YouTube as a Medium for Community

Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, gave a talk at the Library of Congress about YouTube and its role in the participatory culture. He explains how one of his videos, Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us, became very popular in just a few days and how this popularity took him by surprise. The video was remixed, translated, it was the starting point for a conversation at a global level.

To find how people communicate on YouTube, Professor Wesch and his students studied YouTube and the way anonymity, interactivity, authenticity and popularity define it as a new medium for community.

YouTube as a Medium for Community

KeepVid: Download and save any video from Youtube, Dailymotion, Metacafe, iFilm and more!

KeepVid: Download and save any video from Youtube, Dailymotion, Metacafe, iFilm and more!

Test Your Site in Different Browsers Using Adobe BrowserLab

Test Your Site in Different Browsers Using Adobe BrowserLab

If you create a web site, a difficult task is to test if it looks properly in most of the browsers and the operating systems that your users are likely to use. Unfortunately, this requires that you install multiple operating systems, buy more than one computer or use virtual machines.

An easier way to test your site is to use online services like BrowserShots, which generates screenshots for a web page in more than 80 versions of the most common browsers used in Windows, Linux, BSD and Mac. The process takes time and you may have to wait up to an hour to see the screenshots.

Adobe BrowserLab is a recently-launched service that has the advantage of generating screenshots almost instantaneously, but the number of browsers that are tested is smaller: Firefox 2.0 (XP, OS X), Firefox 3.0 (XP, OS X), IE6 (XP), IE7 (XP), Safari 3.0 (OS X). The service has an interesting "Onion Skin View", which superimposes one screenshot over another to see the differences between the different renderings. BrowserLab is integrated with Dreamweaver CS4, but you don't need to buy the software to use the online service.

"Cross-browser testing has been one of the biggest challenges for Web designers because it is such an arduous and time-intensive task. Now with Adobe BrowserLab, designers have a simple solution that enables comprehensive browser compatibility testing in just a matter of minutes," says Adobe's Lea Hickman. The bad news is that the service is free for a limited time.

OffiSync - Integrate Google Docs with Microsoft Office

OffiSync - Integrate Google Docs with Microsoft Office

Caption Editor for YouTube Videos

CaptionTube is a site that lets create captions for YouTube videos. For example, you can include a transcript of the video in one or more languages and YouTube's search engine will bring more viewers.

The site lets you caption any YouTube video, not just the ones that you've uploaded, and the captions can be exported as an XML file that will be later imported at YouTube.

Caption Editor for YouTube Videos

Lifehacker - Better Organize Your Tabs with Tree Style Tab - Downloads

Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): Firefox extension Tree Style Tab adds folder-tree-like navigation to your tab management, organizing tabs based on the order in which they were opened and the pages they originated from. The main idea behind Tree Style Tab is that you can keep track of the relations of your open tabs to each other so you can always follow the breadcrumb trail back to where you started—especially handy when you're researching something and end up with an endless pile of unorganized tabs. The extension's options are highly configurable, allowing you to customize the tab bar location, behavior of new tabs, and more. Tree Style Tab is free, works wherever Firefox does (including Firefox 3 betas).

Lifehacker - Better Organize Your Tabs with Tree Style Tab - Downloads

Transcriptions: free, lightweight Mac transcription app

Transcriptions: free, lightweight Mac transcription app: "If you're a journalist, a social scientist or even just a blogger, you've probably been through the process of transcribing a recorded interview. I do a lot of transcription, but I had always done it the hard way: with a text editor open in one window, and my audio in the other. I should have just downloaded Transcriptions, which handles the whole transcription process in one app, with a lot of cool extras.

It supports both audio and video, with adjustable playback rate and automatic or manual time stamping. I don't have a foot pedal, so I haven't been able to test this, but it apparently supports those, too. I know there are other, more elaborate transcription apps out there, but this one is free, easy to use, takes up under 1MB of disk space. It makes my work a lot of less of a pain than it was when I was using Quicktime and TextEdit to do the job of this one neat little app."