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.

Stephani Roberts one of MIT’s Web Accessibility Consultants will discuss the importance of accessibility on the web and resources available here at MIT.

CJ Johnson and Chris Antunes from 3Play Media will talk about Accessibility issues surrounding web media and discuss how remedying these issues will create an interesting and dynamic site for all users.

Date: Thursday November 19, 2009
Time: 12:00PM-1:00PM
Location: MIT Campus Building N42 Demo Center (211 Massachusetts Avenue)

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!

Video hosted on MIT TechTV

This key question of “What Goes Where?” is the focus of usability testing. YouTube offered insight to their extensive usability process in the redesign of their “Watch” page (the page you see when viewing an actual video). Youtube’s user research revealed some important findings about the desires of their target audience.

MIT is lucky to have Usability services available to the community for free, and this is a great asset for both existing websites as well as new websites. The members of the MIT Usability Group are colleagues aiming to foster usability practices within the Information Technology community at MIT. The team is composed of human factors professionals, usability experts, accessibility specialists, information architects, and user interface designers. Definitely a great asset to the MIT Community!

More information on YouTube’s Usability Testing
More information on MIT’s Usability Group

Speaker: Corey McPherson Nash, a national branding and design firm

Social Media, the “building” of shared meaning among communities, is becoming more pervasive in our personal and professional lives. As blogs, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and Twitter have become growing components of the communications mix, organizations need to develop strategies for using these new media to support their goals and objectives. Every business, school and institution needs to be aware of how social media not only projects who they are but engages existing and new audiences in an ongoing dialog. This presentation is intended for communications and Web professionals at all levels who want to learn about the potential of social media and are seeking guidance on how to engage these tools to connect with their audiences in a meaningful way.

For more information, contact:
Dave Conlon
617-253-5988
dconlon@mit.edu

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”

“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/

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.

Google Webmaster Guidelines

One of the most visible changes that Firefox 3.5 will enable for Web developers comes by way of support for CSS Web Fonts.

“When you think about it, Web designers have had to play with the same ten fonts that they could reliably ensure were on everyone’s computer,” Beltzner said.

Beltzner explained that the way fonts have worked in the past is that a Web developer specified a particular font that needed to be resident on a user’s computer. If that font wasn’t present the user would get a default font. With CSS Web Fonts that model changes and developers can now specify any font they want by providing a reference to where the font is available.

“You can just say ‘use my handwriting font, here’s the font and it’s a 20kb file,’” Beltzner said. “So when the browser hits the page, we pull down the file and render the page in that font. When you leave the page, we dispose of the font.”

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.

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.

The product of four years of development, Alpha is an engine for answers. Its ambition is to delve into “all the knowledge in the world,” Wolfram says, to find and calculate information. Though Alpha’s interface evokes Google ― whose co-founder Sergey Brin once spent a summer interning for Wolfram ― it’s more like the anti-Google.

Type in a query for a statistic, a profile of a country or company, the average airspeed of a sparrow ― and instead of a series of results that may or may not provide the answer you’re looking for, you get a mini dossier on the subject compiled in real time that, ideally, nails the exact thing you want to know. It’s like having a squad of Cambridge mathematicians and CIA analysts inside your browser.

Type in “Pluto” and Alpha calculates the dwarf planet’s distance from Earth at that very instant. Bang out a series of letters like “ACTCGTC” and Alpha recognizes it as genetic code and tells you what strand of DNA that particular gene lives on and what we know about it. Wolfram has licensed ― or created ― a whole library of databases and massaged them so the information is pliable. (To date, they include Wikipedia, the US Census, and “about nine-tenths of what you’d see on the main shelves of a reference library,” he says.) Combined with the near-­magical abilities of Mathematica, Alpha is a powerful computational engine that can effortlessly answer queries that no one has asked of a search engine before.

Consider a question like “How many Nobel Prize winners were born under a full moon?” Google would find the answer only if someone had previously gone through the whole list, matched the birthplace of each laureate with a table of lunar phases, and posted the results. Wolfram says his engine would have no problem doing this on the fly. “Alpha makes it easy for the typical person to answer anything quantitatively,” he asserts.

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.

Not much information on the people that created Ajaxload, but heck it’s cool and free:

I think they forgot one final instruction where you have to say “Presto change-0″ 

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.”

Neal Kane, President of Libretto, Inc. shared his pointers on best practices for web writing.  Neal is widely regarded as one of New England’s leading business writers and messaging strategists.  He has worked on several MIT sites and campaigns, including the amazing MIT Campaign for Students, The Human Factor.

Many thanks to MIT TechTV and MIT Video Services for donating their videotaping and publishing services for this event. The quality of the video is so much better than I could produce and the speed at which it was ready to post was 10 times faster!  I am so pleased with the results, and hope you will be too.

You may download Neal’s PowerPoint presentation and watch the video in podcast format via our iTunes feed. Subscribe to WebPub to download it and more of our videos!

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…

Speakers include:

• J. Todd Bennett Managing Partner decimal152
• Mark Greenfield Director of Web Services University at Buffalo
• Karlyn Morissette Web Producer Dartmouth College
• Luke Robinson Web Manager Calvin College
• Peter Holloran & Josanne DeNatale Cognitive Marketing Inc.
• Sree Sreenivasan Dean of Student Affairs  Columbia University Journalism School

Technology is dramatically altering how higher education professionals—and a multitude of others—communicate about our institutions. This conference offers best practices for managing online reputations while detailing concrete steps to engage prospective students and maintain strong ties with alumni.

Benefits of Attending

• Learn how to develop and implement a strategy for Web and electronic communications.
• Decide how the Web and new media fits into your overall communications plan.
• Find out how to engage your target audiences using social networking tools.
• Get all the tips, tricks and pitfalls of a Web redesign project.

Who Should Attend

Associate vice presidents, directors and other positions that deal with strategy and implementation in the following areas:

• Web communications
• Marketing
• Admissions
• Electronic communications
• Public relations
• Alumni relations
• Advancement

The American Marketing Association Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education: 2009
(11/15/2009   – 11/18/2009  in Boston MA)

The call for papers is now out and are due by April 3.

In 2008, over 550 leaders in higher education marketing joined together at the AMA Annual Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education. Join us in 2009 as we continue the tradition with provocative keynote speakers and in-depth discussions on cutting edge approaches to marketing in higher education. This year’s topics will include:

• Building strong college and university brands
• Using new technology effectively
• New methods of marketing and measurement
• Long term strategic planning
• Internal marketing buy-in
• Skill building/professional growth sessions

In addition to inspiring general discussions, intense advanced learning sessions and skill building activities, the program also includes more than 30 marketing presentations and case studies in four traditional tracks including: Measurement, Strategic Planning, Execution and Technology. Each session offers a unique opportunity for higher educations marketers to learn from what others are doing in the field.

Don’t miss this highly interactive, thought provoking, skill building and energizing event

WebInno is an informal gathering of people interested in internet and mobile innovation – free and open to all in the community. The agenda is to start with a few quick demos, make introductions all around, and then schmooze the rest of the evening.

Following our usual format, early stage start-ups and individual innovators will briefly demo their product/service in two different forums. First, there will be a couple center-stage presenters giving five minute demos for the entire crowd (aka “main dishes”) at 7pm. In addition, there will be a number of tables set up at the periphery of the room for live informal demonstrations to smaller groups during the schmoozing sessions (aka “side dishes”). Each will help provide the community a glimpse of current local endeavors in the space and offer the basis for further conversation.

The scourge of hypertext, the telemarketer link includes a hovering box displaying a thumbnail preview of the target web page. What possible use is there for a small blurry thumbnail of the link target that pops-up and obscures the surrounding text? And what about those double-underlined advertising links? Users should never have to experience those.

Here’s their take on best practices for hyperlinking text:

Poor quality hypertext is a usability disaster causing annoyance, confusion, and anxiety. Users expect links, and that the links will be relevant and useful. A good hyperlink is relevant to the surrounding text and provides enough information for the user to make an informed decision about whether to leave the current page they’re on and follow.

The linked text must have relevance, as it’s the first hint the user will receive as to the nature of the link. The test of good link text is whether it can stand alone on a page, outside of the hypertext of which it’s a part, and still make sense.

Links must also be styled differently to the surrounding text. They can be another color than blue, as long as it’s different to the normal text, and that all the links in the page are the same color, so they’ll be clearly visible.

A title attribute is optional, but should be used independently from providing a context because the tool tip only appears when using the mouse. If the link text is sufficient, it’s unnecessary anyway.

• 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?

1) “Student Recruitment in the Online World: Communicating from First Web Search to Final Enrollment”, by Bob Johnson, Bob Johnson Consultling

2) “Make It Last: Design for the Future, DO Your Homework Today”, by John Stapleton, Paskill Stapleton & Lord

3) “Jumping In Feet-First: How to Participate in Social Media for Recruitment, Retention, and Better Campus Life”, by Sean Carton, idFive

For those unfamiliar with the event, here’s the elevator pitch:

The eduWeb Conference is an annual, internationally recognized event for the higher education community, attracting those who are involved in online strategy, marketing and technology. This includes recruiting, website design/development, CMS, social media, marketing communications and the integration of traditional marketing channels into this new medium.

The conference attracts all levels of professionals in Admissions, IT, Marketing, Communications, Alumni, Athletics, Advancement, Student Affairs … and more

The conference continues to focus on “both sides of the fence” (front end and back end) regarding a website’s development.

• The “front end” includes marketing, communications, advancement, admissions – it includes any non-IT office that now has a website and knows that part of its strategy is to communicate to internal and external audiences.

• The “back end” includes information technology, database development, applications, instructional design, mobile technology, RSS and more.

The core to having a conference like this was to bring these sides together…to learn from the other side, to learn to talk each other’s language and hopefully bring a better working relationship among the personnel that now create the Web.

]]> http://webpub.mit.edu/2009/02/eduweb-2009-chicago/feed/ 0 http://webpub.mit.edu/2009/02/surfing-on-your-phone-cringeworthy/ http://webpub.mit.edu/2009/02/surfing-on-your-phone-cringeworthy/#comments Tue, 24 Feb 2009 17:29:26 +0000 Lisa Mayer http://webpub.mit.edu/?p=354 You’ve got to love Jakob Nielsen’s use of the English language. In his Feb 17th Alertbox article “Mobile Web 2009 = Desktop Web 1998” he discusses the similarities he uncovered during a recent usability test of mobile sites:

• 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.