Did You Know

Here's an interesting video, thanks to one of the guys from TorCamp. Check it out on dotSub.com. Oh yes, and also, he apparently found this video using a tool called StumbleUpon (neat name!) that helps you find recommendations of content on the web, so I just installed it for Firefox browser and will see if this helps me in my daily activities. I know I spend lots of time searching for things in my research using primarily Google and then sifting through the content, or then refining my search queries.

Let me see if StumbleUpon helps to make me even more productive with less effort, that will give me even more time to do some more work!

Really funny Web 2.0 video

Check out this really funny Web 2.0 video. And the serious part, it really is all true!



On Technorati: Web 2.0

CASCON 2007 Conference, Day 1

I just finished co-chairing a session on Tagging as a Social Contract along with Mark Chignell and Sara Darvish, where we had 4 talks about issues surrounding tagging in a business environment. This was the second session as part of the Second Working Conference on Social Computing and Business at the CASCON 2007 conference. It was a great workshop and great session, and great discussion. I talked about how community can be inferred from tagging using the YouTube vaccination videos as an example. Podcasts and slides from the workshop should be available, so check the CASCON blog.

I also showed a demo of a community-based web portal that our lab created to support vaccination groups in our exhibit at the Technology Showcase called "Video Web 2.0: Collaborative Tagging in Web Video". If you're at CASCON, check it out!

Photos from CASCON are on my Flickr account.

Current.TV

I'm checking out this new customized TV web site called Current.TV. They have people that make TV casts and programs, yet they also allow viewers to submit their own content. They call their approach VC squared or Viewer Created Content. They have special pods or channels of which you can watch viewer created content, and they even have special channels you can watch on regular TV programming as well. I would use something like this more than Joost, Joost right now doesn't allow for viewer created content, they have to license content. Joost just got a deal with Viacom, where Viacom will provide them with content.

I don't really use much of Joost because I find that Joost is very memory and bandwidth hungry, and slows down the rest of my apps. And right now, I don't find any compelling content to watch. But I can see how Current.TV would be something that I would watch. There's this special video clip of Gates vs. Jobs which I found really really funny and nice, check it out!

Is MSN Soapbox Microsoft's answer to YouTube?

Today I just discovered a new video social networking site from Microsoft, called MSN Soapbox, which looks like Microsoft's answer to YouTube. It sports a much cleaner interface than YouTube (especially without all those annoying Google ads everywhere). I really like how MSN has included an IM link to instant message the video link to your friends on Windows Live Messenger and also to share the video on Windows Live Spaces.

I'm going to have to try this out and see how if Microsoft has a chance at grabbing some bit of market share for user-generated video content from YouTube. It seems like video social networking is the next thing (first it was blogs, then podcasting, now it's video) in the Web 2.0 arena. Yahoo as you might guess, also has a video service as well called Yahoo Video. So, the big three names in search are also into social networking as well.

It's interesting that a fellow U of T grad student's work from DGP is on Soapbox in the Technology category section, it has to deal with a bumptop 3D desktop where the desktop mimics a real table space where you can put documents into piles and put them in different parts of the desktop like you can do with papers.


Video: BumpTop 3D Desktop

January 31, 2007

Note: I just finished uploading my Masters grad research video onto Soapbox to test the service out. You can see it here and give me comments on what you think.


Video: My Masters graduate research presentation

On Technorati: SoapBox, YouTube, Yahoo Video

What is Google doing with YouTube?

I've been asking this question ever since the acquisition and it was one of the questions that I asked in the breakout discussions of the Social Computing: Best Practices workshop at the CASCON conference. This has made me wonder if Google will replace their Google Video with YouTube, seeing how successful YouTube is. However, Google would not be stupid enough to replace their Google Video, like Google says in their blog post, they've given a glimpse as to what they will do with YouTube.

YouTube and Google Video will be separate, but the Google Video search feature will allow to search on Google Video clips or YouTube clips. Monetization will happen with video ads using YouTube or Google Video in Google's AdSense, there is a new AdSense video test that they are trying out. What would be really neat and useful, is not searching video for text, but metadata embedded in the actual video. That is, I search for some content within the actual frames of the video, using image recognition and vision algorithms. Metadata can be encoded and annotated within each frame, but that is extremely time consuming for the content producer of the video. That's why tagging video like in YouTube is so popular, it's easy, it's intuitive and it allows for building community and finding related topics, and makes it easily available for search.

On Technorati: YouTube, Google Video, video tag, video search