Showing posts with label video. Show all posts

Jan 12, 2010

An Interim Assessment of Evolving U.S.-Burma/Myanmar Relations

http://vimeo.com/8443859 (video)

December 17, 2009, Professor David I. Steinberg

: (Click to enlarge) Professor David I. Steinberg discusses U.S.-Burma relations.

(Washington D.C.) December 17– Though a U.S. policy review has led to new engagement between the United States and Burma, there are still many issues to tackle if relations between the two countries are to improve. In an East-West Center in Washington Asia Pacific Security Seminar co-hosted by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA, Dr. David I. Steinberg, distinguished professor of Asian Studies in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, introduced his new book, Burma/Myanmar: What Everyone Needs to Know, and discussed the current state of U.S.-Burma relations and the prospects for the future.

In February 2009, the United States announced a review of its policy toward Burma, leading to new engagement between the two countries. In the spring, tentative steps were made to open up communication between the two governments, leading to a series of meetings at the official level. The U.S. policy review on Burma was extensive, leading some human rights commentators to worry that the United States might eliminate sanctions or soften its stance on human rights issues in order to achieve greater cooperation with Burma. However, the result of this review is a new period of “pragmatic engagement” in which the United States will continue its sanctions while at the same time maintaining dialogue with Burma at a high level.

Dr. Steinberg explained that it is difficult to say what Burma’s response to U.S. engagement will be. Nationalism, Dr. Steinberg noted, will play a key factor in Burmese decision-making as it engages with the United States. He explained that the fear that the United States will invade Burma is alive and well in the country, and this impedes the relationship. He also noted that Burma is an issue that is of great concern to groups in the United States, who will continue to call for U.S. action to protect human rights issues in Burma regardless of the state of the negotiations between the two countries.

Certainly the Burmese government is concerned about the upcoming scheduled elections, especially with U.S. and world attention being so closely fixed on the country. While the United States has expressed a desire that these elections be “free and fair,” Dr. Steinberg worried that Burmese and U.S. perceptions over what this means may be quite different. Though we cannot predict how the elections will be run or what the results of the elections will be, Dr. Steinberg argued that post-election Burma will still be controlled, in part, by the military due to the active role that the new constitution ensures for them. New political parties will develop that are peopled by former members of the military and, at the same time, Dr. Steinberg suggested that we can expect new opposition parties to develop. Whether the voices of these opposition parties will be heard in the domestic press, however, is difficult to determine. Further, he pointed out that the military leadership has already called for a hiatus in international NGO activities in the country during the campaigning and election period, indicating a concern that international groups will try to influence the elections in some way.

Another important issue facing the U.S.-Burma relationship is that of human rights issues, including the continued imprisonment of Aung San Suu Kyi and the status of the minority groups in Burma that have long been in conflict with the military government. Dr. Steinberg noted that, in the past, the military government had insisted on the disarmament of all rebel groups among the minorities as a precondition of cease-fire agreements. However, he explained that in recent months discussions have begun for the creation of “border guard” forces which would allow rebel groups in the minority areas to keep their arms as long as they would incorporate Burmese military units into their organizations, an act which Dr. Steinberg argues would destroy the minority organizations. Whether the minority groups will agree to this offer is a serious issue that will have important consequences for the upcoming elections. He explained that countries like China and India, which are worried about instability along their borders, will continue to carefully monitor the situation as deadlines for reaching agreements with minority groups continue to be delayed.

Whatever the outcome of this new engagement, the process must be slow and deliberate. As the two countries move forward, Dr. Steinberg explained that there are several key things that the United States could do to keep the ball rolling. He suggested that it may be time to welcome a Burmese ambassador back to the United States as a gesture of good will. Further, he pointed to the importance of the role of NGOs in U.S. engagement with Burma, and noted that the U.S. government could do more to interact with this community. Burma, on the other hand, could indicate its commitment to the new engagement by releasing the many political prisoners held in its prisons and allowing freedom of the press. Dr. Steinberg explained that these two activities would signal that Burma is indeed working toward improved relations with the international community.

David I. Steinberg is distinguished professor of Asian Studies in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, where he was director of the Asian Studies Program for ten years. He is the author of thirteen books and monographs, six of which are on Burma/Myanmar, and some 100 articles/chapters, of which about 50 are on that subject. He also writes extensively on Korean affairs. As a member of the Senior Foreign Service, USAID, Department of State, he was Director of Technical Assistance for Asia and the Middle East and Director for Philippines, Thailand, and Burma Affairs. He was a representative of The Asia Foundation in Burma, Hong Kong, Korea, and Washington, D.C., and President of the Mansfield Center for Pacific Affairs. Professor Steinberg was educated at Dartmouth College, Lingnan University (China), Harvard University, and the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, where he studied Burmese and Southeast Asia. His latest volume is Burma/Myanmar: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press. 2009). Other volumes include: Turmoil in Burma: Contested Legitimacies in Myanmar (2007), and Burma: The State of Myanmar (2001).

Jan 10, 2010

Video links Pakistan Taliban to deadly CIA bombing

Image via Wikipedia

By DEB RIECHMANN
The Associated Press
Sunday, January 10, 2010; 4:41 AM

KABUL -- In a video broadcast after his death, the Jordanian suicide bomber who killed seven CIA employees sits cross-legged on the floor next to the new chief of the Pakistani Taliban, confirming the group was behind the brazen attack in eastern Afghanistan.

Yet multiple insurgent groups have claimed responsibility for the bombing, and a senior Pakistani militant told The Associated Press that al-Qaida and Afghan Taliban fighters were also involved in one of the worst attacks in the U.S. intelligence agency's history.

The suicide attack inside the CIA base - which the bomber said was meant to avenge the death of the former Pakistani Taliban leader in a CIA missile strike - could prompt the U.S. to further pressure the government of Pakistan to crack down on militants who operate on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border. U.S. missile strikes against targets on the Pakistan side already are on the rise.

Seven CIA employees and a Jordanian intelligence officer were killed Dec. 30 when the suicide bomber detonated his cache of explosives at Camp Chapman, a tightly secured CIA base in Khost province, a dangerous region southeast of the Afghan capital Kabul.

The CIA had cultivated the bomber - a Jordanian doctor identified as Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi - in hopes of obtaining information about al-Qaida's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahri.

Defending his agents, CIA Director Leon Panetta said the bomber was about to be searched before the blast occurred.

"This was not a question of trusting a potential intelligence asset, even one who had provided information that we could verify independently. It is never that simple, and no one ignored the hazards," Panetta wrote in a Washington Post op-ed piece posted online Saturday. "The individual was about to be searched by our security officers - a distance away from other intelligence personnel - when he set off his explosives."

Al-Balawi turned out to be a double-agent - perhaps even a triple-agent. In the 1 1/2 minute video, the bomber said he attacked the CIA to avenge the death of Baitullah Mehsud, the longtime leader of the Pakistani Taliban who was killed in August.

"This jihadi attack will be the first revenge operation against the Americans and their drone teams outside the Pakistan border," the bomber said on the video. Al-Balawi - wearing an Afghan hat and camouflaged jacket - said the Pakistani Taliban, now under the leadership of its new chief Hakimullah Mehsud, would fight till victory.

"We will never forget the blood of our emir Baitullah Mehsud," said al-Balawi. "We will always demand revenge for him inside America and outside."

Statements by Afghan Taliban and al-Qaida leaders since the attack have confused efforts to figure out which group's fingerprints were on the blast that struck a blow to the CIA's field expertise in Afghanistan.

A senior militant with the Pakistani Taliban told AP the suicide bomber received training from Qari Hussain, a leading commander of the Pakistani Taliban believed to have run suicide bombing camps. The militant, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of security reasons, said al-Qaida and the Haqqani network, a highly independent Afghan Taliban faction, also were involved.

Hussain's Lashkar-e-Janghvi group, a violent anti-Shiite Muslim organization, is believed to provide a reservoir of suicide bombers and has been linked to some of the more spectacular bombings in Pakistan and the death of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

Arsala Rahmani - a former minister in the Taliban government that was toppled in the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks - said the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban and al-Qaida often work in unison against Western forces.

"Most of the time, the Afghan Taliban, Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaida ... they are fighting together," said Rahmani.

A senior NATO intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to release the information, said all insurgent groups have subordinated themselves to the senior Afghan Taliban leadership, believed to be based in Quetta, Pakistan.

After the attack al-Qaida's No. 3, Sheikh Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, issued a statement also saying the CIA was targeted to avenge the death of Baitullah Mehsud, as well as the killing of two al-Qaida figures - Abdullah Saeed al-Liby and Abu Saleh al-Somali.

Terrorist watchdog groups disagreed whether the message from al-Qaida claimed responsibility for the strike.

Mahmood Shah, a former security chief for Pakistan's tribal regions, said the Pakistani Taliban likely provided logistics to the bomber, but al-Qaida probably provided the recruit himself.

The CIA attack would be the most prolific strike on a U.S. target by the Pakistani Taliban under the 20-something Hakimullah Mehsud's watch. It is also unusual because the Pakistani Taliban rarely claim responsibility for strikes in Afghanistan.

A major Pakistani army offensive in its South Waziristan tribal region is believed to have forced many Pakistani Taliban leaders to go on the run to other parts of the lawless tribal belt along the Afghan border. Hakimullah Mehsud, for instance, is believed to be evading the Pakistani military offensive by hiding somewhere along the border dividing South and North Waziristan tribal regions.

Though the group initially appeared to be in disarray after the August missile strike and the offensive, it and linked militant groups are suspected in a rising tide of violence in Pakistan. More than 600 people have died in a range of suicide and other bombings across the nuclear-armed country since October.

The release of the al-Balawi footage gives the U.S. proof that Pakistani elements are involved in attacks on its security apparatus in Afghanistan, observers said. Already since the CIA attack, the U.S. has accelerated its use of drone-fired missiles to take out militant targets in Pakistan's tribal regions.

At least six such strikes have hit North Waziristan, where the Haqqanis have strongholds, in recent days, including two missiles fired into a home Saturday in Data Khel that killed two people and wounded three others, two Pakistani intelligence officials said.

----

Associated Press writers Maamoun Youssef in Cairo, Jamal Halaby in Amman, Jordan, Nahal Toosi and Kathy Gannon in Islamabad, and Rasool Dawar in Peshawar, Pakistan contributed to this report.

Dec 28, 2009

As books go beyond printed page to multisensory experience, what about reading?

Image by droidman via Flickr

By Monica Hesse
Monday, December 28, 2009; C01

The mysterious man looks completely wrong to me.

In the text of conspiracy thriller "Embassy," an online novel by Richard Doetsch, the character is described as "a starkly thin fellow with a protruding Adam's apple." My brain goes: Alan Rickman!

But when I click on the chapter's accompanying video, the man is younger, tanner, scruffier. He's dressed like he should be bumming clove cigarettes at a concert, not spying on the Greek Embassy.

What I'm reading is a Vook -- a video/book hybrid produced in part by Simon & Schuster's Atria Books. Interspersed throughout the text are videos and links that supplement the narrative. In one chapter, the Greek ambassador receives a mysterious DVD, and readers must click on an embedded video to learn what's on it. In another, kidnapper Jack ominously tells his hostage that he's going to prove that he means business.

"How are you going to do that?" Kate asks.

"Are you squeamish?" Jack replies.

Below that dialogue, a little box encourages readers to "SEE WHAT HAPPENED NEXT" by clicking the play button.

(What happened next, in a comically foreboding scene: Jack grabbed Kate's hand and threatened to chop off her fingers with a kitchen knife.)

Image by junehug via Flickr

It's a dizzying experience, reading Vooks. But they represent just a few examples of a new genre that has been alternatively dubbed v-books, digi-books, multimedia books and Cydecks, all with essentially the same concept: It's a book . . . but wait, there's more!

There will certainly be more of them. The first six books of text/Web hybrid "The 39 Clues" have nearly 5 million copies in print, and nearly 700,000 registered users for the site. A seventh book will be released in February. "The Amanda Project," released this fall, is set to be an eight-book series. Brad Inman, founder of Vook, said that his company will release as many as 200 titles next year -- a goal made more feasible by the relative cheapness of producing his online-only books. "It's very inexpensive in scale. We're talking thousands of dollars, not even tens of thousands of dollars" for each project.

Is a hybrid book our future? Maybe. "As discourse moves from printed pages to network screens, the dominant mode will be things that are multi-modal and multilayered," says Bob Stein, founder of the Institute for the Future of the Book. "The age of pure linear content is going to pass with the rise of digital network content."

Predicting the eventual death of the traditional novel sounds practically heretical. But keep in mind that the genre has actually existed in English for only about 300 years, and that experimentation and evolution have always been a part of the way we tell stories.

Perhaps the folly isn't in speculating that the book might change, but in assuming that it won't.

Choose your adventure

The bells and whistles in hybrid books are endless. In "The Sherlock Holmes Experience" -- one of six books, including "Embassy," published by Vook since the company launched in October -- two classic Arthur Conan Doyle stories are annotated with video clips of historians sharing Holmesian trivia. Hyperlinks pepper the text, sending readers to Wikipedia pages explaining old-fashioned terms.

Image via Wikipedia

In "The Amanda Project," a young-adult series launched earlier this fall, three teens investigate the disappearance of a mutual friend, primarily in a book but also on a companion Web site, where readers are encouraged to upload their own "clues" to Amanda's presence. Some contributions will be incorporated into the second book, due out in February.

In "Skeleton Creek," another work for tweens, the narrative alternates between the written diary of Ryan, a housebound teen trying to investigate strange occurrences in his home town, and the video missives of his best friend, Sarah. Ryan -- and the reader -- access Sarah's transmissions by logging onto a Web site with various passwords, provided at the end of each chapter.

Myebook, which helps users self-publish books online, is flexible with the definition of "book," allowing text to be mashed up with video and applications.

These hybrid books "truly [are] groundbreaking, and I don't use that word lightly," says David Levithan, a Scholastic editor who worked on "Skeleton Creek" as well as "The 39 Clues," a series involving an elaborate online game. "It's expanding the notion of what storytelling can be."

If readers visit every hyperlink, watch every video and play every game, it is possible for the experience of consuming a single book to become limitless -- a literal neverending story. It's also possible for the user to never read more than a few chapters in sequence, before excitedly scampering over to the next activity.

Hybrid books might be the perfect accessory for modern life. They allow immediate shortcuts to information. They feel like instant gratification and guided, packaged experiences. What they don't feel like, at least in certain examples, is reading.

Envision, for a moment, what it feels like to delve into your favorite book. Picture losing yourself in the fictional world for hours on end -- the way the characters sound in your mind, the way unfamiliar references give you pause. What is a nosegay, anyway?

If you could see the authoritative version of a character right away, without waiting for the movie version, would you?

If a floral dictionary were just a click away, would you interrupt your reading to visit it?

Would these abilities represent a breakthrough, the sort of enhanced involvement that book lovers have always dreamed of? Or would they tamper with our imaginations, completely changing the experience of reading?

Can you imagine?

It's not coincidence that many current hybrid books are aimed at kids -- the first generation of "digital natives" who, we're repeatedly told, feel stark naked without a cellphone, iPhone and a couple of laptops strapped to their persons.

"What they really love is staying in that world," says Lisa Holton of Fourth Story Media, which packaged "The Amanda Project." The non-text components "give them a way to dive even further. When you hang out with kids and you watch what they're doing, we as adults can't even begin to understand their relationships with technology." Holton left a job in traditional publishing to found Fourth Story and explore new forms of storytelling.

But what happens to the traditional reading experience, the one involving a fat novel, a fireplace and a cup of tea?

"It's very common for [a 15-year-old] to read, but have her phone there and her computer there," says Patrick Carman, who wrote "Skeleton Creek" and one volume of "The 39 Clues." "For her, having this multimedia experience is like sitting down with a cup of tea."

He directs me to his niece, an exceedingly generationally aware 14-year-old named Madison Wilcox. "The books with the videos, I think they keep our interest better," Madison says. "The generation we're in is always using technology. [Books like 'Skeleton Creek'] are easy to blend in with our lifestyles."

Inman of Vook says it would be a mistake to compare products like his with traditional texts, the two genres being independent entities.

"We don't pretend that it's a book because it's not." With the Vook, "there's an expectation that you're not gulping the text," as you would in a traditional novel. Instead, Inman says, "you're tasting the text," dipping in and out of it at will.

One wonders how this tasting affects the way we read -- that shortening of attention span we've read so much about.

"When you go from one task to another, your brain does slow down," says Earl Miller, a professor of neuroscience at MIT. "Your brain has to reconfigure its cognitive network. For the first few seconds [of the new activity] there's an increase in errors," in how well we comprehend what we're reading or viewing.

"The way the brain handles language is very different than the way it handles pictures," says Clifford Nass, a Stanford professor who studies multitasking. "One of the ways is pacing. You read a book and you stop whenever you'd like. When you watch a video, you can't do that. It goes on." It's active entertainment vs. passive.

Retention and comprehension are moot points when the narrative in question is, for example, "Embassy." Missing a paragraph or two won't affect a reader's understanding of the plot; missing a plot point or two isn't a life-or-death scenario.

In reading "Embassy," what concerned me wasn't that my brain was getting overworked but that my imagination wasn't.

The pleasure of reading has always been its uniquely transporting experience: the way a literary world might look completely different to two readers. One might picture the fictional heroine as a Natalie Portman type; the other might see her as Freida Pinto.

But when the "true" representation -- like clove cigarette guy -- is immediately provided to the reader, imaginary worlds could be squelched before they have a chance to be born. Reading Vooks made me feel a little like a creative slacker. Maybe there was no point in imagining what someone or something looked like, if I was going to be helped along anyway.

David Sousa is a consultant in educational neuroscience and author of "How the Brain Learns to Read." In his classroom research, he says, "we find that kids are not able to do imagining and imaging as exercises" as well as they once did, "because video's doing the work for them. . . . They still have the mental apparatus for that, the problem is they're not getting the exercise."

Reading has traditionally been one of imagination's personal trainers, and while skipping from medium to medium might provide other benefits (catering to a variety of learning styles rather than just the visual reader's), it might adversely affect the way we create our own worlds.

Of course, some hybrid books' companion activities seem designed to exercise creativity. Readers of "The Amanda Project," for example, are encouraged to contribute to the site's catalogue of reader-submitted stories in a sort of organized fan fiction compendium. Madison, the 14-year-old, says that though she's never been what you would call a bookworm, the multimedia aspects of her uncle's books have made her more willing to read other things.

And Stein of the Institute for the Future of the Book says that whatever assumptions we might make now about hybrid books, there's a good chance they won't hold true when the medium grows up. "Things like the Vook are trivial. We're going to see an explosion of experimentation before we see a dominant new format. We're at the very beginning stages" of figuring out what narrative might look like in the future. "The very, very beginning."

Sep 29, 2009

The Associated Press - Video shows Jakarta bombers before hotel attacks

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By NINIEK KARMINI (AP) – 7 hours ago

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Two Indonesian suicide bombers lounged and casually snacked in a grass field near luxury Jakarta hotels weeks before they attacked them, videos released by police Tuesday showed.

The footage was pulled from a laptop found in a backpack on regional al-Qaida commander Noordin Top, a Malaysian who was shot dead two weeks ago during a police raid in Central Java.

The video, taken in the last week of June, also shows the men jogging on a road that passes the hotels and trying on clothing to wear on the day of their deaths.

Three weeks later, the men walked into the lounges of the Ritz-Carlton and J.W. Marriott and blew themselves up. The July 17 explosions killed seven people and wounded more than 50, ending a four-year pause in terrorist attacks in the world's most populous Muslim-majority nation.

"This is our target," one of the bombers, Dani Permana, an 18-year-old high school graduate, says on the video, pointing to the hotels. "This is a very noble way to destroy the enemies of Islam. This is not suicide." He detonated explosives inside the J.W. Marriott, where four Westerners were killed.

The second bomber was Nana Maulana, 28. He is seen in the video footage wearing a baseball cap and eating a shrimp cracker as the men sit cross-legged in a grass field in downtown Jakarta. The two hotels are in the background.

"America has to be destroyed. Australia has to be destroyed. Indonesia has to be destroyed," says a voice on the video, which police believe is that of Syaifuddin Zuhri, who allegedly shot the footage and recruited the bombers. He remains at large.

A letter recovered from Noordin's laptop, believed to have been written to Zuhri's family, says Zuhri joined an al-Qaida affiliated group called Salafi Jihadi during studies in Yemen. He has held a prominent position in Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad — a group that was headed by Noordin — since 2005, said the typed note shown to journalists.

Police believe that Zuhri sought funding overseas for terrorist attacks in Indonesia with a militant suspect detained last month in connection with the July bombings.

The suspect, Mohamad Jibril Abdurahman, calls himself the "Prince of Jihad" on his Web site, anti-terror investigator Tito Karnavian told reporters.

"There are indications that they traveled to Saudi Arabia in order to find individual donors for terrorism acts in Indonesia," Karnavian said. Police said the pair flew to other countries but didn't name them.

Police continue to hunt for several fugitive suspects in the hotel bombings, the first terror attack in Indonesia since triple suicide blasts on the resort island of Bali in 2005.

Regional terror network Jemaah Islamiyah and the splinter faction headed by Noordin have been linked to a series of bombings that killed more than 250 people in Indonesia. Most of the victims were foreigners who died in devastating 2002 blasts at Bali nightclubs.

Noordin's group had hundreds of pounds (kilograms) of chemicals needed to make explosives and was plotting new attacks, Karnavian said. He declined to give details, saying inquiries were ongoing.

Noordin's family is due to collect his remains from a police morgue in Jakarta this week and return them to his Malaysian hometown for burial.

Aug 26, 2009

Magma: A Billboard Hot 100 for Online Video

August 25th, 2009 | by Ben Parr

Online video is a giant sea of mostly unfiltered content. There were 11.2 billion video streams in July in the US alone. That’s a ton of video.

So how do you go about finding the best video the web has to offer? You can just watch the popular listings on YouTube, but you’re going to get a lot of Fred and Phillip DeFranco. Some companies have launched their own solutions, including eGuders (media expert recommendations) and Reddit.tv (browse top videos on Reddit).

But now the founder of RocketBoom has launched his own solution: Mag.ma, a video aggregator and rating algorithm that acts like the Billboard Hot 100 of online video.

Hop onto the website and it’s immediately apparent what you should do: watch videos. The system takes videos from YouTube (), Hulu (), Vimeo (), TED, and more. Each of the videos are ranked in terms of “hotness” on a scale of 1 to 11. All of this is done in a column-based interface to show where Magma is finding top videos.

Magma also offers users the chance to interact with the Magma charts, either by adding videos (there’s a bookmarklet to help) or by signing up and personalizing your account and channel list.

Magma helps solve a difficult problem – oversaturation of video – with a clever solution and does it with a clean but content-rich interface. It takes into account social sharing on Twitter (), Facebook (), and elsewhere to rank videos. So far, we’re impressed and look forward to hearing more about this new service.

Jun 26, 2009

AOL’s Truveo Relaunches As Improved Video Search Destination

Jun 25, 2009 at 10:10am ET by Greg Sterling - click on above title for full posting and links

According to comScore the average watcher of online video in the US took in 385 minutes-worth in April. And according to Nielsen, in May, “year-over-year, unique viewers, total streams, streams per viewer and time per viewer were up, led by a 49 percent growth in time per viewer.” The leading video site is Google/YouTube by a large margin with almost double the unique users of Fox Interactive Media, the next ranking US online video provider. After that it becomes much more competitive.

Against that backdrop of intense competition and increasing consumer demand for online video, AOL’s video search engine Truveo has relaunched on a global basis (17 countries).

Truveo began as a video search technology platform and was acquired by AOL in January, 2006. In August of 2007 it became a consumer destination site. The previous version of the site had a number of virtues (depth, global scope, organization) but also serious problems with usability. I wrote at the time:

The single biggest drawback to the site (esp. vs. YouTube) is the fact that many (though not all) of Truveo’s content partners contractually require that videos be served on their sites rather than on Truveo. Consequently a pop-up appears and you watch the desired video (and pre-rolls ads) on the partner sites (about 50% of the time in my quick testing). That creates a variable experience, which YouTube avoids by having everything play in a single, uniform player on its site.

Those problems have largely remedied with the new user experience though there’s still some unevenness. Yet one can watch many more videos on the Truveo site itself today; and where the engine is compelled to link to third party sites (i.e., no video embed code) Truveo frames the experience. There are two viewing modes.

Among the improvements, there are also new user controls and filters to search or browse video by source or sort by popularity, ranking and recency.

There are also myriad full-length shows on the site. Overall this is a dramatically improved user experience and Truveo should see its traffic increase accordingly.

Truveo itself says that its global reach and the comprehensiveness of its video index — all the video is being crawled, there are no feeds or deals here — are what differentiate the site from competitors. AOL video remains a separate site with a different look and feel, though they share technology.

As part of the announcement this morning Truveo announced a deal to power video search on Univision Interactive Media’s online portal.

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land, and writes a personal blog Screenwerk, examining the broader world of media and advertising. He also posts at a Local Mobile Search, which is focused on the mobile Internet.

Timor-Leste - Cognates, Calques, and False Friends

Cognates, Calques and False Friends | liafuan
Source: blip.tv
Finding Common Ground between Four Languages in Timor Leste

To see the full video by Ken Westmoreland, hit the _title line_ of this posting.

Jun 24, 2009

Internet Resources, June 25, 2009

Blog Tips - On entering the blog, you might try first going to the bottom of the page. This is where a bunch of gadgets which 'push' news to you are located. There are also a few which let you select from a new menu of news daily, or, in some cases, just as the news appears on the net. The top two are the 'breaking news' gadgets, one looking like a map which you can manipulate to get news from almost every country in the world. The one immediately below the map presents only breaking news programmed to reflect the six topics covered by the blog. Hit any stiry of interest to see the full-text behind the moving headline. In researching contemporary events, gadgets like these make your work easier, faster, and more complete.

Today's Readings

GetDocs

CitizenTube

YouTube Video Volunteers

Wayback Machine

Web Pioneers

Wiki Resources

Internet Archive

Volunteering

Jun 20, 2009

Wikipedia to Add Video Options to Articles

Posted: 19 Jun 2009 08:06 AM PDT

Wikipedia Logo Wikipedia is a great knowledge base, containing tons of text and lots of photos, but it’s lacking when it comes to videos, which are, well, quite scarce. This is all going to change in a couple of months, as Wikipedia has big plans for video; both in the sense of having more videos on the site, and letting contributors edit and annotate the actual videos.

According to MIT’s Technology Review, this should happen within two or three months. Wikipedia editors will get a new option, Add Media, which will let them search for videos, and insert portions of the video (via a simple drag and drop interface) into the article. Further plans include annotating the actual videos, and editing as well as reorganizing Wikipedia’s video collection – similar to what is now done with Wikipedia’s articles.

Where will the videos come from? Wikipedia has a plan. First, there’s the Metavid, a repository of Congressional speeches and hearings; Internet Archive and its 200,000 videos, and Wikimedia Commons, which is currently mostly holding photos but has a collection of video files as well.

However, once this initiative takes place, Wikipedia hopes that its users and editors will be more keen on uploading videos to Wikimedia. There is a catch, however: the videos added to Wikipedia’s database will have to be based on open-source formats. Since Wikipedia offers great exposure and traffic to everyone, this will surely motivate more people to use or convert their videos to these formats, and more open source is always a good thing.