YVAXNWDK77A
I’m thankful for my family, career, health (even though my cold still lingers) and friends and colleagues.
Have a Happy Thanksgiving.
How to carve a turkey.
Cartoon: Story about the pumkin.
Warning: This next video has some fake blood at the end.
YouTube announced automated video captioning for videos. Converting audio to text in videos will make videos more accessible to deaf people or anyone searching for videos online, but it can also lead to several advantages for search engine optimization, too.
YouTube already allows manual captioning, but most video uploaders don’t take advantage of that feature. To do so, the videos need to be transcribed by a human and that’s simply too high of a cost to do. Google, YouTube’s parent company, has decided to use the automated transcription technology from Google Voice to produce automatic captions. This eliminates the timely and costly process of a human doing the transcription.
The system isn’t perfect and struggles with accents, multiple voices, and quick speakers.
This video demos to learn about machine-generated captions in YouTube and automatic timing for manually created caption tracks. It’s a work in process.
Even Google videos are incorrectly automatically captioned, see the image below, the caption barely makes any sense.
The machine-generated transcription service will English-only captions initially on 13 partner channels, including Google channels and videos, PBS content, educational content, others. Could this one day lead to organic video SEO? If search engines could search the audio in video that could dramatically increase the viewership of videos that today rely on tags, viral marketing and direct marketing to get viewed watched. There are Video SEO solutions today that will manually transcribe and optimize video so it is findable and ranks higher on search engine results. The Career Corner Digital does this for recruitment videos. Using its process companies like Schlumberger and GEICO have increased viewership from search engines results by 9-to-25 times the standard video uploading processes. “Having a transcript in the video is the holy grail for video and SEO,” says Peter Young, President of Career Corner, a video recruitment, Video SEO and social media firm in based in NYC. “Having text from a video helps the video rank in search engines and drive candidates to a company’s website like job listing and blogs do today.”
While YouTube hasn’t mentioned specifically, it would seem a natural for the text from the captioning to be added to Google’s search tools. Today a search for several captions resulted in ZERO results. Among the searches was the caption from the photo above. Based on my back of the envelope calculation analysis, less .00001% (less than 1 in a million) of the videos are captioned today and ZERO show up in search results. But this automatic captioning system is giant leap forward.
The machine-generated service will generate English-only captions initially on 13 partner channels. The service combines Google’s automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions.
“Auto-caps” use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video, according to Ken Harrenstien, the Google software engineer who created the technology.
Today, very little text from video is being captured on the Web because no one wants to transcribe thousands of videos. But for important initiatives, the additional investment in Video SEO can be well worth it. Peter Young stated that Schlumberger, who hires field engineers and had video content on its website to provide a glimpse into the job, culture and company for years, the content has been helpful to candidates once they got to our site. But, a search for “field engineer” on search engines and video sites produced NO Schlumberger field engineer video results. With Career Corner video social media and Video SEO the field engineer videos are a top search result and people are embedding the video on blogs, job boards, and sharing on social networking sites, especially amongst the field engineering community.
That optimization allows for candidates to find and share the videos on search engines and on sites including Veoh.com, www.VirtualJobShadow.com, Youtube.com, MetaCafe.com and others. The Video SEO and distribution has resulted in over 90,000 video views (11 times more than on the Schlumberger site).
Here’s some links to the Schlumberger videos.
• http://www.blinkx.com/videos/field+engineer (video search engine, results from many different sites)
• http://tinyurl.com/kvfx96 (YouTube search)
• http://tinyurl.com/ns9ldj (Metacafe search)
• http://tinyurl.com/m9h95d (Google search)
• http://tinyurl.com/l3xcfo (Bing Search)
• http://tinyurl.com/mmmwzn (Yahoo search)
The problem of only self-tagging to find video could one day be eliminated with YouTube’s new automatic captioning service. In time other companies that host and serve video will surely launch similar solutions to make the Holy Grail for video a reality.
YVAXN6WDK77AI heard it from several attendees at #SocialRecruiting summit – “I’m hoping to build a case to bring back to my company.” That is the mantra of an employee playing it safe. One of the speakers, Fred Wilson, a venture capital investor in twitter, indeed.com, meetup.com and others, suggested going rogue. He did state that you need to be mindful of laws and other legal compliance issues.
Some people are early adopters and others are not. Why are some people and companies early adopters and other not? I think risk tolerance is a big reason. People that are riskier (innovators) are willing to try new things, these people know that sometimes the new things they try will completely fail, but sometimes the new things will be BIG homeruns. Those that play it safe all the time will have less failures, but will also miss out on the early and most rewarding gains and advantages.
Going rogue is about trying something new and different and doing it outside the traditional risk level of the organization. But, with a policy like one-third of time and budget goes to trying something new and innovative and two-thirds of the time and budget to proven strategies and tactics, companies and individuals can avoid the sticky messes that develop with going rogue. I believe some research and homework helps, just avoid research and analysis paralysis.
Social media – social networks, blogs, wikis, video sharing sites, etc… are often considered rogue activities. John Sumser talked about the “technology adoption curve,” I view this concept as the “rogue curve,” the earlier in the curve you are the “roguer” you are….
Social media is largely an open and public discussion. Social media opens organization to new levels of direct dialogue with customers and jobseekers. In the past, companies could hide behind mail, email and the telephone, with little risk if you ignored correspondeances. Now, with social media, avoiding blog posts, “wall” posts, tweets, comments, video posts and other forms of contact on publicly available forms can have negative consequences. Sodexo, Microsoft and RSM McGladrey representatives were on a panel that discussed their social media strategies and their perspectives on candidate engagement. Here’s each one’s response.
Here’s the video:
Sodexo Candidate Engagement – Kerry Noone
RSM McGladrey Candidate Engagement – Ben Gotkin
Microsoft Candidate Engagement – Heather Tinguely
St. John’s University Men’s Soccer team won the BIG EAST Tournament for a RECORD 8th time! Now on to the NCAA tournament. @stjohnsalumni
Lady Gaga – new video and song – Bad Romance http://bit.ly/1Z3I44 , chill party tune
Twitter is bursting at the seams in terms of unique visitors, subscriber growth, buzz, VC financing and valuation. TechCrunch published reports that Twitter had projections of 1 Billion users by 2013. The thing that many question, is the revenue model, which Twitter apparently doesn’t have or is not revealing.
Many Twitter outsiders have speculated about the revenue model. Only C-level Twitter insiders or an active VC investors know the most likely revenue model. Fred Wilson, who’s Union Square Ventures VC invested early in Twitter, will be speaking at the #Social Recruiting Summit in NYC and he published a some of his talking points in a blog. In the comments posted in that blog, Fred writes “twitter can copy indeed’s model there can be free/organic and there can be ways to amplify by paying.” He was referring to indeed.com’s sponsored links and jobs (similar to the traditional SEM model). Fred does say “can” and there is a big difference between “can” and “will.” Time will tell……
I’ll be at #Social Recruiting Summit and the Pre-Social Recruiting Summit Tweetup, if any news develops I’ll post a comment here. I believe there are still a couple spots available if you wish to attend either event….
Sesame Street was really good today. Big bird migrating and the rapping real estate guy was has the baby glued to TV. Happy 40th Bday!
What does your phone number spell? find out checkout http://phonespell.org/ , nothing for mine 612-6006 
Recruiting Has to Go Video, right. Video, combined with the Internet, is a game-changer for recruiting, right, as Kevin Wheeler has stated recently. But I still hear it all the time – “How much for a video?,” “It too expensive?” In ADOTAS I came across an article that is retweeted below. This article answers the cost question very well, but the answer is it depends. Read the article to see why.
When thinking strategically about your talent acquisition, a more important question is – “what will my ROI be.” I know HR “isn’t” traditionally know to be good with numbers/math. If you want a “seat” at the table you’ll need to think how to add value to the organization. Everything can be measured, by adding value and focusing on ROI, you will save and make your firm more money than just focusing on price.
I know you still want to see a price, $0 – $30,000 for a ‘typical’ recruitment video. Well, zero is not really zero because you need to allocate the cost of your time (and other people’s) as well as the cost of lost opportunity of having a poor product. $30K is not the limit either, but paying a high price doesn’t always mean your get the best product either. But if you come back to value and RIO, then you’ll know whether $5k or $20K a better price.
I started my career in investment banking on Wall Street, I worked about 80hrs per week, two years of financial modeling and analysis taught me a lot about ROI. But even more important, I learned from the SVP of HR, the importance of having the “right” people to make the “right” decisions to get the desired ROI. She had a seat at the table (and yes they were pioneers in using video too).
Video on the Web: Where to Start
Written on September 3rd 2009 Author by Ernie Mosteller | ADOTAS – “How much for a web video?”
I don’t know about you, but I get that question all the time. Video on the web has officially come of age for advertisers (a long-anticipated event, at least for this former spot director), and everybody wants in on it. Everybody.
Of course, a lot of the groundwork that was laid to get to this point, at least in the minds of most advertisers, has led to the mistaken belief among too many that you can do just about anything in video, slap it up on the web somewhere, and you’ll have the next viral hit. Or at least, people who are, ever so remotely, interested in the broad category your product fits into will flock to watch what you put up, no matter what you put up. Oh, and by the way, how much?
I sometimes have a hard time believing it, but too many advertisers are still in a mind-space that treats the web as a thing, a plug-in, a commoditized unit, that can simply be applied to a marcom mix in nice, even increments. Sorry folks, it just doesn’t work that way.
Cheap, done-on-a-webcam, silly little videos can, yes, become global viral hits. But the chances of your regional sales manager, talking across his desk about “added consumer value” to a guy with a camcorder, becoming the next Numa Numa are – remote, at best. To be fair, maybe you’re not after the next viral hit. But I’m assuming you do want someone to watch what you upload. I’m not one of those ad guys who says you have to spend what we used to spend on TV commercials to make a web video that’s watchable. You do, if you come up with an idea that requires the same production specs. But the key to what you need to spend has everything to do with the ideas you generate. And that has everything to do with what you hope to accomplish with your video on the web. Which, together, make the calculations for the price of a web video exactly like the calculations for any other type of advertising creative: It all depends on what you want it to do, and the idea you create to do it.
Important here to note that actually having an idea in the first place is the real cost of entry. Making effective web video boils down to ideas that connect with the people you want to connect with. If the idea is there, the video will do its job. The idea, of course, is going to tell you how much you’ll need to spend. If your idea involves explosions and car crashes, please don’t try to do it on your intern’s camcorder. But if said intern’s camcorder represents all the money you have to spend – don’t automatically give up, either. Spend more time thinking, or get someone to think smarter, and there’s every chance you can create something that connects, on a much lower budget. But you’ll have to leave the explosions out of it. There are good, cheap web videos. There are bad ones, too. Just like there are good expensive web videos, and bad ones to go along with those. It’s not the price that makes it work, or fail. It’s the idea. Start there.
The Great Recession is in the ninth inning and the home team is up by one run. As long as the other team doesn’t ties it up, the recession is over. As you can see, I am cautiously optimistic. We have come a long way from the market panic in the fall on ’08 and March ‘09 lows. The “green shoots” we started to see in Q2 and Q3 have led to stock market rebound of almost 55%. The stock market usually moves six months ahead of the real market.
The Conference Board said recently that its index of leading indicators rose 0.6% in July – its fourth consecutive gain – suggesting the economy has bottomed and the recession will end this summer, if it hasn’t already. On Tuesday, The Conference Board reported its gauge of consumer confidence jumped to 54.1 in August from an upwardly revised 47.4 in July. Economists had expected a milder uptick to 47.5. Consumer confidence number over 50% is bullish. When you start to hear economists proclaim the recession is over, they’re celebrating the technical meaning, they mean economic output has stopped contracting.
Economic activity “will increase slightly over the remainder of 2009,” Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress. As a result the Fed will stop some of it bond buying activity, signaling that the Fed is less concerned about liquidity in the market.
Some the concerns in the ninth inning of the recessions are that unemployment rate remains north of 9% and foreclosures are near all-time highs. Since December 2007 The U.S. has lost 6.5 million jobs and spurred the sharpest rise in the unemployment rate since the 1930s. As manufacturing jobs move overseas and companies struggle to further reduce costs, unemployment, which stands at 9.5 percent, is likely to rise above 10 percent, but jobs are trailing indicator. Recent job losses have dropped 60-70% from their peak. The temp job market recovers first, so keep an eye on that. Employers want to feel confident about the business environment, so mass fulltime employ happens only when the economy is well out of a recession.
WANTED Technologies forecasts that Nonfarm Employment Payroll will drop by 190,000 in August. Last month the BLS reported a decline of 247,000 nonfarm workers, substantially down from the 700,00+ declines earlier in the year.
The stock market is a lead indicator and the marker has recovered more than half of its losses. The S&P 500 stock index bottoms, on average, four months before the recession ends and never by more than eight months. This year the S&P 500 bottomed on early March.
My brother-in-law toke that drive from MA to NJ for the weekend and he talked of all the infrastructure work going on, which cause his trip to take twice as long. That infrastructure work and much of the positive economic data is simply the result of government action (the stimulus plan) and stabilization of banks and credit markets. Seems like Keynesian economics, a theory stating that active government intervention in the marketplace and monetary policy is the best method of ensuring economic growth and stability (especially in recessions), is working, or at least prevented a depression. Goldman Sachs predicts Global GDP for 2009 to be 4%. All other recession have ended so will this one.
The jobs numbers are important to a full recovery and a booming economy. I think in Feb 2010 we’ll have positive jobs numbers. Indeed.com had about 2.8M jobs listed on the site when I did a search for ‘a’, top occupation Physical Therapist, top employer Pizza Hut/YUM Brands, top location NY, and there are almost half million jobs list with salaries over $100K.
By Feb 2010 the stimulus plan will be in full swing, employers will have new budgets and consumers should be even more optimistic. To keep the economy rolling after that we will need to stop relying on government stimulus funding and interest rates need to rise above 0%. In addition, inflations (not currently an issue) will need to be managed and the national debt reduced.
We are a long way from the go-go days of a 5% unemployment rate, 7 or 8% is much more likely than 12 or 13%. After a category 5 hurricane, thunder storms don’t seem so bad. Let hope our star “closer” can pitch his way to a win in the bottom of the ninth.
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