The first lecture was given by Aza Raskin, former Creative Lead for Firefox. It was titled "How to prototype and influence people" and the talk's important message was that
"The value of an idea is 0,While this sounds like a Captain Obvious statement, it's easier said than done. The means you choose influence on how well you can communicate your idea.
unless it can be communicated."
When Aza showed the above slide, I thought back to when I was working with my mentors on the LikeLines idea for the MoJo challenge. Back then, I was thinking on how to communicate our idea. It started out as a short write up by Martha, which I liked, but I felt that submitting the idea in this form would not be good enough. I decided that a video presentation would be the best way of communicating our idea.
However, I had no idea how. "The problem is that we don't understand the problem", Aza quoted Paul MacGready during the lecture. It took a few iterations, a few sketches and several discussions with Johan and Martha until I started to get a picture of how to present the idea. The discussions were quite fruitful —in the Learning Lab's second lecture, Burt Herman mentioned it is important to build a team to find people that complement you and I fully agree— and it took a few iterations for the deck of slides to mature and the script to become polished.
Still, there are things to work on. Aza ended the lecture you should sell a dream when communicating your idea. I find that I did not do this well enough in the video I submitted. If I were to redo the video again, I would make it more user-oriented, perhaps starting like this:
You notice that "Macy’s Day parade" is a trending topic on Twitter. You do a quick search and find the following videos:"Oh my, where do I start watching?", you might think. What are the interesting tidbits in this huge collection of almost 3000 videos? Well, don’t worry. With intelligent video players powered by LikeLines, finding the interesting bits is no problem at all[...]
Wrapping up, I found Aza's lecture inspiring and full of good points. I wish I also had time and space to discuss the optional third lecture this week by Amanda Cox (New York Times, graphics editor). I initially missed it, but I managed to watch the recording today. It was a very nice and recommendable lecture.
P.S.: While watching the missed lecture using the BBB player, I was really craving for a LikeLines-powered player. Time-based seek bars suck!
I think something like LikeLines could be cool if you can use it on video you have no control over, using e.g. a browser plugin. But I don't know if I'd be very happy if a news org would use LikeLines: I want *them* to do a proper job editing and (if necessary) chaptering their content. Also, if they do put in the effort to actually produce some great video, it would seem to me that they'd be wary of encouraging users to skim and skip entire parts.
ReplyDeleteSo the main question would seem to be who you're expecting to be the implementors/downloaders/installers and how you're going to convince those people of the merits of LikeLines, rather than what the app will do for end-users.
2 cents,
Stijn
Hi Stijn, thanks for your comment.
ReplyDelete> LikeLines could be cool if you can use it on video you have no control over, using e.g. a browser plugin.
Yes, it would be cool, but I'd rather see the idea being picked up by all major video sites than having people to install a browser plugin (although it might be a viable first step to promote the idea).
For a first prototype, I'm currently considering re-skinning the YouTube video player.
(gotta brush up my JS... I'm not really into webdev :p)
> But I don't know if I'd be very happy if a news org would use LikeLines: I want *them* to do a proper job editing and (if necessary) chaptering their content.
You're right. LikeLines does not directly add value in this kind of video content. A prime example would be the awesome video that Amanda Cox mentioned in her lecture. That video is meant to be watched from beginning to end in a linear fashion and does not make sense otherwise.
So yeah, the LikeLines idea in its current form only adds value to all those videos without proper editing. It's meant to add structure to all those other videos on the web.
> So the main question would seem to be who you're expecting to be the implementors/downloaders/installers and how you're going to convince those people of the merits of LikeLines, rather than what the app will do for end-users.
Right, and thank you for pointing this out. I'm currently still thinking about who to target here, but I do have a (raw) idea coming up how it might be useful for linear videos and therefore also news organizations. For the end-user, if the video is meant to be watched linearly, I assume most people will also watch it linearly. As a result, the LikeLines heatmap below the player would show that the only interesting starting point would be at the beginning.
For the video editors at news organizations, the LikeLines heatmap would be a form of feedback. They can see whether their viewers are watching the video from beginning to end or that they are skipping through. You could perhaps compare it to web heatmaps, which tell web designers if their visitors are actually clicking on the things they expected their visitors to click on.
Anyway, thanks again for your comment. It gives some food for thought. :)
LikeLines would be great for automatically putting together a "best of" video for each topic. People should be able to click during each snippet to view the full video from where that snippet was cut from.
ReplyDeleteUsing YouTube's support for the "t" URL parameter that starts a video at a particular timecode, plus a JavaScript timer, you could actually compile these "best of" videos without having to risk copyright problems by putting together actual videos, not to mention the extra coding this would entail.
So a whole LikeLines system for YouTube doesn't need to be a browser plugin or be adopted by YouTube themselves, but can be an external site that embeds videos, accepts timecode-based likes, and offers best-of "videos" by playing back a series of embedded videos that each start at a timecode and move on to the next video after the correct delay.
Hi Mark, thanks for your comment (although Blogger didn't seem to appreciate it and marked it as spam :X).
ReplyDelete> LikeLines would be great for automatically putting together a "best of" video for each topic.
This is somewhat similar to the use-case I presented in my originally submitted slidecast (it was dubbed "distributed directing"). It is something that can be built upon the core of LikeLines, but I haven't given it much thought yet.
> Using YouTube's support for the "t" URL parameter that starts a video at a particular timecode, plus a JavaScript timer, you could actually compile these "best of" videos without having to risk copyright problems by putting together actual videos, not to mention the extra coding this would entail.
Now, I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not sure if this technique would automatically avoid copyright problems. When laws are applied, I think they usually look at the ends and not the technical means. I do think that the risks are low using this approach. :)
About the t-anchor, I'm aware of that feature, but I also recently found out that YouTube exposes a JavaScript API which gives you more control. You could for example query the YouTube player for the current playback position.
> So a whole LikeLines system for YouTube doesn't need to be a browser plugin or be adopted by YouTube themselves, but can be an external site that embeds videos, accepts timecode-based likes, and offers best-of "videos" by playing back a series of embedded videos that each start at a timecode and move on to the next video after the correct delay.
Great to see your comment about an external site, it's something I also had in mind. :) The reasons I thought of building an external site were precisely of the two benefits you mention. By basically building a different front-end for YouTube, we can directly benefit from the huge amount of videos available and we don't have to rely on other parties to adopt our idea.
However, there is one problem. It will be hard to convince people and change their behaviour. Regular YouTube users are so used to going to youtube.com that they probably would not switch to a different front-end. For prototype purposes, this is just a minor thing, but in the end I hope that the LikeLines idea catches on and that all future media players provide rich navigational means such that people don't need a plugin or have to go to a special front-end website. Finally, the dream would really be complete if all content providers would make the timecode-based likes metadata generated by their intelligent media players available such that everyone can query the interesting bits of videos on the web. :)