YouTube to Add Two New Closed Captioning Services

A great endcap to our great presentation yesterday by Stephani Roberts from MIT’s ATIC and CJ Johnson from 3Play Media, the New York times published this article yesterday about new features coming to YouTube.

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.

Video demos of Google Chrome Browser

Google has some nice and short demos of what Chrome browser can do (Windows only for now).

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

Google SEO Guidelines

For those who don’t already have it, here’s guidelines that will help Google find, index, and rank your site.

Google Webmaster Guidelines

Average teens don’t use Twitter

An interesting post on Teens and what they think/use for social media networks.  Some information is just about teens themselves, but worth a read for the Twitter info…

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.

Wolfram|Alpha…the anti-Google?

WIRED Epicenter has an article on the new search engine called Wolfram|Alpha being released this month that will challenge Google in the search arena…

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.