SleepyDog.Blog

Screencast: Heavy Metal Umlaut

I found this great screencast by Jon Udell on del.icio.us. It is all about the evolution of a page on wikipedia. John describes the process here but I've included a heavily edited version below ...

Heavy Metal Umlaut: The Making of the Movie

by Jon Udell
02/07/2005

When Wikipedia's page on the heavy metal umlaut made the rounds of the blogosphere recently, I decided to make a documentary screencast that would illustrate and narrate Wikipedia's editorial process. The Wikipedia screencast clearly belongs in the feature category: it tells the story of the life of a Wikipedia page, and traces several of its evolutionary motifs.

When I visited Wikipedia's heavy metal umlaut page and began stepping through its change log, it was clear that the sequence of revisions was intrinsically interesting. If you go to the beginning and step forward through the revisions, you can watch the history of the page unfold.

The ability to scroll forward and backward along the document's timeline is, arguably, the coolest aspect of my Wikipedia screencast. The subject of this particular screencast lent itself particularly well to this treatment. This method works nicely when you're both editor and narrator. It won't help much, though, when the sound track is a conversation that's been recorded live, as is typical of the demo/discussion genre. Still, even in those cases, it may be useful to re-record the original capture in order to add a layer of narration underneath--or between segments of--the demo/discussion.

Why This Matters

Screencasting is a cool way to tell stories about software, and that's reason enough to care about it. But when the focus shifts from the software itself to our software-mediated social and political and economic lives, the true significance of the medium becomes clear.

Jon Udell is lead analyst for the InfoWorld Test Center.

New Feature: Link within a Video

Email links to specific points inside a video!

How cool is this new feature on Google?  I found it here on Digg.  Like the Digg commentators, I'd like to see links embedded in the Video, to allow tags and comments in a flickr notes & tags style.

I was lucky enough to work with Daniel Brown and the late Roy Stringer on a multimedia version of a A Brief History of Time.  They were embedding  links into video in the late 90s.  It is cool to see it implemented in such a simple fashion.   Some interesting mashups on the way!

From Google ...

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Now you can email links to specific points inside a video! All you have to do is add the time you'd like to share to the end of a video's URL. We support hours (h), minutes (m), and seconds (s).

For example, Invisible Board is a 1 min 46 sec long video but I believe the coolest part is at 1 min 26 sec, so all I have to do is add #1m26s to the link I'm going to send to my friends! Just like this:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6396990712930217422#1m26s

Screencasting

I've been investigating screencasting today.  I think this has relevance to the IOCT and Lecture 2.0.  I've posted two excerpts from articles linked from the Wikipedia ScreenCast page.  I'll be adding more article excerpts before pulling it all together in a future post.

   
O'Reilly (http://www.oreilly.com/)

What is Screencasting by Jon Udell 11/16/2005

A screencast is a digital movie in which the setting is partly or wholly a computer screen, and in which audio narration describes the on-screen action. It's not a new idea. The screencaster's tools—for video capture, editing, and production of compressed files—have long been used to market software products, and to train people in the use of those products. What's new is the emergence of a genre of documentary filmmaking that tells stories about software-based cultures like Wikipedia, del.icio.us, and content remixing. These uses of the medium, along with a new breed of lightweight software demonstrations, inspired the collaborative coining of a new term, screencast.

Screencast Genres

Here are some of the ways screencasts are used.

Tutorial: A screencast that demonstrates how to use an application or service. The screencasts on my LibraryLookup page are examples of tutorials. One of the most dramatic examples of this genre is called Cracking WEP in 10 minutes. To a thumping electronic beat, it shows you how to use kismet to locate a victim, aireplay to generate the requisite hundreds of thousands of WEP initialization vectors, aerodump to save the traffic to a file, and aircrack to analyze the file and recover the WEP key. It's a stunning contribution to the literature of wireless security.

Short how-to: Examples include this 90-second short on Linky, a Mozilla/Firefox extension, and another shortie on Windows' hidden desktop search feature. For screencasts as brief as these, editing is optional because you can get a usable result in a single take. That means that almost anybody can create one, blog it, and thus make it discoverable by search, tagging, and word-of-mouth referral.

Conversational demo: My first effort here was a demo of JotSpot, the "application Wiki," in which Joe Kraus drives the demo and I ask questions. A more recent example is this co-narrated demonstration of Zend Platform. As software grows ever more complex and dependent on elaborate substrates—especially in the enterprise category—I expect that this genre will be increasingly useful as a way for developers, reviewers, and users to reach a shared understanding of the software.

Feature story: My first foray into this genre was Aunt Tillie's OS X Adventure, in which I respond to a pair of Eric Raymond essays [1, 2] on the horror of Linux's printer support ...

Good old-fashioned software review: If you're reviewing a software product, for example the latest version of Photoshop, why wouldn't you do it as a screencast? That's just what David Pogue did.

Spontaneous user-produced demo: My favorite example of this genre is Paul Everitt's ad hoc demo of the oXygen XML editor ...

Animated whiteboard: Troy Stein, product manager for Camtasia Studio, made this screencast for the soccer team he coaches ...

Screencast-enhanced video: Although most of my screencasts have focused mainly on software action, with bits of live video sometimes spliced in, my screencasts about a flood and a pumpkin festival reverse the emphasis ...

Concept screencast: The ACLU's digital identity nightmare is a screencast about software that doesn't exist, but could: an application for a pizza store order-taker that violates the customer's privacy in a dozen different ways ...

DonationCoder (http://www.donationcoder.com/)

Best ScreenCasting Tools

ScreenCasting is the new hip term for recording movies of your computer desktop as you demonstrate some program ...

... Regardless of whether you call it screencasting or demo movie recording, a new breed of tools (combined with the market penetration of Macromedia Flash) is making it easier and easier for home users to produce software demonstrations.

After an exhaustive review of screencasting software, which involved making dozens of demo movies spanning several full hours of video, we narrowed down the list of best screencasting tools to a small handfull. We tried hard to choose a single best tool from this set of top contenders, but in the end we decided that we couldn't pick a single winner. Instead, this review represents the first shared Best-in-Class award at DonationCoder.com:

TechSmith Camtasia Studio BEST Fast-motion/Quality BEST Editing	BB FlashBack BEST Price BEST Low-bandwidth	Macromedia Captivate BEST interaction, quiz, scripting

Looking Back at the Futurists

OPEN OR FREE

Open or free I paid my fee

And read the book

It took a while

To compile my notes

Open Source is of course

Like market forces and Morse

Code that’s free

Free as in speech

Not as in beer I hear

Voices proclaim

How laudable

And the best part is

That liberty not gratis

Means I may now freely pay

Lip service and drink to the day

They make free beer

Affordable

Toby

Moores

26.6.99

I wrote this poem after reading Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution.

Obviously I'm not a poet, but this book came at a time of great change for me. I thought I'd start this blog with a look back at some of my strongest influences.  Today I found a series of articles in Wired entitled 10 Years That Changed the World, so I guess someone has beaten me to it …