Tag Archives: youtube

YouTube Live Streaming Graduation Ceremonies

Last Saturday saw the campus taken over for Edge Hill’s winter Graduation ceremonies and I was there to see the Real Jenny Barrett graduate.

Nursing Students waving their caps in a blur

Nursing Students waving their caps in a blur

We’ve been streaming graduation ceremonies live online since Summer 2008 – I blogged about the use of eStream at the time – and the system has worked very well and allowed us to both stream to people watching at home and keep an archive of past ceremonies.

As I said in the previous post we were particularly pleased with the quality of video compared to other platforms such as YouTube and hosting ourselves offered more flexibility for embedding in our site.

But that was then and this is now and as you would expect, cloud services have upped their game.  YouTube now supports full HD, videos are available on a range of platforms from mobiles and tablets to TVs as well as watching on the YouTube website or embedding into our site. Combine this with the additional visibility that publishing to YouTube gives us as students share videos with friends.

So for the last couple of years we’ve been using a hybrid of live streaming with eStream and a Flash Media Server hosted in-house and uploading the archived footage to YouTube. Patiently we’ve been waiting while Google first launched streaming for some major events, then last year introduced Hangouts On Air but with a “Google+” DOG burnt into the corner of the video.

Finally in August, Google lowered the subscriber threshold for enabling live streaming to below the level that Edge Hill’s account has and we gained access to the fancy “Live events” screens:

Create a new event - YouTube

 

Technically the process is very similar to what we had previously: a PC in the control room captures the mixed video output from a Tricaster, encodes it using Flash Media Live Encoder but instead of pushing to our own Flash streaming server, the feed is sent to YouTube who handle transcoding and sending out to viewers.

Colleagues in Learning Services were manning the desks but from a viewer’s perspective it went very well. The public feed ends up with about a 30 second delay from live after it’s been through YouTube’s processing but as long as people sat in the audience aren’t trying to tune in that’s not noticeable.  The feed resolution is comparable to what we had previously but at 480p it seems subjectively better quality and on mobile devices it looks great.

December ceremonies have historically had lower live stream views than the summer ones (fewer people on campus) but we had up to 61 concurrent connections watching for an average of 17 minutes:

Graduation Statistics

You’ll see we ran a single stream all day rather than individual events. This made it easier to manage from the control room as FMLE could be set up once and run all day but it means that the individual ceremonies must be uploaded again for the archive – it’s not possible to use YouTube’s online editing tools for videos over 2 hours long.

Overall I’m very happy with how it went. We’ve purchased a new video capture device which unfortunately we couldn’t get to work in time but that will offer additional future proofing and the ability to stream at up to 1080p!

Update: it looks like now all YouTube users of good standing will be able to stream through both YouTube live and Hangouts On Air.

Protect your digital identity and information on social networks

Sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace , LinkedIn, Orkut, Zorpia, Flicker, twicpic, yfrog and YouTube.etc, are social media sites designed to share information such as who and where you are and what you are doing, photos and video. This is a comical example of how information is shared using social media sites to tell the Digital Story of the Nativity.

Social media sites are a great way to connect to close friends and family, or even re-connect with old classmates and old co-workers. Also it can be a great way to find and connect to new groups with interests common to your own.

With just a few clicks people can access messages, know where their contacts are, what are they doing. All this makes for an entertaining experience network. The speed and immediacy that characterizes them are useful to inform and share content, true, but it can also jeopardize your own job or worse and compromise your privacy and security. Also the content posted on the site stays on the server even after you disable your account and is searchable.

The trouble starts when it becomes an addiction, if people spend too much time discussing everything that happens in their lives without taking the necessary steps to protect what is shared. It is logical to enjoy safely social media sites, which have the ability to control how visible your information and pictures are on the site as well as any search engines who parses that data.

Below is a series of recommendations to protect the identity information in digital networks and it is up to you to decide how visible you want your contact and profile information, videos, photos, and other posts need to be, and take the time to set the appropriate controls within the media site in question. For each one of us it is important to have a good view of what is published and learn to manage and protect our identity.

Although this presentation is from last year some of the information is still relevant

Exposure Level

The search is an important aspect of social networks. It is up to the users if they want to be seen by all members of a network or just want to be seen only by their contacts.

It should make a conscious choice and set the profile, rather than leave it to the default settings, they usually allow some of the profile information such as name and main photo to be found on page and through Internet search engines.

Personal Data
Be cautious about posting and sharing personal information. Do not reveal passwords, keys, date of birth, home address, phone number and place of birth. Do not put your full resume online, if you must, remove it when you find a job. Protect the answers to secret questions that make social networks. The combination of that publicly available information and your public post about hanging out with friends on Saturday night across town could be enough for someone to take advantage of the situation and break into your house.

Information Policy
Generally every page has a link that explains how to use the information by users and gives tips for safe keeping. Note that when entering a network, it is giving license or right to use any information that is on these sites.

Privacy
All sites have a link to a “Privacy” page that explains how your information is used and provides tips on staying safe. Determine how visible the information is that you post on social networks and search engines (profile, photos, videos and posts.) Each page allows you to select privacy settings, read them and adjust by trial the level of control and privacy you want.

Twitter Safety
There is an option that messages, pictures and videos that can only be seen by their followers, for this you must change the default settings of Twitter.
Think twice before posting or even clicking on a post. Consider what could happen if a post becomes widely known and how that may reflect both on you (as the poster) or your family, friend or workplace. i.e. Jason Manford quits The One Show over sex messages

With a little effort and some common sense you can enjoy and safely participate in social media sites. Ultimately though, it’s up to you to manage your digital identity. You must use good judgment about what you post and learn how you protect your personal data and reputation from the digital networks.

Happy Christmas.

University LipDub: do it, do it, do it!

University LipDub has taken University campuses across Continental Europe, Brazil and Québec by storm over the last year!  Karine Joly and Mike Richwalsky mentioned it on Twitter the other day which got me looking at some of the examples.  One of the best – from l’Université du Québec à Montréal – has been featured on CNN and “LipDubs” [???] the Black Eyed Peas’ I Gotta Feeling:

I wonder if there are there any Media or Performing Arts students out there who fancy giving this a go..?

Google Wave is coming soon! – Part I

Google Wave was launched on the 28th May, 2009 at the ‘Google’s I/O Developer conference’ in San Francisco. It has been developed by a team working in Sydney, Australia. Which consist of two brothers, Jens and Lars Rasmussen and has Stephanie Hannon as the lead project manager, all of whom were previously involved in Google Maps.

What it is Google Wave?

It is a new platform for communication and collaboration on the web in real time coming later this year. I can’t wait!

It is based on a “Wave”, a different way to communicate by integrating many of the tools we are currently using such as email, maps, videos, photos, blogs and chats in just one interface. So, we can create a wave and invite our collaborators to join the conversation by giving them access to send simple messages and edit the wave directly. Truly Impressive.

It combines some of people’s favourite aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, blogs, chats, projects and social networks. There’s even a twitter client (Twave robot) – you can tweet into and out of a wave!

Google Wave interface

The following are few of the cool features from the demo:

  • Real Time: Drop photos onto a wave and see the thumbnails appear on the other person’s machine before the full upload is finished. Just watch the demo to view this
  • Embeddability: The waves can be embedded in any blog or site
  • Drag and Drop: Wave lets you drag and drop files directly onto its interface

    • googlewave1editdoc

  • Open Source, Applications and extensions: With open APIs developers will be able to create different applications for the waves. There will be plenty volunteers.
    The API has been used to build a bunch of cool extensions such as:
    • Bloggy, a blog client, lets you make a blog post as a wave
    • Linky is a link-recognition engine that is clever enough to recognize that the link you just entered is a YouTube video
    • Buggy, a bug-reporting tool that can also be a participant in a wave
    • Bidder, You can turn a wave into your own eBay
  • Wiki Functionality: anything within the Google Wave can be edited by other members
  • Playback: We will able to reproduce any part of the wave to keep track of what is being said or done and to see how it evolved
  • Translation: Wave has the capacity of autocorrecting and translating in real time, which allows collaborative work among people that don’t share the same language
  • Spell Checker: an extension called Spelly which uses the entire corpus of the web as its dictionary

googlewave4spelling

Google Wave is promising to change the scope in: Education, e-learning, collaborative projects, companies and organizations, as it can be the most popular tool to create Personal Learning Environment or Personal Learning Networks.

Could Google Wave really redefine web communication? We’re going to have to wait a while though to find out, as this product is still under development. Right now it’s only available to a select group of developers who attended Google I/O conference and have an account to create their own Wave servers. I’m sure there will a lot of articles on the web keeping us informed of the development process, pros and cons.

If you want to find out more about Google Wave, allow yourself some time to watch the full demo, then you will be able to understand why people are extremely excited.


Better late than never

This video came up on my feed reader when it was posted (I subscribe to Michael Wesch’s channel) but for some reason I didn’t get around to watching it. But the internet has a funny way of bringing good stuff back to you so happily Ewan McIntosh posted about it yesterday giving me a second chance to catch it:

It’s almost an hour long, but if you can afford the time it’s well worth watching – it’s pitched just right giving details about not just the technologies (which you may already know about) but the anthropological issues.

Tag me

Tags are being used by more and more websites. They’re everywhere. Look at the top of this post, its been tagged (by me). Look to the sidebar, a tag cloud (more about these later). Chances are if you use any social networking site or web 2.0 site, you’ll have used, seen and interacted with tags.

Our new-look corporate site, extensively uses tagging, specifically in News, Events, Imaging and the eProspectus, but what’s a tag used for? A tag is metadata, a keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information. So tags can be added to any page in a web document and associated with any other pages prieviously tagged with the same tag.

The tags themselves are usually single words, informally and personally chosen. If you’ve signed up for accounts with Flickr, Picasa, delicious, Magnolia or YouTube, to name but a few, you’ve probably added your own tags by now. So is tagging just a way to show similarities between your documents? Not really, tagging data on these sites provides a simple navigation through to your own content, but also hooks into other members’ data by turning tags into links, which aggregate documents similarly tagged.

Tag Clouds

Tag Cloud

Popular tags can be visually represented through tag clouds, also known as a weighted list, with the most popular tags shown larger and bolder. Again the tags are links which drill down to similar content. You could even base an rss feed on a tag to alert visitors to new content so tagged.

Microformats

Microformats logoBy adding rel=”tag” into the links, the link also becomes a microformat. Microformats are a standard way to represent things in HTML, by adding rel-tag we’re standardising the link as a tag. Making the link a microformat allows the reader to find similarly tagged content from a wider source than just the current site. Firefox users can install a fantastic add-on called Operator. Operator recognises microformats on the page and in the case of tags, offers the reader entry points to content similarly tagged on other websites. Sadly there doesn’t seem to be anything similar available for Internet Explorer, yet.

Machine Tags

On the horizon, we have Machine tagging or Triple tagging. Machine tags use a specific syntax to define extra information about the tag, making it more meaningful for interpretation by computer programs. Triple tags comprise three parts: a namespace, a predicate and a value. For example, ehu:news=607This kind of tagging isn’t currently used on the Edge Hill site, but it’s built-in ready to go. Anyone interested can see an implementation on Adactio, any Flickr images, tagged ( where n is representative of his blog post) will be included automatically.adactio:post=n

Adopting Tags

By adopting tags, or creating tags so unique, ensures that all things tagged are related. For example, all news, event and images relating to this year’s Solstice Seminars could be tagged: solstice08. The tag is so unique, items tagged with it would be unlikely to be included out of context. Such unique tags can be promoted like a product, by requesting conference attendees to tag their own online content, on websites and slides etc.

Tagging Best Practices

If you’re about to embark on a journey of tagging for your own sites, it can feel a little daunting. There are, however, some best practices you can use to get started:

The Bubble is Back!

A bit of light entertainment since it’s less than a week until Christmas*:

This video was taken down from YouTube when the copyright holder of one of the photos objected to not receiving credit but it’s back online now for everyone to see. There’s much debate as to whether it really was breach of copyright or if a parody is fair use.

Is there a bubble, and is it going to burst? That’s a question many commentators will probably try to answer in their New Year predictions, or refuse to answer if they have any sense! Last time there was a “market adjustment” a lot of long term good came out of it. The waste and excess was given the squeeze and the good ideas won through. I could write more about this but I won’t – enjoy the video, and stay tuned over the holidays – I’m going to try to blog some stuff.

* Find out on isitchristmas.com when it really is Christmas!