youtube

A Vine for its Time

I’m addicted to Vine, Twitter’s recently acquired 6-second video service. I Vine my dog-walking, my coffee-making, my cookie-baking, my car-washing. I Vine everything but my wife, and only because she won’t allow it. (If I ever do, I’ll also Vine my time in the doghouse after she finds out.)

It wasn’t too hard to become addicted. I’ve tried many video services before: YouTube, 12seconds, Qwik, and others that came and went even faster. Vine is right for its time. What makes it different?

KONY 2012 and the Age of Online Activism

The KONY 2012 campaign is a great example of how people can come together to raise awareness on an important topic.

I work for a labor organization and a great deal of the work we do is tied to feet on the street. We organize people and money for the benefit of our members and society. When it comes to doing online activism, this is still something that is new in the social justice arena.

Yes, it’s easy enough to create a Facebook page or a Twitter page and send out an email now an then. But those types of efforts rarely have a major impact when they are done as items on a check off list and not as a significant and urgent component of a campaign. The KONY 2012 campaign does just that.

The KONY 2012 campaign includes a strong narrative in regards to the devastating effects of children being recruited into a personal army and it uses new media to help get the message out. At the time of this post, the KONY 2012 video has over 43,300,000 views on YouTube, is filling up Facebook timelines, and is trending on Twitter with the “Uganda” and “Invisible Children” terms.

How To Control And Brand Your Video Content

One of the greatest benefits of video is its ability to end up all over the Internet. You post a video to YouTube, the message resonates with viewers, and they share the video with the world. For example, after helping my nephew tie a tie before his first job interview, I decided to do a video of the process. To my surprise, the video took off and now has over 5,500 views!

YouTube Adds New iPad-Friendly HTML5 Video Player

YouTube announced a new HTML5 video player that works on the Apple iPad device.

I tested the new player against the regular YouTube player on an iPad and the new player still needs some work. The new player takes a longer to load, has some funky behavior (a duplicate window appears below the player), and the screen is bouncy when the player isn’t set to fullscreen.

Unleashing The Power of YouTube Captions

A few months ago, I was talking with a good friend about new technologies and he mentioned Stanford’s video captioning services. I didn’t understand why it was that exciting a technology, at first. After visiting the site and looking at what Stanford was doing, it finally all clicked.

Captions turn video content inside out, making them searchable and accessible to the world.