YouTube Captions Feature

Google-owned YouTube announced they now allow you to upload subtitles for your videos. These will display in the video if the user expands the menu at the bottom right of the player to enable the captions, as in this CNet video. The supported formats for captions are Subviewer and Subrip (*.sub/ *.srt). To upload such a definition, visit your video’s edit page (accessible via Account -> My Videos) and switch to the Captions entry on top. For each video, you can also upload captions in several languages.
It’s an important feature, but YouTube’s tools are often not the most innovative; in this case, an additional web-based captions editor from YouTube is missing. YouTube suggests a couple of caption editing programs on their help page. Captions don’t seem to work with embedding yet.
[Via Ionut!]
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: YouTube Captions Feature | Comments]
[Advertisement] Find the right keywords for your campaigns at KeywordDiscovery.com
|
Bookmark:
|
Follow:
Social media tools: Community vs. Influence vs. Reputation
|
Bookmark:
|
Follow:
Google Experiments With More Colorful Checkout Badge

Google search result advertisers who sell products through Google’s Checkout program get the special benefit of having a visible icon next to their ad (“Your AdWords ads will stand out”, as Google says). This could be an incentive for sellers to use Checkout, as the Checkout program has been struggling in the past (judging from e.g. Google’s extensions of free usage for sellers). Now, Google has been seen experimenting with an even more colorful version of the Checkout badge, which in this case is placed in a pet food ad and reads “$5 off!”. It’s getting kinda cheap. The pet food, I mean.
[Images from WowFeed and Search Engine Land, with hat tip to Steve LaLonde.]
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google Experiments With More Colorful Checkou ... | Comments]
[Advertisement] Want to advertise here? Your ad will show in the blog and feed.
|
Bookmark:
|
Follow:
"its supposed to be so good so bad so private."
Tony tells great LA stories and links to the best of the new ones. Anyway, click on him - I'm not making sense today/this week; Cant spell names... it's all a deep psychic ledger that I'm makin a mess of. "Sleep. U need Sleep." : 'U mean I do?'. Table tennis interior monologue on a blog isn't the smart thing to do if u wish to profess your sanity. Makes your 38% look 23% overestimated. Read. Tony. 4. Secrets.
TonyPierce.com : "its supposed to be so good so bad so private. that youre supposed to have a secret afterwards. you shouldnt be able to talk about it at work. you shouldnt be able to blog about it and you definatly shouldnt be able to explain every detail to your mom. you shouldnt roll over afterwards and say : k wanna play wii now?"
|
Bookmark:
|
Follow:
Ignite NYC II - Submit a talk
On the night before the Web 2.0 Expo NY Ignite is coming back to NYC! On September 15th we will have 10 Ignite speakers who each get just five minutes on stage. Bre Pettis, the co-creator of Ignite will be hosting a cupcake decorating contest. Ignite is going to be at New World Stages (340 West 50th Street) where we are a guest of the New York Television Festival. They are providing us a ~400 person theatre and free beer (during the cupcake contest).
We are currently looking for speakers. If you have something geeky to share then submit a talk! Each speaker will get 20 slides that auto-advance after 15 seconds for a total of five-minutes. Put in your talk idea here. We will let people know by September 10th but submit early as selection is rolling.
If you plan on entering the cupcake decorating competition plan on bringing your own decorations. We will have some on-hand but if you are going to be the cupcake decorating champion of NYC then you'll need to bring something unique. You will not be required to use our cupcakes; feel free to bring your own.
Here is a rough schedule for how the night will go.
7:15 Door & Bar opens
7:30 Cupcake Contest Begins
8:15 Cupcakes Contest Ends
8:45 Ignite Talks Begin
9:45 Ignite talks end; upstairs bar opens
RSVP at Upcoming or Facebook to give us an idea of how many people to expect (but you do not have to).
After this Ignite the New York community will be taking on the event (though I will come back next summer to do some). They're already put up a community site; Tikva Morowati is on point if you are interested in being involved.
If you don't live in New York (or Seattle or Portland) or anywhere with an Ignite start your own! I urged people at Gnomedex last week and we will soon have new Ignites in Vancouver, Nashville, Dallas and DC (they'll soon be joining all of those logos to the right). Check out our community site for more information.
|
Bookmark:
|
Follow:
SUP, a Format to Tell Which Feeds Updated

SUP stands for Simple Update Protocol (officially, anyway, though it’s perhaps an acronym or backronym for “what’s up” aka “’sup”). It’s a JSON-based meta format for RSS/ Atom feeds useful for websites that deliver a large number of feeds, like a blogging platform, so that services subscribing to that site’s RSS feeds only need to download a single file to check for updates, and then download the other individual feeds as needed. SUP was invented by the ex-Google employees Paul Buchheit and Gary Burd of (recently redesigned) social feed aggregator Friendfeed. There is no official documentation at the moment outside of the Python source.
Friendfeed’s aim in introducing the format is to decrease the load in polling so many feeds from all over the web all the time (a polling that’s typically done whether or not the feed changed since last time). After all, that’s one of Friendfeed’s problems, too. “FriendFeed’s user base has grown quite a bit since launch, and our servers now download millions of feeds from over 43 services every hour,” Paul Buchheit writes in a blog post announcing SUP. A SUP feed can thus serve as first stop for feed readers to see if a feed changed, and the SUP file will only include the changes since the last SUP in a specified frequency – like 3 minutes – was published. (I remember Google’s Blogger once had such a “what’s new” file in XML format, but I’m not sure they ever attempted to turn it into something like a standard.)
So, all of this means SUP is not a competition to RSS feeds, but rather it’s a level above “watching” over it to make site updates be known faster and easier to other sites, due to a lowered load for publisher and reader programs. For sites with only a single feed or two (like Blogoscoped.com for instance) there seems to be no immediate need to support SUP (I’m not sure if it would be a speed win with Friendfeed). “[T]he benefits are most significant when the SUP feed covers a large number of other feeds,” Paul says. On the other hand, from an aggregator’s point of view the SUP format also requires you to set up a system that doesn’t miss out on its polling in the defined frequency, or else your program may miss feed update information (a look at the SUP’s time stamp could help find out about this). Paul in an email says, “SUP consumers must be somewhat intelligent when consuming feeds in order to poll at the appropriate frequency, but our goal was to make things as simple as possible for SUP producers in the hopes that most sites will be able to quickly implement a SUP feed.”
As for the syntax itself, why the choice of JSON over, say, XML? In popular browsers, XML can be checked for well-formedness and also displays somewhat formatted when directly opening it. Paul comments that JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) “is a very simple and common data format that is now supported by just about every common language ... It is also very compact, which is a real advantage for SUP feeds that may have thousands of entries. An XML-based SUP feed could be easily generated, but it’s not clear that there would be any advantage (and it could easly end up being 3-5 times as large).">>
At this time, not even Friendfeed itself has SUP reading support (they do have a SUP feed), but Paul says “it should be ready soon.” As SUP is so new it’s hard to tell who else will adopt the format. Paul states:
<<I’ve spoken with several sites, but we’re not yet ready to make any announcements.
We would like for everyone to support SUP, however Blogger already pings several blog ping services, so the benefit may not be as significant as it is with other non-blog services. One other issue with blog feeds is that many people send their feeds through Feedburner, which introduces additional delay (meaning that even after a new blog post is published, it may not appear in the RSS feed for some time).
A great example of a service that would really benefit from SUP is Google Reader. The Reader shared items feeds have “secret” urls that Google does not want to publish, so a traditional blog pinging service is not viable for them. Using SUP, they could easily notify feed consumers such as FriendFeed of which feeds have been updated without having to disclose any of the secrety urls.>>
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: SUP, a Format to Tell Which Feeds Updated | Comments]
[Advertisement] PingPongPie - the art of linkbaiting and social media marketing
|
Bookmark:
|
Follow:
Huge iPhone Security Risk? It's nothing new, says Jonathan...
|
Bookmark:
|
Follow:
'Sup friendfeed? : bustn a post_rss simple update protocol...
Summary below via The Deal : "FriendFeed's Simple Update Protocol.. will allow the service to process updates from social networks and blogging sites more quickly than what's possible using current Really Simple Syndication technology. SUP.. query Web sites to determine which feeds have been updated since the last poll and then download only those that have been modified. "FriendFeed downloads millions of RSS and Atom feeds every hour.. SUP makes it much more efficient and lets us check much more frequently, like every minute or every couple of seconds, instead of every half hour."
Bonus : Post RSS Technology not your thing, how about living in a garbage truck ? It's very chic and minimalist actually :D
|
Bookmark:
|
Follow:
Content Owners Profiting From YouTube Uploads

Google’s YouTube has a video identification system available to find copyrighted content. Google says there are currently 300 content-owning partners available who can be alerted by the system and who then face the choice of blocking the video, promoting it*, or getting a share of the ad revenues from YouTube (money from which the one who uploaded the detected video will not see a share, according to the New York Times, though I guess they can display some of their own links and so on in places like the video description snippet). Interestingly enough, Google says content owners participating here choose the third, seemingly more sensible model, around 90% of all times... making money from their content which was not uploaded by them.
[Via Andy.]
*I asked Google what exactly that option means (will it be pushed as partner video?) and will add an update if there’s a reply. If you know please comment.
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Content Owners Profiting From YouTube Uploads | Comments]
[Advertisement] Want to advertise here? Your ad will show in the blog and feed.
|
Bookmark:
|
Follow:
Google Video Onebox Spotted
When Ron (of Totlol.com) searched Google.ca for iphone recently, he hit upon what looks like an experimental video onebox result. Instead of the usual thumbnailed videos displayed in list format, this box was showing two videos results side by side below the headline “Video results for iphone”. Both in this search as well as in a search for love, all videos part of that onebox were from Google-owned YouTube.
In 2006, briefly before the YouTube acquisition another type of video onebox was showing, displaying 3 thumbnails with the video titles below the thumbnail.
[Thanks Ron!]
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google Video Onebox Spotted | Comments]
[Advertisement] Find the right keywords for your campaigns at KeywordDiscovery.com
|
Bookmark:
|
Follow:






