For those of you who missed it, here is the video of Wine Library TV‘s Gary Vaynerchuk on NBC’s The Conan O’Brien Show. It’s hilarious.
Video of Wine Library TV’s Gary Vaynerchuk on NBC’s The Conan O’Brien Show
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Category Archives: Media
We Need a Facebook & Netflix Mashup
For the longest time, I was a Blockbuster Online user (I’m not sure why). I recently changed over to Netflix. I’m still not completely sure how the services are that much different but I’ll be reporting back soon.
Anywho… I was thinking that there should be an application on Facebook which takes what movies that I and my friends have seen through Netflix and shows them in my Facebook newsfeed. For example, I just got the movie The Queen. My friends would be “Oh, Justin got ‘The Queen’ on Netflix. He thought it was great Maybe I should get it?”
This would be even better then what Flixster is trying to do with their movies Facebook application because you already have a service (Netflix) which is recording a user’s movie viewing habits and their reviews.
Too many new applications ask me to do too much. They want me to add all kinds of information into their system. The thing is the information already exists in other places.
What’s the latest application you’ve used where you’ve had to review something or enter something that you’ve already entered in for the thousandth time?
Gary Vaynerchuk – a gentleman, scholar, and example of an expert in a Web 2.0 world
Last week, I went off on Jakob Neilsen for essentially saying that you have to bloviate like a dotty old tenured professor if you want to be considered an expert in your field. (exaggeration) My thesis was that its important to know your stuff but that you need to interact and have conversations with your community. It’s through these conversations which you gain trust with the people you’re there to serve.
Someone who exemplifies these qualities for me is Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV. He is both a gentleman and a scholar. He takes advantage of all that Web 2.0 has to offer to spread his message of Wine to the world.
For those of you not familiar with Gary, he hosts a podcast, Wine Library TV, that goes out every weekday where he reviews some wine. He’s fun and engaging. It’s probably one of the best shows on the Web. Both Time Magazine and ABC News have decided to stand up and take notice.
On his show, he is constantly asking for user feedback but his show isn’t the only place where he interacts with the community. He has a Twitter account. In addition to giving personal updates, he used to use Twitter as a way to field viewer questions live on the show.
Now instead of using Twitter to field questions, he has an application on Facebook called “Ask Gary.” There users can post question for Gary, which he’ll answer.
He has a profile on the wine social network Cork’d. You can see what he’s drinking and what his thoughts are on the wines that he’s tried. He loved the community of Cork’d so much that his company Wine Library purchased it. He hopes to grow the community and use it as a way venue for encouraging people to try new wines.
At the end of everyone of his shows, Gary says, “you with a little bit of me…we’re changing the wine world.” I can imagine if Jakob Neilsen had a podcast he’d say, “I’m changing the world and I’m glad you just paid $3,000 to listen to me talk about it.”
Lee LeFever and Common Craft Release “Social Networking in Plain English” Video
Ever have people ask you, why you use social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn? If so, I have exactly the video for you.
Lee LeFever and company have released their latest video, “Social Networking in Plain English.“
It’s Apple iPhone Day!
In a little over ten hours Apple nerds up and down the east coast will be peeling back the shiny wrapping to unlock all the treasures of the iPhone. Till then, we all wait with baited breath and excitement to see what will happen.
I will be joining the masses at the Clarendon Apple Store in Arlington, VA. If you’re in the area, stop on by and say hello.
WCAG 2.0: Add Captions to Your Online Video
I recently read some obscene statistic about the HUGE amount of video that is getting uploaded to the Web everyday. It’s a probably safe bet to say that the majority of that online video doesn’t have any captioning. This is a big problem for people who are deaf or hard of hearing and are trying to understand the message of your video. According to Gallaudet University, about 8.6% of the American population or 20+ million people have some form of hearing problems.
Captioning takes time and its not easy. I wish there was a magic button that you could press and captions would magically appear on the videos you were making.
Regardless, the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 has the Success Criteria 1.2.1 which says:
1.2.1 Captions (Prerecorded): Captions are provided for prerecorded multimedia, except for multimedia alternatives to text that are clearly labeled as such.
Well authoring tool vendors and developers have responded to our call for better tools.
In the latest version of Adobe Flash CS3, there is integrated captioning functionality. According to Adobe Accessibility Engineer “delivering captioning in Flash really easy.” While, I haven’t seen this at work. I’m pretty excited that Adobe has made this a priority.
There is also MAGpie, the free open-source tool from WGBH’s National Center for Accessible Media. If you already have the transcript for your video, you can quickly turn the transcript into the xml file format you need to make captions for your online video. I have seen it in action. It’s not super seamless but it gets the job done.
The US Library of Congress has started to integrate the use of MAGpie and Flash video to provide captioning for some of their videos. Check out the videos for the MacDowell Exhibit. (Full Disclosure: With my government contracting job, I work at the Library of Congress full time.)
One of the most interesting tools I have seen is dotSub. You can submit your video to the service and then you or any of the members of the service can transcribe and caption the video. Once you have the initial captioning done, the captions can be translated into many languages. This is all done through the wisdom and knowledge of the community.
Lee Lefever did it with his Wikis In Plain English video. dotSub really worked for him. Not only was he able to get his video transcribed and captioned in English. It was also subtitled into a dozen other languages. His video is now accessible to people with auditory disabilities where it wasn’t before.
This is where I work…
When you’re at work, it’s easy for the walls to feel like they’re pressing in on you. You forget why you do what you do and the difference that it’s making in people’s lives.
This video helped me remember how cool my job is and the great difference that we’re making.
You’ll want to work at the Library of Congress after watching this video.
(Kudos to Michael Lawerence Films for a cool trailer. I’d love to see the full DVD)
MobEA V: Galit Zadok on “Mobile Web in the Developing World”
Note: These are notes from the MobEA V: Mobile Web in Developing Worlds Workshop, which is located with WWW2007.
Mobile web in the developing world is about the people. There is a quote from the guardian, “if we wait for aid, we wait forever.”
It really isn’t developing countries. It’s developing regions. There is a big difference between the urban and rural areas.
We can’t impose our solutions on them. We have to understand the people. We have to have a collaborative approach.
By 2015, there will be 5 billion mobile phones. In Nigeria, the biggest selling phone is the Nokia N70. A increase in 10% mobile penetration raises GDP by 1.2%.
Ubiquitous computing will emerge from the developing world. Necessity is the mother of all invention. Technology will take hold where it is depended on.
Keep it simple. Customer experience is key. It needs to be universally accessible. Show the monetary benefit.
You Can Make Internet TV
On Friday, I had the pleasure of hanging out with the Harvard Free Culture Group. At their meeting, Dean Jansen of the Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF) debuted the Web site Make Internet TV. The site, a project of PCF, is a resource to help people make videos. It covers everything from equipment, shooting, editing, licensing issues, publishing, and promotion. There is even an underlying wiki where users can contribute their knowledge and tips. This Web site is really a great resource. Check it out.
RIT Highly Ranked (for media piracy)
I just read Bob Finnerty‘s latest blog post, “Movie lovers beware: Hollywood is watching RIT.” Apparently, students at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) are some of the biggest pirates of movies, according to the MPAA. I wasn’t surprised.
I got my undergraduate degree at RIT. I have to say there is a culture of media piracy. Its just what was done. If you’re with a bunch of your friends and nothing is good on TV, someone will say, “wanna download a movie?”
When I was a freshmen, media piracy had just become to the cool thing to do. We had an internal network that would have around 20 terabytes of data on it at any given time. You could get any song you could imagine. Movies and video games would come out on our network months before they were released to the public.
By my sophomore and junior years of college, my friends at RIT started getting sued by the MPAA and the RIAA. If you heard a knock on your door and there were two guys there in suits, it probably wasn’t the Mormons. It was Campus Safety there to serve you with the lawsuit papers. I quickly gave up downloading for good and opted to use the Apple iTunes Store.
At RIT, there is and always has been a plethora of free pirated media at anyone’s finger tips. How can you engineer an incentive so that the piracy doesn’t take place?
RIT tried to offer a discount to a paid music service but no one really used it. I kind of wondered what they were thinking when they instituted this service.
The RIAA and MPAA could sue more students. RIT could pursue all the pirates. I still don’t think it would matter. There would still be media piracy.
I don’t pirate media because, well its wrong. Also… the convenience that iTunes provides (versus downloading illegally) is worth the money that I pay for music on iTunes.
What can RIT due to cut down the piracy? They’d have to make it easier and more convenient to get legal legitimate media then to get the pirated media but when you have students with little to no budget for fun (except for beer) that’d be hard to do.
