Archive for November, 2009
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I’m thankful for my family, career, health (even though my cold still lingers) and friends and colleagues.
Have a Happy Thanksgiving.
How to carve a turkey.
Cartoon: Story about the pumkin.
Warning: This next video has some fake blood at the end.
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YouTube announced automated video captioning for videos. Converting audio to text in videos will make videos more accessible to deaf people or anyone searching for videos online, but it can also lead to several advantages for search engine optimization, too.
YouTube already allows manual captioning, but most video uploaders don’t take advantage of that feature. To do so, the videos need to be transcribed by a human and that’s simply too high of a cost to do. Google, YouTube’s parent company, has decided to use the automated transcription technology from Google Voice to produce automatic captions. This eliminates the timely and costly process of a human doing the transcription.
The system isn’t perfect and struggles with accents, multiple voices, and quick speakers.
This video demos to learn about machine-generated captions in YouTube and automatic timing for manually created caption tracks. It’s a work in process.
Even Google videos are incorrectly automatically captioned, see the image below, the caption barely makes any sense.
The machine-generated transcription service will English-only captions initially on 13 partner channels, including Google channels and videos, PBS content, educational content, others. Could this one day lead to organic video SEO (VSEO)? If search engines could search the audio in video that could dramatically increase the viewership of videos that today rely on tags, viral marketing and direct marketing to get viewed watched. There are VSEO solutions today that will manually transcribe and optimize video so it is findable and ranks higher on search engine results. The Career Corner Digital does this for recruitment videos. Using its process companies like Schlumberger and GEICO have increased viewership from search engines results by 9-to-25 times the standard video uploading processes. “Having a transcript in the video is the holy grail for video and SEO,” says Peter Young, President of Career Corner, a video recruitment, Video SEO and social media firm in based in NYC. “Having text from a video helps the video rank in search engines and drive candidates to a company’s website like job listing and blogs do today.”
While YouTube hasn’t mentioned specifically, it would seem a natural for the text from the captioning to be added to Google’s search tools. Today a search for several captions resulted in ZERO results. Among the searches was the caption from the photo above. Based on my back of the envelope calculation analysis, less .00001% (less than 1 in a million) of the videos are captioned today and ZERO show up in search results. But this automatic captioning system is giant leap forward.
The machine-generated service will generate English-only captions initially on 13 partner channels. The service combines Google’s automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions.
“Auto-caps” use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video, according to Ken Harrenstien, the Google software engineer who created the technology.
Today, very little text from video is being captured on the Web because no one wants to transcribe thousands of videos. But for important initiatives, the additional investment in VSEO can be well worth it. Peter Young stated that Schlumberger, who hires field engineers and had video content on its website to provide a glimpse into the job, culture and company for years, the content has been helpful to candidates once they got to our site. But, a search for “field engineer” on search engines and video sites produced NO Schlumberger field engineer video results. With Career Corner video social media and VSEO the field engineer videos are a top search result and people are embedding the video on blogs, job boards, and sharing on social networking sites, especially amongst the field engineering community.
That optimization allows for candidates to find and share the videos on search engines and on sites including Veoh.com, www.VirtualJobShadow.com, Youtube.com, MetaCafe.com and others. The VSEO and distribution has resulted in over 90,000 video views (11 times more than on the Schlumberger site).
Here’s some links to the Schlumberger videos.
• http://www.blinkx.com/videos/field+engineer (video search engine, results from many different sites)
• http://tinyurl.com/kvfx96 (YouTube search)
• http://tinyurl.com/ns9ldj (Metacafe search)
• http://tinyurl.com/m9h95d (Google search)
• http://tinyurl.com/l3xcfo (Bing Search)
• http://tinyurl.com/mmmwzn (Yahoo search)
The problem of only self-tagging to find video could one day be eliminated with YouTube’s new automatic captioning service. In time other companies that host and serve video will surely launch similar solutions to make the Holy Grail for video a reality.
YVAXN6WDK77AI heard it from several attendees at #SocialRecruiting summit – “I’m hoping to build a case to bring back to my company.” That is the mantra of an employee playing it safe. One of the speakers, Fred Wilson, a venture capital investor in twitter, indeed.com, meetup.com and others, suggested going rogue. He did state that you need to be mindful of laws and other legal compliance issues.
Some people are early adopters and others are not. Why are some people and companies early adopters and other not? I think risk tolerance is a big reason. People that are riskier (innovators) are willing to try new things, these people know that sometimes the new things they try will completely fail, but sometimes the new things will be BIG homeruns. Those that play it safe all the time will have less failures, but will also miss out on the early and most rewarding gains and advantages.
Going rogue is about trying something new and different and doing it outside the traditional risk level of the organization. But, with a policy like one-third of time and budget goes to trying something new and innovative and two-thirds of the time and budget to proven strategies and tactics, companies and individuals can avoid the sticky messes that develop with going rogue. I believe some research and homework helps, just avoid research and analysis paralysis.
Social media – social networks, blogs, wikis, video sharing sites, etc… are often considered rogue activities. John Sumser talked about the “technology adoption curve,” I view this concept as the “rogue curve,” the earlier in the curve you are the “roguer” you are….
Social media is largely an open and public discussion. Social media opens organization to new levels of direct dialogue with customers and jobseekers. In the past, companies could hide behind mail, email and the telephone, with little risk if you ignored correspondeances. Now, with social media, avoiding blog posts, “wall” posts, tweets, comments, video posts and other forms of contact on publicly available forms can have negative consequences. Sodexo, Microsoft and RSM McGladrey representatives were on a panel that discussed their social media strategies and their perspectives on candidate engagement. Here’s each one’s response.
Here’s the video:
Sodexo Candidate Engagement – Kerry Noone
RSM McGladrey Candidate Engagement – Ben Gotkin
Microsoft Candidate Engagement – Heather Tinguely
St. John’s University Men’s Soccer team won the BIG EAST Tournament for a RECORD 8th time! Now on to the NCAA tournament. @stjohnsalumni
Lady Gaga – new video and song – Bad Romance http://bit.ly/1Z3I44 , chill party tune
Twitter is bursting at the seams in terms of unique visitors, subscriber growth, buzz, VC financing and valuation. TechCrunch published reports that Twitter had projections of 1 Billion users by 2013. The thing that many question, is the revenue model, which Twitter apparently doesn’t have or is not revealing.
Many Twitter outsiders have speculated about the revenue model. Only C-level Twitter insiders or an active VC investors know the most likely revenue model. Fred Wilson, who’s Union Square Ventures VC invested early in Twitter, will be speaking at the #Social Recruiting Summit in NYC and he published a some of his talking points in a blog. In the comments posted in that blog, Fred writes “twitter can copy indeed’s model there can be free/organic and there can be ways to amplify by paying.” He was referring to indeed.com’s sponsored links and jobs (similar to the traditional SEM model). Fred does say “can” and there is a big difference between “can” and “will.” Time will tell……
I’ll be at #Social Recruiting Summit and the Pre-Social Recruiting Summit Tweetup, if any news develops I’ll post a comment here. I believe there are still a couple spots available if you wish to attend either event….
Sesame Street was really good today. Big bird migrating and the rapping real estate guy was has the baby glued to TV. Happy 40th Bday!
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