SuperSatellite

eduWeb 2008 Day 3 (Can I go home yet?)

// July 23rd, 2008 // 4 Comments » // Tech, Travel, Web

The morning Flickr update is done.  I was quite disappointed, no sooner had I gotten to the Boardwalk last night and my batteries went and died on me, so I ended up missing a lot of good shots.  Hunting down sushi was an interesting challenge, but by god, not only did we find it, we managed to put together a crew of about 22 people. Yeah, they totally hated us.  Hopefully everyone else tipped well (because I sure didn’t… no, I kid, I did).  I’m sorry to report it actually wasn’t that great, which is too bad.  That was, however, the best group I’ve managed to get together.  So, what’s everyone doing at HighEdWeb in Springfield? Heh.

The morning is starting as a painful one.  Stupid soft beds.  I’m getting rolling at Sarah Stanek’s presentation on effective web site management.  Didn’t hit topic tables this morning.  I’m gonna follow here as best I can, had to jump in a couple minutes late due to a last minute need for a jacket in the room.  We’re talking about turning skills as web users into skills for web authors.  A person might not know how to create what they want, but they know what they want to see, so we should give them the tools to do that.

Four steps of web writing: 40% organizing, 30% setting goals, 20% writing, 10% building.  Did you know 67% of all statistics are made up on the spot?  It’s true.  We’re back to a lot of basics: web users scan, not read, reuse content when possible, proofread.  More stats: web site creation is 80% organization and 20% composition.  What happened to 40/20?  Write, test, and revise navigation.  I’m getting that feeling of “too basic” again.  I think it’s time for conferences to have an “advanced concepts” track.

“Ideal links are 7-12 words in length.”  That seems like a really unusual statement.  While you see this with blogs where the title is a link, general contextual links will never be that long, and making them that long is kinda crazyish.  She’s also throwing out the idea that we should use words, not URIs.  Good concept, unless you want URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) recognition so people can go straight back without navigating clear through your site.  That’s a bit nitpicky though, because I understand why you should use words instead of URIs.

Hierarchy of web content: links and navigation, calls to action, support documentation, site home page, ande everything else. It is clear, relevant, short, relatable, easy to scan, and authentic.  You know, I really thought this was going to be about managing a web site, not about an introduction to creating and organizing content.  I was sorta thinking how you manage resources, work with other teams, control and drive development, etc.  Oh well.  Sorry, I’m cranky this morning, and still waiting on the Aleve to kick in.  Updates to follow…

Update ~9:29AM EDT

Nearing the end of the first session, and covering more writing tips.  It does make me glad that I don’t have to write, for the university at least.  Now, I do like the idea she presents to create a fake departmental site, full of bad writing and mistakes to use as an example and to train people to find and fix things.  It allows you to train consistently and to avoid calling anyone out as an example.  And to paraphrase: never underestimate the stupidity of your users.

Update ~10:21AM EDT

I’m taking a gamble in the session on e-mail in the new media landscape.  One, because I’m not terribly interested, and two, because it’s a vendor presentation.  But if I go take a nap, I might just sleep away the rest of the morning. And afternoon.  The vendor is Greg Cangialosi from Blue Sky Factory.  These guys are in the email business, so you can bet they’re going to be pushing the importance of email.  Let me be clear, I like email, I think it has its place, but I also think there are things that it isn’t good at and wasn’t meant for.  I also think it’s time for marketing to find a new medium, as email’s spam saturation level is so high that I think the effectiveness of it is in peril.  Plus, I’m not a proponent of HTML email.  I know some folks that will disagree with me, and can throw numbers to the contrary, and I admit it is a personal thing.  It made fun of my mom when I was a kid and I still hold a grudge.

He says “Email is THE dominant app.” I cannot argue with that.  It’s sorta like how Ali was the heavyweight champ, or VHS was the video format of choice.  Stat: ROI is ~$48 for every $1 spent on email.  Did you know 28% of all statistics are made up on the spot? It’s true.  I would like to see some methodology on those numbers actually.

Switching gears to RSS. Discussing how prevalent it has become, and how it’s being woven into the fiber of the web.  But the thinking is RSS can’t replace e-mail, which I’d agree with.  But I also don’t think it ever could have.  He states that e-mail is the currency used by all the accounts that you have, everywhere you go, every service you use, e-mail is the common thread through them all.

Greg presents the following “five gems” to capture data and build returns: incorporate social media (capture them every opportunity you get), optimize for mobile devices (positive brand experience), triggered and nuture e-mail (keep your brand in their mind = mindshare), permission is paramount (tell them what to expect), and lastly, don’t forget the parents (keep the decision makers in the loop).

Update ~10:35AM EDT

Example of nuturing email: 52 tips in 52 weeks.  Nice, because it also suggests a “contract” that you’ll get an email a week, no more, no less.  Some things you can control and test: from line, subject line, copy, imagery, call to action, and a landing page.  “Email is the digital glue of it all.” I can see that thinking.

Greg’s blog is www.thetrendjunkie.com.  He’s also on Twitter, @gregcangialosi.

Update ~11:33AM EDT

OKay, got my bag into the hands of the busboy (busman?) for the next couple hours.  Managed to get checked out before the biggest part of the eduWeb rush I think (it’s currently pretty empty in here).  I can’t wait to get away from the stale 30 year old cigarette smell of this place.  For the record, the eduStyle award winners from yesterday’s lunch have been posted: http://www.edustyle.net/awards/winners.php.  I plan on seeing us on that list next year.  We just weren’t fast enough with the redesign to get in the running this year.  But that’ll give us a solid year to smooth things out.  Fear us.

Waiting for “How to Embed Video on Your Website” presented by Lance Merker of OmniUpdate.  Another vendor presentation on a subject not of a ton of value to me.  I’m hoping he covers some stuff like codecs and bitrates.  The last session like this I sat in on was just on recording and very basic editing, not at all what I wanted.  Our CMS (Content Management System) (dotCMS) is already set up to handle, embed, and display video just fine, but I always like tweaking settings to try and get clearer, more high quality FLVs.

Okay, the first photo was pretty funny.  Tried to get a photo of it, but he went to fast.  The concept is that video should be used to address the “short attention span theater.”  They are “information snackers.”  People viewed 11.5 billion videos in the month of March.

Videos on campus are good for campus tours, visual FAQs (neat idea, expanding on the screencasting concept), blog content, student perspectives, serial programming.  I wonder if anyone has thought to engage their broadcasting depart to put together a “TV show” that is ran only on the web, a la Dr. Horrible.

Hooray! Containers and codecs and players, oh my!  Finally someone seems to be getting to the good stuff.  Talking about YouTube as a potential, but not terribly effective solution.  It’s easy, but not ideal, and you end up with a branded, identifiable container that you have little control over.  Flash video is the ideal solution.  I think that’s a generally agreed upon medium at this point.

Talking transcoding to get to FLV now.  He’s recommending www.transcodeit.com to use cloud resources to get any common video format to flash.  No mention of bitrate or size controls though.  He’s doing a demo now, and it looks like there are no controls for such things.  I’ll mention Riva Encoder as well as a free FLV encoder.  I’ve found it to be pretty fast and decent.  Answering my question, he corrects my previous comment and says there are controls for bitrate, etc, we just need to wait until the upload of the sample video finishes on our brutal wifi here.

Update ~11:49AM EDT

Transcode-It actually doesn’t look too shabby for a free, online transcoding service.  It even has FTP (File Transfer Protocol) controls to automatically upload the transcoded video straight to your web site.  Interesting… Transcode-It apparently supplies code specific to OmniUpdate users as well.  They must be affiliated.  And now that I look at it, the Transcode-It site footer clearly states an OmniUpdate copyright.  So, just be aware.  Still looks like a good service, and you don’t have to use OmniUpdate to use it.

Also talking about captioning too.  He recommends MAGpie.

Update ~12:50PM EDT

Keynote! We’re almost done!  The closing keynote is being presented by Karine Joly, and is called “It’s the Community, Stupid!“  The concept is raising and nurturing online communities.    Unrelated: Heidi Cool got her presentation on blogging from yesterday posted.

So far, everyone seems pretty excited for this. Hopes are high, emotions are on edge.  Karine runs collegewebeditor.com.  She definitely puts togther a nice slide.  That’s something I definitely think separates the good speakers from the less than good.  Making a note of that to myself.  She brings up a point I mention occasionaly, that people are starting to suffer from communication overload.  I think this is the big failing point of the social web, that there’s just too much right now.  It’s hard to determine what is most important.  Ultimately there is no way to catch up and keep up.

We are in the relationship building business.  It’s easy to get lost in our information silo, and fail on connecting to certain audiences and targets.  Conversations build relationships, and the community is central to our job.  We can’t have conversations or relationships without a community.  She mentions the Groundswell book I linked the other day in Mark’s keynote.  I must make it a point to get that now, since it showed up in both keynotes.  “Community is about people’s need to connect, not your need to control.”

Karine’s 7 step plan for community building:

1. What can you do for them? (their needs)
2. What do you want? (your goals)
3. If you build it with them, they will come. (participatory design)
4. Exclusive content and conversation starters (exclusive valuable content)
5. Listen, identify, and empower
6. Call them back – on their terms (cross-promote)
7. Meet your new boss(es) (treat them as stakeholders)

Community members are the stakeholders, and never forget that they know more than you do.  Eww, now we’re treated to Brad’s ugly mug on the projector.  I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.  But, good point on the random incentive to get students blogging.  Dammit Brad, stop making points I need to mention.  Karine’s showcasing a Ning group.  I keep coming back to this wondering if there’s a use for it with us.  I’m just not totally keen on relying on a free third party for something like that yet.

Update ~12:59PM EDT

And that’s that ladies and gentlemen.  I have a bag to go grab, and shuttles and planes to catch.  Hopefully it all goes as planned.  I’m taking tomorrow off, and will upload some more photos and maybe some finals thoughts then.  Good meeting those of you that I got to, look forward to seeing some of you at HighEdWeb.  Travel safe, those that are traveling, see you in the Twitterverse.

Reaching into the shadows

// January 15th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Music, Web

So, the internet today provided one of those random needle-in-a-haystack moments to me. It was funny, because with as big as it is, and as much information as is out there, it’s weird when you unexpectedly hit something familiar. I think I have an average sized digital footprint in the grand scale of things, but at the same time, I try to keep it tidy. I generally know where all my stuff is that’s out there.

This morning, a friend had me checking out some music videos on YouTube. This turned into a game of association. Saul Williams turned into Andy McKee, which turned into Jeff Martin, which turned into me getting a random curious bug and searching for an old local band called The Sound and the Fury. They broken up some time back, but I was curious if they had any media out there on da ‘Tube. Imagine my surprise when I saw a video of them covering Superstition. A video from 4 years ago. A video posted by some random patron on the net. A video that I filmed in Joplin at the Green Room during an interview. It was just very unexpected, like when I still worked for KIND and made a radio friendly edit of Teenage Dirtbag by Wheatus, only to be driving around Pittsburg and hear my exact edit of the song on a station here years later.

I hadn’t even thought about this video in the past couple years. Since this unscrupulous person clearly took the video from SuperSatellite where it had been posted in ’04 when we were still a site for music and concert information, I find it only fitting that I upload it (with proper credit as to the source, me, I might add) and re-present it to you! Here you go, watch and enjoy!

Taking TV to DVD

// January 7th, 2008 // No Comments » // Software, Tech, Television

Storing video can be one of the single most space consuming tasks you can do on a computer. If you do any video editing, you know the pain of storing 6+ hours of uncompressed DV footage for composition (not to even mention work in HD). That’s bad enough. At least once you are done with it, you can archive the footage on its original tapes, or select out the best bits and pieces for a scratch file to be used later, and dump the rest. Where I am running into more and more problems is backup of TV shows I record on my tuner and such. Rather than setting my VCR to record, it’s all too easy to keep up with a show’s torrent RSS. Once I’ve watched them, I tend to not get rid of them however (at least if I like the show), because once in a while I like going back and watching it over.

This adds up. Several seasons of a show will really pack on the gigs into a hard drive. Yes, you can buy it on DVD, that is an option I have exercised more than once. But sometimes shows on DVD are way overpriced, impossible to find, or not even released (has anyone seen the Drive season set yet, or anything past the first volume of Whose Line?). Thanks to my friend Rachel giving me a spindle of blank DVDs for Christmas, I decided to try my hand at burning my shows to DVD to watch on TV, instead of my computer monitor, and also free up the space on my server.

First, go here. It’s a tutorial at the VideoHelp.com forums. Though a tad dated (there’s a new version of TMPGenc Xpress out, and you don’t need Goldwave), it still gets you familiar with the process. It does help if you know a little about video encoding ahead of time. I’ve done a lot with the VCD format in the past, and done my share of editing and exporting. If you aren’t familiar with codecs and bitrates, I suggest starting in some of VideoHelp’s FAQs.

To give you an idea of what I was able to accomplish (I’ll explain my settings momentarily), I can fit 7-8 ~45 minute episodes on one DVD. Caveat: At my settings, the quality is above acceptable, in my opinion. But, I don’t have an HD TV (not that VCD, SVCD, or DVD supports HD in the first place), I’m not hell bent on perfect clarity, and I can probably tolerate more than some people. I actually use formating that falls somewhere between VCD and SVCD, and as far as I am concerned, it’s a fine compromise, but there’s a chance you would disagree. So, preview your transcoded video before burning it, or burn a sample disc, just to make sure you can live with it before sinking several hours of CPU time into settings that aren’t acceptable to you.

First, that tutorial I mentioned says to use Goldwave to rip the audio stream. That is unnecessary, as the new version of TMPGenc Xpress can do this all as a matter of course in one step. It rips it straight to an .mp2 file as well (by selecting “ES (audio + video)” instead of “ES (video only)”), removing the intermediate step of converting the ripped .wav you get from Goldwave into an .mp2. You can still follow the steps as laid out if you want, it just takes longer. Generally, allowing TMPGenc Xpress to do it all takes about half an hour for a 42 minute episode. By comparison, it’s roughly the same the original way, but you have to babysit it a lot more.

For the video encoding, I select MPEG-2 (which is the SVCD standard), but use the VCD resolution of 352×240 (for NTSC people) at a bitrate of about 1500kbps. You can use a bitrate calculator to figure out the rate best for you, or TMPGenc Xpress will show you in the lower right corner how big the output will be. With a DVD5, shoot for no more that 4500MB. On the older VCD standard, the bitrate is 1150kbps. For SVCD, it can vary, with 1600-2000 about normal. I go a hair under depending on how many episodes I’m fitting.  Obviously if it is a shorter season, or you aren’t concerned about spanning several discs, you can stick to SVCD standard encoding. The result is video that looks just fine on a TV, right about what you would get from standard cable.

To create and burn the disc, you can use DVD-lab Pro (which is fairly easy) as suggested, or Adobe Encore, or whatever you are most familiar with. At that point, you can import the elementary streams you have encoded and create menus and whatnot as you desire. Then just build and burn. Before burning, you can also open up your built disc by dragging the folder to most DVD player programs (WinDVD works, or VLC Player can do it too) and test how it looks and runs. This can be handy if you don’t want to waste a disc if the output isn’t what you’d like. Be prepared to waste a disc or two if you really want to tweak your quality, as balance between resolution and bitrates can be a challenge.

Otherwise, this all worked out well for me. I can get a 16 episode season on two DVDs. This would change for half hour episodes obviously, which means I’ll probably be retweaking my settings again, heh. It runs about 4 hours of labor per disc, most of which is time spent transcoding from AVI to MPEG-2, which is a good task to let the computer do overnight while you sleep.

I’d be interested to know if any of you do something different, or have different settings, etc, that you find useful.

Placating the masses

// November 27th, 2007 // 2 Comments » // Life and Times

Okay, to satisfy the requests I’ve gotten, here is a little video of the inside of the new house. Nothing special, and really…the video sorta sucks, but all I had access to was my digital camera, which luckily had a video function. I need a larger memory card. Santa take note.

On a side note, my camera saves videos as .mov files…boo.

And now for something completely different…

// July 20th, 2006 // No Comments » // Theatre

So, I now take my first step forward in the world of t3h intarweb. I completed my first video blog last night and got it uploaded. I apologize for it being a little long and lacking of fancy bells and whistles. Once the musical is done, I’ll put some more effort into my After Effecting in them. I’ll try to do one every couple weeks. Let me know what you think! Enjoy!

By the way, the pop machine at work gave me another free drink yesterday. That’s 4.