you’ll find out how valuable a link from that page would be.  Results are based on factors such as PageRank and number of outbound links.

“..a persistent search for multiple keywords on Twitter. Each Event is associated with one or more terms, which Tinker then searches for across all Tweets and presents in a single stream. For example, a Tinker Event for March Madness might present tweets that included the terms ‘NCAA’, ‘Basketball’, and ‘Final Four’…”

“..After creating an Event, users can share the event’s feed using an embeddable widget, which they can place on their webpage or blog. These widgets allow users to both view the feed of an event and to submit their own messages, which can then be sent to Twitter and eventually sites like Facebook and FriendFeed. From an advertising perspective the widgets are also appealing, as they allow brands to pick out ‘trusted’ streams (for example, one with tweets only pertaining to the Oscars) that they’d like their ads to appear next to. Tinker will also post feeds created by trusted partners on its homepage, allowing the most established events to get more traction.”

The downside of Seesmic is that (since its only about a year old) it doesn’t have alot of the bells and whistles you’d hope for from a video service. Conversations are asynchronous and if you reply to a poster it does not embed in a thread as we are all used to with blogs. This makes it difficult to follow the conversation. Conversations at time go off on different tangents, or take on a life different from the originators post. The user interface is also challenging – it took me some time to figure out how chats are ordered and how to respond to one person versus the whole conversation. I still can’t find a decent “about” description on the site.

The best thing about the site is its community. The quality of the responses and the incredibly warm and polite nature of the posters is what would keep me coming back. Perhaps its because they can’t hide behind their keyboard, or because there’s no voting someone up/down a popularity scale. Its an interesting social experiment – there is an instant sense of camaraderie and ease. If this was a live video conference it would not have been so relaxing.

For me, a successful post was one under two minutes. Responses that went on longer failed to hold my attention. While it was unsettling at first to watch myself recording myself, I soon got into the swing of things and shot off a few video responses.

I’d use it to communicate with friends in different time zones, but that would force them to join too. I can see where Faculty might want to use this as a discussion tool outside of class hours, but am struggling for how to use it otherwise. For now I think I’ll join in on the public conversations from time to time to see where this service ends up…

• A customizable dashboard showing traffic, viewing patterns, and referrer details.
• Ability to show traffic patterns over time (so you can see if there was uptake related to your releases) and how numbers are looking over the last year.
• Embeddable widgets and APIs to provide access to your piwik data.

Here’s the high level messaging….

Piwik is a downloadable, open source (GPL licensed) web analytics software program. It provides you with detailed reports on your website visitors: the search engines and keywords they used, the language they speak, your popular pages… and so much more.

Piwik is a PHP MySQL software program that you download and install on your own webserver. At the end of the five minute installation process you will be given a JavaScript tag. Simply copy and paste this tag on websites you wish to track (or use an existing plugin to do it automatically for you).

Obviously it isn’t as powerful (yet) as Google Analytics, I like that you can customize the interface and that it has a Drupal plugin. However SourceForge thinks it’s stable enough to offer as a hosted solution.

It seems complaints about CS 4 have been pretty widespread and there have also been reports of horrible driver issues (slowness, etc.) with Photoshop CS 4.  If you’re thinking about upgrading, maybe wait a bit for Adobe to iron out the problems.

And if you’re running Adobe Reader 9, you might want to take a look at http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/24/0032201 about a patch for the vulnerability that allows an attacker to take control of your machine…

I’m just full of good news today, aren’t I?