Posted by Angela | 0 Comments
Goo.gl, Youtu.be, and Fb.me: URL shortening for ev...
If you’re on Twitter you know that you have to limit everything to 140 characters. Those 140 characters can be pretty difficult to achieve if you want to include a link to the funny article your Tweeting about. So Twitter supported a safe service to shorten URLs for its Tweeters, Bit.ly. Now Google, YouTube, and Facebook are jumping on the bandwagon and have all come out with their own URL shortening services.
Google just announced their new URL shortener on December 15th. The service, found at Goo.gl, is only available for Google products, like Google Toolbar and Feedburner. Google’s newly acquired YouTube.com is also creating its own URL shortening site for YouTube videos. With the beginning YouTu.be, these URLs are used only for YouTube videos and nothing else. Facebook is the most recent to join in on the URL shortening fun with Fb.me. This URL shortener is used mainly for pictures and commercial pages on Facebook.
Each of these sites is being very smart by not allowing their services to be used for anything outside their sites. TinyURL was the first big hit Website for shortening URLs but soon was banned by many Websites for distributing spyware. By creating their own URL shortening services, Google, YouTube and Facebook are avoiding that risk altogether. These shorter URLs also don’t disguise the URL, so you know when a URL is going to take you to a YouTube video or a Google Toolbar or a Facebook picture.
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Posted by Angela | 0 Comments
IE6 Gets the Boot
In 2006, five years after its launch, Internet Explorer 6 came in 8th in PC World’s Top 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time. Now, the same browser is known for its terrible susceptibility to hackers and viruses that has become evident over the past nine years.
Even though IE7 and IE8 have both been launched, IE6 still has a pretty large following. A well known site that uncovers interesting stories on the internet, called Digg, claims that about 10% of traffic to their site is from Internet Explorer 6. That is a remarkable percentage when considering that Digg had over 38 million visitors to their site in June alone. Even though Digg reports so much traffic from IE6, they also report that only 1% of comments are left by IE6 users. Therefore Digg is considering removing some of their key features for IE6 users, like commenting and digging.
Digg isn’t the only site considering to move away from the parasite if IE6. YouTube is now taking steps to decrease visitors from IE6. If you currently have IE6 as your browser and you visit the YouTube site, you will see a blue bar at the top of the home page saying that you should upgrade to a newer browser. It also informs you that YouTube will be phasing out their support of your browser soon so you need to download Google Chrome, IE8, or Firefox 3.5. Google is using this “phasing out” announcement to really promote Google Chrome. On every page you visit on the YouTube site (almost every page) there is a link to download Google Chrome in some advertisement.
With the latest data from StatCounter, Internet Explorer lost 11.4% of the market share to Chrome, Firefox, and Safari since March. If Microsoft had a face, it would be starting to sweat in this heat.
Read MorePosted by Jeremy Scott | 0 Comments
YouTube And Twitter Are Incredibly Popular, &...
Twitter is pretty popular. So is YouTube.
Also, the sky is blue, LeBron James is talented, and men like sports.
But beyond the stating of the obvious, those two articles linked to above have some staggering statistics. Even if you already knew Twitter and YouTube were huge, you probably still didn’t realize exactly how huge.
YouTube users are now uploading more than 24 hours of video every single minute. That means that in the time it took you to read this far through my article, another day’s worth of video has been posted. Holy cow. No wonder Google is losing over a million dollars a day on YouTube.
Twitter, on the other hand, may be breaking popularity records before our very eyes. In February, they had 9 million unique visitors. In March, it jumped to 19 million. Well, the April numbers are in, and Twitter has surged to 32 million unique visitors per month. That’s way more than an upward trend. Twitter has more visitors monthly now than the New York Times, Digg.com, or the popular business networking site LinkedIn (Twitter actually doubles LinkedIn’s 16 million monthly visitors).
Want to really have your mind blown? Consider this: Twitter’s numbers above don’t even factor people who use the service via their mobile device. And the convenience of “tweeting” from your phone is part of the site’s popularity. Who knows what their true popularity is when you factor that in… but I’d wager it’s a lot higher than you or I thought it was yesterday.
Read MorePosted by Jeremy Scott | 4 Comments
Teenagers Use YouTube To Cheat In School
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Newsflash: some schoolchildren cheat on their tests.
I know, I know… we thought we’d beaten cheating by banning cell phones during class, right? Well, just because you take the tech away during the test doesn’t mean they aren’t using tech to help beat that exam.
Apparently it’s quite the craze for teens to share cheating techniques through YouTube videos. See this example… or this one.
Both of those examples look like more effort than simply studying, but what do I know?
There are countless others on the video-sharing site. While it may be tempting to panic and decry the decay of civilization over the fact that “Youtube is helping children cheat,” think about it this way: teachers now have a handy database of video demonstrations on all the latest cheating methods they should watch out for. If I’m a middle school or high school teacher… this news is the best thing I’ve heard in years. I now have an insider’s perspective.
It’s just another example of these rapidly-emerging technologies impacting our day-to-day lives in unexpected ways. Students have been crafting clever ways to cheat for hundreds of years, and they will be doing so for another hundred. Thanks to the open and neutral nature of the web, though, this new wrinkle means teachers are learning right along with prospective cheaters.
Read MorePosted by Jeremy Scott | 1 Comment
Killer New Audio Indexing Technology From Google
Google, the current king of the Internet and all-around innovator, has announced a new technology called Audio Indexing–actually it’s called GAudi, which sounds more like a car than a web service.
Either way, it’s one of the slickest things I’ve heard of in months.
GAudi will catalog every word uttered in a YouTube video and add it to a searchable archive. Translation: you will soon be able to search videos by keywords used within the video.
For now, the product is still in Beta (limited testing mode), and will only be indexing YouTube videos related to the current political races. So you can search for a soundbite you read about in a news article–maybe something Obama or McCain said–and then use GAudi to search for video of the speech on YouTube.
That’s pretty mind-blowing to me. Sure, there have been speech-transcription services for years that allow you to dictate text to your computer… but they are far from perfect, and had never been applied to video like this. As video’s importance on the web increases, technology like GAudi makes finding the right video a heck of a lot easier–and if you’ve ever tried to search for a particular video on YouTube without knowing its title… you know how frustratingly hard it can be.
Imagine a future where your company creates and uploads videos to YouTube–maybe instructional, maybe humorous, maybe just advertisements–and you’ve used some good keyword selection in writing the spoken script for that video. People who just surf around YouTube for videos related to their favorite topic will then have a much easier time finding your content than they currently do.
So now everyone in the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) industry will be adding video content writing to their roster of services, as companies begin to learn how the spoken audio of their movies can help them reach new customers.
Very exciting stuff. Stay tuned for more developments. And you can check out GAudi and search for things the candidates have said here.
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