Manufacturers should not  lose site that videos are a powerful informational tool when it comes to building credibility with contractors. Consider if you will that next to Google Search, the next highest search is YouTube. That alone should tell you something.

From case studies, testimonials and training, to new product info, videos are a unique way of telling your story and add another dimension to the story by engaging the viewer. According to eMarketer.com, rich media ads with video had a higher dwell rate than those without, and almost double the dwell time.

This translates into fewer impressions needed for the same results.

where are some freaking funny videos.  i was looking on youtube yesterday for some fresh comedic stuff and just couldn’t find any that i really liked.  maybe their search system sucks, I don’t know, but i looked up comedy and humor and all i could really find were stand up montages.  and they weren’t by the comedians themselves. it was disheartening.  if anyone knows any good self-produced comedic content.. in the form of a show preferably, I would be happy to look at it.

Max Linder in The Three Must-Get-Theres (1922), from www.europafilmtreasures.eu

Welcome news arrives from silent film musician and composer Maud Nelissen. Europa Film Treasures, the free online library of European films put together by Lobster Films, has published the uproarious Max Linder film The Three Must-Get-Theres (1922), with a fine new score by Maud and her band The Sprockets. The film is a cheerful parody of Douglas Fairbanks’ The Three Musketeers (1921), sending up the Fairbanks persona while having with more than a little of the spirit of Alexandre Dumas itself, in between the anachronistic gags and slapstick knockabout. It looks good, and sounds terrific.

We’ve already reported on Europa Film Treasures, an extraordinary collection of fiction and non-fiction titles from across Europe (plus some from the USA), dating from 1898 to 1999, and from archives such as Deutsche Kinemathek, GosFilmoFond, Filmarchiv Austria, the Imperial War Museum Film and Video Archive, and Lobster Films itself. To quote from the earlier report, the films include

early actualities by Danish cinematographer Peter Elfelt, pornography from Austria, Biblical lands film from 1906, dance films, a Russian fish processing factory documentary, comedies (including Max Linder), trick films, science fiction (Walter Booth’s The Airship Destroyer from 1909, listed here under a German title, Der Luftkrieg der Zukunft), Spanish newsfilm, Russian Yiddish drama, one of John Ford’s first Westerns Bucking Broadway (1917) – the only non-European title on view, the extraordinary Der Magische Gürtel (1917) – tracking the trail of destruction wreaked by a German U-Boat, French public health films, abstract animation from Viking Eggling, Soviet puppet animation, and more, much more.

That was a year and a half ago, when there were fifty or so titles, with the promise of 500 eventually. More titles have been added since then – around forty – among which are Twee Zeeuwse Meisjses in Zandvoort (1913), a plotless comedy about two young Dutchwomen visiting the seaside, starring Annie Bos; Rijks-veeartsenijkundige hoogeschool (1918), a visit to the Royal Veterinary School of Utrecht in the Netherlands; Hesanut Builds a Skyscraper (1914), an American animation film about the building of a skyscraper; and Chamber of Forgetfulness (1912), an American drama of jealousy and photography directed by Étienne Arnaud for Eclair, starring Alec B. Francis and Barbara Tennant.

You can keep up with the additions by following the Europa Film Treasures blog, which records each new film as it goes up. Fresh material is promised, including titles by Georges Méliès. Additional features are being added to the site, including documentary resources, including an introduction the history of colour in cinema and an essay on film conservation. A debate section covers issues such as the digital projection of heritage films. The site continues to have its oddities, not least a quaint use of the English language (the site in in English, French, Italian, Spanish and German) that reads in place like they used translation software. You can either view this as having an amusing charm, or you can be disappointed that an excellent site funded out of the European MEDIA programme could not be just that little bit better in its presentation (another quibble is films given under the language title of the print rather than their original title).

Anyway, as always, go explore.

Business Source Complete has recently added videos from the HBS executive education programs.

To see the HBS videos (if you’re connected to the JWU network on campus), click on the following link (and then click on the button for “Videos”):

HBS Videos in Business Source Complete (All Campuses)
on campus 

You can sort the videos by date or by title.

Another way to access the videos is to click on “Business Videos” when you are looking at Business Source Complete main search page:

Business Source Complete (All Campuses)
on campus  |  off campus

…then type “harvard” to see all the videos, or enter a keyword to search for videos on a particular topic.

Happy viewing!

Sometimes you come across a piece of news for deaf children and young people so good that it takes a while for it to sink in. That was the case for me when I found out that Google has developed speech recognition software that has the potential to ensure more online videos on most of its websites will now be subtitled. Including Youtube videos.

Personally, if you’d asked me a week ago about universal online subtitles, I would have said it’s a great idea, but probably technologically impossible. Well, thanks to deaf leadership at Google, I’ve pretty much been shown to be a complete Luddite.

The importance for deaf children and young people? Well, to give one example, listen into a playground conversation and I bet many children will be talking about the latest youtube craze or embarassment. Now deaf children and young people can be involved in those playground chats.

Hopefully, everyone who uploads videos will make use of the new software. And that all other providers of online subtitles will take note and follow suit quickly. I am particularly thinking of BBC news online and their continuing abject failure to caption stories featuring deaf children, despite assurances to the contrary…

As it uses speech recognition software, there are bound to be some painful (and amusing) typos. But it still a massive step forward. If there was an award for most promising and exciting technological development for deaf people in 2009, this would have to be one of the contenders. Maybe the 21st century is about to arrive for deaf children and young people after all?

Whether it is the i-pod dance parties or flash mobs in subways – a procrastinator must have come up with this way of mobilizing large groups of people to waste the time of even larger groups of people… and have fun doing it!

Flash Mob in Subway

Flash Mob… works for the i-wish-i-thought-of-that procrastinator for:

x Passing time while talking on the phone

x Watching trash tv

x On the train, bus, car… public transport

x Good detox … after work, while writing a paper…

x Good to lull to bed

x Stop and Restart

Think of it as closed captioning for the new media world.

Google Inc. said it is introducing automatic, machine-generated captions for videos on its YouTube site. The new service, being launched this week, is intended to make online videos accessible to the deaf and hearing-impaired.

Hundreds of thousands of videos on Google sites already contain caption tracks that users have created and added manually with Google’s existing captioning service. But with 20 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, most videos on the site still lack captions.

So Google is tapping into the speech-recognition technology that it uses for its Google Voice call management service to make captions an automatic feature on YouTube.

Because the speech-recognition technology is still a work in progress, Google is launching the automatic captioning service on the YouTube channels of just a handful of partners, including PBS, National Geographic and a few big universities. But the company promises that the technology will improve over time – and it hopes for a much broader rollout.

In the meantime, Google is adding a new “auto-timing” feature to its existing manual captioning service to make it easier to use. Video creators will now simply have to create a text file with all the words spoken in a video and Google’s speech recognition technology will take it from there – matching the text to the words as they are spoken. Google hopes this will encourage more users to add captions to their videos.

It is with a heavy heart that I present to you more evidence of how amateur pole dancing has again ruined an event for everyone… *sigh*… where are this girl’s friends?

P.S. You have to watch the entire video.

Amateur pole dancing gone wrong… again

Amateur pole dancing works for the where-are-her-friends procrastinator for:

x Passing time while talking on the phone

x Watching trash tv

x On the train, bus, car… public transport

x Good detox … after work, while writing a paper…

x Good to lull to bed

x Stop and Restart