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

There’s no need to register and this even is open to all!

Location:
MIT Stata Center, Building 32
Kirsch Auditorium-32-123 and Student Street reception area

Special Thanks to Susan MacPhee for giving us the heads-up on this great event!

“This Google resource brings together the latest industry facts and insights together in one place. These have been collected from a number of third party vendors covering a range of topics from macroscopic economic and media trends to how consumer behaviour and technology are changing over time.”

This site is hosted on a UK server, but the data is gathered from companies such as BusinessWeek, Coke, HarvardBusiness.org, Motorola, New York Magazine, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Reuters, Wall Street Journal, YouTube, and GM to name a few.

The factoids are broken into five large categories: MacroEconomic Trends, Technology, Consumer Trends, Media Consumption and Media Landscape. With little tidbits like this, “According to a case study by Coke Oasis, 3 out of 4 of the top media vehicles for increased brand fame are online. (Coke Oasis, March 2009)” I’ve found the site interesting, if not a little quirky! Definitely something to check out!

Resource: Google Internet Stats http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/landing/internetstats/
Citation: Google Launches Internet Stat Center http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_launches_internet_stat_center.php
by Sarah Perez on ReadWriteWeb http://www.readwriteweb.com/

Here’s the summary of the topic covered:

Web Apps: The Collision of Design and Business with Jared Spool
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.

• Abysmal success rates
• Download times dominate the user experience
• Scrolling causes major usability problems
• Bloated pages hurt users (not physically I hope)
• Unfamiliarity with a browser’s user interface limits the user’s options
• JavaScript crashed and problems with advanced media types (video, flash, etc)
• Reluctant to use websites on mobile devices
• Search dominance
• Old-media design

The article goes on to discuss screen size issues, arguments for separate mobile sites, ideas about mobile web’s future, and where to learn more.

Most view their web sites as a tool to recruit new students and perhaps to reach out to alumni and the public at large. What they’ve not be able to understand, is how to communicate to these very different audiences using all of the mediums at their disposal, without compromising their message.

The web is nimble and other mediums are not. The web is immediate, it’s fast and yet, if you’re not clear about who you’re trying to reach and target the message to that audience, it can be even more ineffective than anything else you do (print, radio, TV, etc.) and it’ll reach them and turn them off faster than ever.

Getting your website right – uses and misuses of web design patterns

A well designed website is absolutely crucial to future business, particularly when online is used as a channel for sales. This article looks at the pitfalls of website design patterns and how companies can use them successfully to aid website design, helping to ensure an online proposition that’s as effective as possible.

Foxmarks is a free add-on for your browser that syncs and backs up your bookmarks across multiple computers and more. Available for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. Learn more or take the tour.

In any case, I think I’ll give this extension a go.  Anyone else tried it yet?

Ma.gnolia.com

Wired.com author Michael Calore writes:

There was a meltdown at bookmark sharing website Ma.gnolia Friday morning. The service lost both its primary store of user data, as well as its backup. The site has been taken offline while the team tries to reconstruct its databases, though some users may never see their stored bookmarks again.

The failure appears to be catastrophic. The company can’t say to what extent it will be able to restore any of its users’ data. It also says the data failure was so extensive, repairing the loss will take “days, not hours.”

In light of today’s outage, many are questioning the reliability of web apps and web-based storage in general. Twitter in particular is full of users venting their suspicions.

Here’s the short hand version of the whole article:

1. Explain to your visitors what retweeting is
2. Fill out your bio
3. “Link it up” – Put links to your Twitter profile everywhere
4. Tweet about your passions in life and #hash tag them.
5. Bring your twitter account into the physical world (business cards, email signature, powerpoint slides)
6. Take pictures.
7. Start a contest.
8. Follow the top twitter users and watch what they tweet
9. Reply to/get involved in #hash tag memes.
10. Track your results.

BTW, webpub is now on Twitter. Follow “us” at mitwebpub.

Many thanks to MIT TechTV for hosting the video feed for us!

——————————–

Hello fellow WWW’s,

I want to extend an invitation to a special Web event on Monday, February 2nd.

Eric Meyer, Dan Cederholm, Marc Amos, and our former colleague Ethan Marcotte have planned a meet-up/networking event for Boston web designers / developers / etc.

Here is a brief summary:
Created by two Salem web geeks, Marc Amos and Angelo Simeoni, the Build Guild is a monthly event where folks in the web industry (designers, coders, project managers, hobbyists, etc.) can get together to talk web, debate industry topics, share ideas, make professional connections, land gigs, etc.

The Time and Location:
Monday February 2, 2009 at 6:30pm
Spirits
300 Derby Street
Salem, Massachusetts 01970

More information:
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2009/01/20/bahstahn-the-gathering/
http://www.simplebits.com/notebook/2009/01/20/buildsociety.html
http://unstoppablerobotninja.com/entry/call-me-julie-mccoy/
http://www.buildguild.org/

To RVSP yourself make sure to get on the list at the following URL: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1501235/

Scott Janousek (Boston-based) will be on-hand to discuss Flash Lite 3 and how the new Adobe eLearning Suite can be incorporated into a Flash Mobile workflow. Additionally, they will be viewing 2 Flash Mobile eSeminars (Nokia from 10-11 AM, and GetJar from 12-1), with Scott speaking before and after the GetJar session.

A venue is booked for 9:30 — 1:30 that day and it holds 40 people. They’d like to get as many Boston-area Flash Mobile developers into the room, to promote Flash development at Harvard by viewing/listening to these sessions and speaking with Boston-area Flash mobile developers.

In addition to Scott Janousek in attendance, they are hoping to have Alessandro Pace (Boston Adobe Mobile and Device User Group) and some of their members, in addition to Rob Toole (Fidelity), who are all quite active in the Flash mobile space; they are also inquiring if there is interest within other usergroups at Harvard. In essence, there are 2 real events: the Nokia eSeminar from 10-11, and then Scott Janousek discussing Flash Lite (wrapped around the 12-1 GetJar eSeminar). Scott is the key guest speaker, and will be the Flash mobile expert on-site.

Tentative Schedule (people can come to as much or little as desired):
9:45 — 10:00 Introduction(s)

10:00 — 11:00 eSeminar: S60 Platform Services — Reaching Further with Flash on Nokia Devices (technical session)
From Forum Nokia: This webinar will look at the new S60 5th Edition Platform Services and how Flash developers can make use of them. Nokia will give an overview of the opportunities on offer and the techniques used to access location, sensor, calendar, contacts, and other functionality in your Flash and web applications. Join us to learn about some practical examples of how you can use S60 Platform Services to extend what Flash Lite can do on Nokia platforms.

11:00 — 11:45 Fun/Wii/Lunch/Networking (not confirmed)

11:45 — 12:00 Scott Janousek: Captivate and Adobe eLearning Suite — Integration into Flash Mobile Workflow (geared toward academic)

12:00 — 1:00 eSeminar: GetJar (business and development session)
Bill Scott (VP Sales & Business Development) will present GetJar and their Flash Lite content distribution solution. GetJar is the world’s most popular mobile application distribution and developer community with over 200,000 registered developers. GetJar has over 10,000 apps in its catalog, covering Flash Lite, Java, Symbian, Android, BlackBerry, etc. For the Flash Lite catalog, please see check the following resource.

1:00 — 1:30 Scott Janousek: Flash Lite 3

Hope you can go!

The Web Validator validates your HTML and CSS and verifies the proper use of microformats, including hCard and hCalendar, for single pages or entire websites.

The Web Standards Advisor checks for subtleties of standards compliance in nine different areas—everything from structural use of headings to proper ID, class, and element use. Nonstandard practices are flagged and reported in the Dreamweaver Results panel for quick code correction. A full report with more details and suggested fixes is also generated.

Popurls calls itself “the dashboard for the latest web-buzz, a single page that encapsulates up-to-the-minute headlines from the most popular sites on the Internet.” The site was created by Thomas Marban. What it basiscally does is aggregate web sites all in one place – digg, delicious, news sites, Techmeme, key blogs, media sites (Flickr, YouTube, etc) and much more. The great thing about it is that you can easily personalize it to your tastes. As you use it, the site gets smarter and shows you recommendations. You can view stats for the web site here.

So why am I nuts about Popurls? There are many reasons…

• It’s a digital curator that helps mitigate the Attention Crash
• It underscores that the world is flat (Thomas is from Austria)
• Popurls added a ton of features this year: you can sign in with Open ID or your Google Account, sharing, a live view and a cluster view, a deep archive, a zeitgeist and much more. He seems to be adding features as fast as Gmail and Friendfeed.
• They’re also on Friendfeed, Twitter, Facebook, mobile devices, the iPhone and even the Wii.
• Popurls Live – track it in real-time like Twittervision.
• And finally, killer search – complete with search feeds.

.

Ning is great for those without alot of technical knowledge and who don’t want to host anything on their own hardware. It takes seconds to set up a site (I made one here for fun http://mitwebpub.ning.com/) and you can choose from a number of design templates available.

What makes your own social network on Ning special? It’s yours. Your brand and visual design. Your choice of public or private. Your very own members.

Free features include inserting your own brand, member management, your choice of custom text and widgets, rss feeds in and out, discussion forum, video feature and branded video players, chat room, facebook integration, groups, member blogs, and an events calendar.

Premium services are for fee, and include things like controlling ads, removing the Ning promotion, transferring your own domain name, more storage and more bandwidth.

Elgg (http://www.elgg.org/)

Elgg is an open, flexible social networking engine, designed to run at the heart of any socially-aware application. Building on Elgg is easy, and because the engine handles common web application and social functionality for you, you can concentrate on developing your idea.

Elgg is open source. That means, when you use Elgg, you have the benefit of being part of a large developer community, with the security and stability that hundreds of eyes can provide. It’s also headed and used by Curverider and its partners, so you can be assured that it’s in commercial use and will cope with the demands of a popular application. 

It runs on Apache, PHP and MySQL – the same open source platform that the majority of web applications are written in. Elgg is compatible with enterprise technologies like the Zend Platform and any server environment that can run the Apache web server.

We believe in an open, distributed, social web. As a result, Elgg supports technologies like OpenDD, OpenID and OpenSocial, and we are directly involved in community efforts to push the envelope when it comes to data portability, federation and the user experience. Elgg is a great way to future-proof your social applications.

Elgg was founded by Ben Werdmuller and David Tosh, and has been powering networks since 2004.

The article is mostly about Jonathan Abrams, the serial entrepreneur who founded Friendster in 2002, and Socializr, a site devoted to optimizing users’ social calendars. I mostly found it interesting because it mentioned some newish Web enterprises I hadn’t heard of yet. Check them out:

• Dropbox
• Disqus
• Justin.tv (this one i remember from when it was just a kid wearing a tv camera on his head and streaming the feed, but its grown alot since then)
• Scribd
• Snaptalent (relaunching in Feb ‘09, read more about them on TechCrunch)
• Livemeeting

A colleague asked him to investigate a couple users that started a ‘Class of 2013′ within their Facebook network. Mr. Ward found a startling trend – the usernames were popping up on class groups from coast to coast at private and public universities.

http://squaredpeg.com/index.php/2008/12/18/facebook-pay-attention/

See how many times those names appear in admin for these groups, and look at their friends and see how many times those names pop up. A LOT. This isn’t just the Common App Effect, where students apply to every school under the sun. These people aren’t interested in going to every school they have started a group for. No, this is an inside ring with a common purpose. They don’t always create the group, but they do always get in, friend someone, and get control rights.

You might have the same thought I had at first. I responded to Megan, “That is very interesting. I don’t really see where squatting could be beneficial. After all, the students who join and participate will steer the group in whatever direction they take it. I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

Sure, not for one school. Not for tiny little Butler, with 900 incoming students.

But for 500+ schools? Owning the admin rights to groups equaling easily 1,000,000+ freshman college students?

That’s huge.

Think of it: Sitting back for 8-10 months, (even a few years), maybe friending everyone and posing as an incoming student. Think of the data collection. The opportunities down the road to push affiliate links. The opportunity to appear to be an ‘Admin’ of Your School Class of 2013. The chance to message alumni down the road. The list of possibilities goes on and on and on.

I’ve said many times, step back and let the student group start on its own.  Today, I change that position. It seems that we have been gamed, and we need to at least own the admin rights to the group in an effort to protect our incoming students. To end the possibility of them being pushed ads and “buy these sheets for college” stuff this summer. You know there is a motive behind all of this. And you know it has to do with money. And you KNOW you’re going to get calls about it when it happens.

Check it out at
http://website.grader.com/

Date: January 22nd, 2009
Time: Noon to 1pm
Location: Building N42 Demo Center, 211 Mass Ave

Topic:
jQuery: Comprehensive DOM, Event, Animation, and Ajax JavaScript Library.

Presenter:
John Resig, Creator and lead developer of the jQuery JavaScript library.
Author, Secrets of the Javascript Ninja and Pro JavaScript Techniques.
JavaScript Evangelist for the Mozilla Corporation

jQuery with John Resig

Our first potluck is coming up on December 18th. Our guest will be my good pal Kris Brewer from MIT TechTV. Kris will give us the low down on all the upgrades they’ve done and the down low on future enhancements. He’ll take us through some of the new bells and whistles and take down your wish list items to bring back to their developers.

Topic: MIT TechTV upgrade

Date: Thursday, December 18

Time: Noon to 1pm

Where: N42 Demo Center

Whether or not you choose to bring a dish is up to you – but if you should HAPPEN to have an irresistible urge to bake brownies, I will personally be on hand to help eat them.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Shibboleth Authentication – works with MIT Touchstone for certificate login – WOOT!!

Content Construction Kit

Views

Organic Groups

FCKEditor – not what you think it stands for, its the creator’s initials…

TinyMCE

FileField

Admin Menu

Lightbox2

Custom breadcrumbs

Captcha plus Recaptcha

Webform

Voting API

Fivestar voting widget

Content Profile

Since we met last week, an MIT Drupal group has started up. If you create a Drupal.org account you can join this group and can get emails sent to you automatically whenever anyone posts a topic. There’s one post in particular that was started to get a list going of all the Drupal sites at MIT that are using Drupal. You can edit the page and add yours once you’ve joined.

However if you don’t want to join, I’ve changed the webpub@mit.edu list so that any webpub member can send emails to it. Feel free to send your Drupal, web design, development or production questions along!

EDITOR’S NOTE:  you can also check out developers.mit.edu, there’s alot of Drupal posts there!

Here’s my list of the sites I know of that are either using or are in the process of converting to Drupal. Feel free to add yours to the comments field below (your certificate will let you log in):

In progress:
Environmental Health and Safety
IS&T
CEE
Koch Institute
MIT Dining
HR
Media Lab
SHASS
Coeus
Office of Sponsored Programs

Launched:
MITEI member site -mitei.mit.edu
MIT Sustainability Symposium
Sustainability@MIT
Center for Future Civic Media
CSAIL
Sheller Educational Program
The Owl Project
MIT Undergraduate Student Program
Student Life
MIT FamilyNet

Be well,
lisa

IS&T bought a copy of Lullabot’s “Understanding Drupal” video, and we can loan it out to webpub or other MIT Commnity members. Here’s what I came up with for how to manage the loan of it – think of it as our own little grassroots lending library…

1. Go to the comments section of this post
2. Add your name and where the movie should be delivered to.
3. Watch the movie (keep it for a week or less to be fair)
4. Go back to this post to see who gets the movie after you
5. Send it to them via interoffice mail
6. Delete your comment from the post (so we know who’s got it currently) Email me (lmayer@mit.edu) and I’ll remove your comment from the post.

Sound good? Ok, who’s first?

Best,

Lisa

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has created a way for people to link to specific times within their videos, meaning you can jump straight to the action.

How many times has a friend shared a video with you and said something like, “Wait until it gets to 2 minutes 38 seconds!”? The time spent waiting for the good part your buddy wants you to see can be anywhere from entertaining to downright boring.

In order to allow friends to share their favorite parts of videos, YouTube announced the ability to “deep link” to YouTube videos. This means you can now not only link to a YouTube video itself, but you can also link directly to a specific time within each video.

Google says that in order to create a deep link, you have to add “#t=1m15s” to the end of a YouTube video URL. So your whole link would be something like http://www.youtube.com/videoID#t1m15s. This sets the link to the time 1:15 in the video. Of course, you can replace the numbers before the ‘m’ and the ’s’ with anything you like, setting up the link to any part of the video you wish.

Google will also automatically create links if a viewer mentions a specific time in the comments section. If someone writes, “LOL, 1:15 is hysterical”, this will become a hyperlink. Other viewers will then be able to click on that link and jump to that moment in the video.

Thanks, Google. Keep the good stuff coming.

Ditto!

Back by popular demand, this month’s webpub meeting will be on Drupal (I promise not to cancel it this time).

Many of you have been hearing of Drupal, an open source content management system that has gained a certain fan base at MIT. What is Drupal? What makes it so great? Come find out!

Dr. Ann-Patrice Hickey is a software developer and trainer who in Jan 2007, was brought in to the IS&T website project to create Alfresco templates, and to write scripts to migrate the IS&T website content into the Alfresco CMS. The Alfresco CMS turned out not to be the right tool for the job. Thus began the journey to find a replacement Content Management System, a journey that ended with the choice of Drupal. Ann-Patrice will talk about the selection process, why they chose Drupal, and what steps they are taking to move forward into development.

I look forward to seeing you there! Snacks and refreshments will be provided.

• Better syncing across multiple computers
• Preview a site’s RSS feed before you subscribe to it
• Low-bandwidth mode for faster email performance

…as well as its standard features which include Speed Dial, mouse gestures, note-taking, BitTorrent support, and voice-controlled browsing. Read a review on Opera 9.6 at Lifehacker or download version 9.6 from the Opera site.

Top 7 Most Cliché Stock Images Used in Web Design

…Sometimes clients ask us to implement ‘not-so-unique’ elements into our designs and sometimes it seems almost impossible to convince them otherwise, however, hopefully this post can suggest some reasons why not to use the old web design stock imagery clichés.

I will do this simply by showcasing the most generic and cliché stock images (still) used in web design today. Please also take note that there is nothing wrong with using any of these images if used appropriately.

The 7-Mbyte download is available now via http://www.google.com/chrome/ in 122 countries and 43 languages. It will run on Windows-based computers running XP or Vista, but Mac and Linux versions are still in the works…

“What we wanted to build was not so much a traditional content viewer but more of a window manager for web pages and applications,” Ben Goodger, a Google software engineer, said during a Tuesday press conference.

When asked how Google will compete against IE, Page demurred. “We’re competing with a product that’s given away by default on most computers,” he said.

Chrome alone will not be a major moneymaker for Google, according to the executives, but if Chrome can improve the user experience, that will encourage more Internet use and ultimately create more revenue for Google, they said.

“If we make our site faster by 20 percent, we can get substantially more usage and that generate directly into revenues,” Page said.

Plus I feel tons hipper now. Wow, marketing really does work!

UPDATE: From the Google blog, 3/05/2008:

Through experimentation, we found that presenting users with a search box as part of the result increases their likelihood of finding the exact page they are looking for. So over the past few days we have been testing, and today we have fully rolled out, a search box that appears within some of the search results themselves. This feature will now occur when we detect a high probability that a user wants more refined search results within a specific site. Like the rest of our snippets, the sites that display the site search box are chosen algorithmically based on metrics that measure how useful the search box is to users.

]]> http://webpub.mit.edu/2008/04/search-within-googles-search-results/feed/ 0 http://webpub.mit.edu/2008/04/the-2008-gmail-appeal/ http://webpub.mit.edu/2008/04/the-2008-gmail-appeal/#comments Sat, 12 Apr 2008 02:01:35 +0000 Lisa Mayer https://webpub.mit.edu/?p=89 The Email Standards Project reaches out to the Gmail team via this short video appeal, asking them to improve the email experience for both designers and readers alike:

Email Standards Project – Gmail Grimaces from Mathew Patterson on Vimeo.

Here at the Email Standards Project, we’ve heard from designers all over the world how frustrating it is that Gmail, the otherwise excellent webmail client, does such a disappointing job rendering HTML email…
…It’s so close to being really great, and other webmail clients have already made it work. This video is a friendly attempt to get in touch with someone from the Gmail team, so we can help them to make Gmail even better.We desperately want to get in touch with anyone from the Gmail team, or from Google, who we can talk to about the way Gmail handles CSS and HTML. If that’s you, then get in touch right away! We’d love to talk to you and give you as much background, help and support as we can.
If you are not from Gmail, but you are a web designer or otherwise interested in the Email Standards Project, then you can help too. The first thing to do is contact Gmail directly – Drop an email into the Gmail Suggestion box, asking them to visit this website and get in touch, to improve their CSS and HTML rendering.

Spread the word, people!

]]> http://webpub.mit.edu/2008/04/the-2008-gmail-appeal/feed/ 0 http://webpub.mit.edu/2008/04/exhibit-info/ http://webpub.mit.edu/2008/04/exhibit-info/#comments Tue, 08 Apr 2008 19:01:44 +0000 Lisa Mayer https://webpub.mit.edu/?p=87 Many thanks to David Huynh for a wonderful presentation on his work, “Exhibit.” For those of you unable to attend, you can read about David’s work online at http://people.csail.mit.edu/dfhuynh/research/papers/www2007-exhibit.pdf.
Our next meeting is May 22. Look forward to seeing you there!

]]> http://webpub.mit.edu/2008/04/exhibit-info/feed/ 0