Leigh Blackall: Video file formats, what and when to use
Video file formats are a real nightmare! And after 10 years of amateur video production, I still don't have a clear understanding on how they work. So what I am about to tell you is what works for me, considering I try to produce video that works for many.
TweetMyPaper is a word processor that functions linearly and off of the same basic principles of text messaging and Twitter i.e. the restriction of only 140 characters per message.
Welcome to the Tar Heel Reader, a collection of free, easy-to-read, and accessible books on a wide range of topics. Each book can be speech enabled and accessed using multiple interfaces (i.e. switches, alternative keyboards, touch screens, and dedicated AAC devices). The books may be downloaded as slide shows in PowerPoint, Impress, or Flash format.
Originally developed as a computer cookbook, tech-recipes was brought online in October of 2003. Millions of visitors have received help from the over two thousand step-by-step tutorials found on the site. Most of these were authored by the large community of users that have registered through the site. The most helpful of users are often rewarded with t-shirts, hats, gift certificates, and even personal blogs. The blogs provide the tech-recipes editors and legendary recipe authors a place to express their thoughts and ramblings.
A phrase net diagrams the relationships between different words used in a text. It uses a simple form of pattern matching to provide multiple views of the concepts contained a book, speech, or poem. The image below is a word graph made from Jane Austen's novel "Pride and Prejudice." The program has drawn a network of words, where two words are connected if they appear together in a phrase of the form "X and Y":
Lifehacker - Zamzar Now Converts Text to Speech - Text-to-Speech
You need a quick text to speech conversion but you're lacking the software to do so. No worries, Zamzar—the handy online file conversion tool—has added text to speech conversion. We've covered Zamzar before for its handy file conversions, including the recent addition of a power point to image conversion. The newest trick in the Zamzar conversion bag is the ability to turn TXT, PDF, Word, Works, WordPerfect and OpenOffice document files into speech.
2009 is the year of social media. Once, TwitterTwitter reviewsTwitter reviews was a place where you could read about someone else’s cat. Now, it’s the first place you go to when there’s breaking news. Sites like DiggDigg reviewsDigg reviews, Redditreddit.com reviewsreddit.com reviews, and FacebookFacebook reviewsFacebook reviews can now leave a huge impact on the real world; lives are changed, important questions are asked (and answered) there. Many milestones have been reached; the growth of nearly every aspect of social media has and continues to be enormous. We’ve dug up some amazing statistics and numbers from this realm.
Ruben & Lullaby are lovers having their first fight, and whether they break up or make up depends on you! A new kind of entertainment called an “opertoon,” Ruben & Lullaby is part comic, part game, part musical instrument, and controlled with motions and gestures which enable you to shape the feelings of the characters. You can shake your iPhone or iPod touch to make Ruben angry, stroke the screen to make Lullaby sad, and more. The characters respond to your actions—and to each other—according to how they're feeling in the moment. Like a game of solitaire for the emotions—casual, engaging, relaxing and replayable—Ruben & Lullaby has no dialogue, just the expressive faces of the lovers and a moody jazz soundtrack that responds to your actions. Try to keep them together, try to break them up, or just enjoy the music you can make out of their circumstances.
Media Cloud is a system that lets you see the flow of the media. The Internet is fundamentally altering the way that news is produced and distributed, but there are few comprehensive approaches to understanding the nature of these changes. Media Cloud automatically builds an archive of news stories and blog posts from the web, applies language processing, and gives you ways to analyze and visualize the data.
Many Eyes Wikified is an experiment in using a simple wiki language to collaboratively edit information dashboards. You can add data to Wikified, either embedded directly in a page or linked from an external website. You can then easily create a number of rich visualizations of Wikified content, embedding them side-by-side on separate pages or even right next to the data.
The Anatomy of a Tweet: Twitter Gets a Style Guide - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com
The bulk of the book, titled “140 Characters, A Style Guide for the Short Form,” will revolve around eight key lessons from the Twitter universe, such as the importance of simplicity, honesty and humor. The project will also highlight notable figures worth following on Twitter, anecdotes from the community and even examples of the few occasions Twitterers have gone overboard: For example, Mr. Sagolla points to “bathroom tweets,” or messages about bodily functions, as falling into the category of things not to post to Twitter.
Wikipedia:School and university projects - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Everyone is welcome here. If you're a professor, teacher, or student within the college community, we encourage you to use Wikipedia and/or Wikiversity in your class to demonstrate how an open content website works (or doesn't). Many of these projects have resulted in both advancing the student's knowledge and useful content being added to Wikipedia. An advantage of this over regular homework is that the student is dealing with a real world situation, which is not only more educational but also makes it more interesting ("the world gets to see my work"), probably resulting in increased dedication. Besides, it will give the students a chance to collaborate on course notes and papers, and their effort might remain online for reference, instead of being discarded and forgotten as is usual with paper coursework, or classroom systems which are routinely reinitialized.
ImageStamper is a free tool for keeping dated, independently verified copies of license conditions associated with creative commons images. You can use it to safeguard your use of free images from license changes, or to prove you are the original image creator. Simply paste the URL of the page that contains the image you intend to use. ImageStamper will produce a timestamp of the image's license and will store this timestamp permanently in your account. The timestamp proves you obtained the image under that license and you can show it to others using a unique permalink. Sign up and start using ImageStamper now - it only takes a few moments!
is a search engine for high-quality Flickr images. It aims to answer your queries based on what is inside the images -- at the pixel level. It offers a completely new way to search for images, using techniques of computer vision. It is different to standard image search engines, such as Flickr or Google, because those search through images using only image tags and filenames. Behold looks for high quality images, so you don't have to sift through hundreds of poorly taken pictures to find a good one. Behold uses both aesthetic and technical quality indicators to find some of the best images available online. Behold draws computational power from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to handle large volumes of images.
An interesting side-effect of YouTube's recent push for higher quality videos is that most videos can be downloaded as MP4 files directly from YouTube. Until now, you could only get FLV files from your browser's cache or using one of the many websites that let you download YouTube videos. In fact, to download the MP4 files, you need to use the same URL like for FLV files and append "&fmt=18":
Over on Museum 2.0, Nina Simon (not Nina Simone - and wouldn’t it be something if this post was sung by her) has a great blog post encouraging museums to get human on their Twitter accounts and provide more than just “spammy and dull” tweets. Pretty much everything she exhorts museums to do applies to libraries, as well. Actually, it’s great advice for all types of organizations, including, um, associations and the like.
Howcast - Cool how-to videos and guides from cutting-edge filmmakers, savvy experts - and you!
Howcast shows consumers engaging, useful how-to videos and guides wherever, whenever they need to learn how. Howcast brings together the personality of user-generated content with the quality of a professional video studio to create engaging, informative, and free how-to videos for consumers. It also offers emerging filmmakers an opportunity to gain experience, exposure, and income.
Whether you are a large corporate organization or a small business, the udutu online course authoring tool – myudutu™ – can save you time and money. Myudutu™ is a FREE web-based tool which allows users to create highly interactive elearning courses quickly and easily. This unique and award winning online authoring tool allows you to design and implement online training and courses without any knowledge of technology. Myudutu™ offers you all the features of an enterprise solution without the risks, hassles and headaches that come with it.
PBS Teachers in Second Life - A collaborative space for educators working on the Holiday Hunt!
Need a stress breaker or are you stuck in the house due to all the white stuff everywhere? Log in to Second Life and play the Happy Holiday Hunt with PBS Teachers!
Immersive media — games, guides, stories — woven into the landscape. Tap into it. A place is a place. A mediascape is an experience. Grab your GPS and get out of the car. Look at it. It still knows where you are, right? Walk to the end of the parking lot. When you get there — instead of Turn left or Turn right — you'll discover a whole new dimension to reality. Mediascapes are rich in interactivity — full of sound and music, images and text, videos and animation, narrative and dialog, all embedded in the space where you’re standing.
MemeTracker builds maps of the daily news cycle by analyzing around 900,000 news stories and blog posts per day from 1 million online sources, ranging from mass media to personal blogs. We track the quotes and phrases that appear most frequently over time across this entire online news spectrum. This makes it possible to see how different stories compete for news and blog coverage each day, and how certain stories persist while others fade quickly. Overall we track more than 17 million different phrases and about 54% of the total phrase/quote mentions appear on blos and 46% in news media. Too see how quotes change and mutate check out the figures in the gallery section.
Vuclip - Free Mobile Video Search, Download and Convert for any cell phone, watch videos on mobile phones
Vuclip is the most widely-used mobile video search site in the world. We are the only true mobile video search and delivery solution that allows you to access any video on the Internet and watch it on any video-enabled phone. Go ahead and search for an Internet video that you'd like to watch on your mobile phone. Vuclip will find that video, transcode and optimize it "on the fly", and then deliver it to your mobile phone in real-time. Pretty cool, and there's no need to download any application to get it to work. Our service is free, although standard carrier data charges apply. Vuclip users can also take advantage of numerous personalized services, like creating "Cliplists", receiving alerts about new videos and sharing their favorite videos with friends. With Vuclip's unique and proprietary real-time streaming and personalization technology, you are sure to have a rich and hassle-free mobile video experience
One Minute Languages: learn a language in minutes with the Radio Lingua Network
Welcome to One Minute Languages where you can learn the basics of a language in a matter of minutes. One Minute Languages will introduce you to a new language from scratch. Each language features ten lessons and each lesson is only a couple of minutes long, so there's no excuse! Join our teachers as they introduce new languages and cover greetings, talking about names, saying you understand or don't understand, counting and making friends.
Loopt shows users where friends are located and what they are doing via detailed, interactive maps on their mobile phones. Loopt helps friends connect on the fly and navigate their social lives by orienting them to people, places and events. Users can also share location updates, geo-tagged photos and comments with friends in their mobile address book or on online social networks, communities and blogs. Loopt was designed with user privacy at its core and offers a variety of effective and intuitive privacy controls.
