Adobe Video Text to Speech to be Stored in XMP

I missed this bit of news coming out of NAB, but thanks to John Nack I’m now caught back up (the benefit of a good feed reader and the echo chamber).

I’ve seen lots of talk in the past about video search, deep tagging etc., but nothing that’s effectively realized the potential. It definitely will be interesting to see if Adobe can both build the tech and get the players on board to make it happen. I don’t see anything up on labs at the moment, but hopefully more news and bits will be forthcoming.

For those not aware, XMP is what I would term an RDF media metadata format that’s an important component of the Adobe product ecosystem as well as an open standard that can be used by other vendors. XMP can be injected into binary file formats or saved as an xml sidecar. Adobe provides a free (at least the last time I checked) toolkit for incorporating XMP into your own products.

Metadata’s relationship to search and interoperability is huge and its an arena that’s really still in its infancy, but XMP provides a solid map to largely uncharted waters. I hope Adobe spends more time talking about it. I know its not sexy, but sometimes brains trump our more visceral tendencies.

How to Find the IP Addresses of Computers Connected to an AirPort Extreme Router

I recently ditched my Netgear wireless router and purchased Apple’s AirPort Extreme. I’ve been pretty happy with its range and I’m no longer having my internet connection dropped every hour which is a plus, but I had a devil of a time figuring out how to determine what the IP addresses of other computers on my home network were. For once, the Google wasn’t much help, so I thought I’d post a very short Jingcast showing the solution.

Lowering the Barrier to Social Media Participation

ReadWriteWeb had a provocatively titled post, Real People Don’t Have Time for Social Media, yesterday which resonated strongly with me. I’ve long felt that the Web, and software in general, has only recently (read last couple of years ) started to be accessible to the masses, but the truth of the matter is that the barrier to entry is still too high for most people. What’s interesting though, is that the barrier is increasingly not the lack of specialized ‘geek’ knowledge, but the more typical constraint of time. And that my friends is why I’m so geeked about Jing.

I don’t know if Jing will ever become a product or be remembered in the annals of software history, but it does represent a revolutionary departure from ‘old school’ content creation tools which have a steep learning curve and require a substantial investment of time to create and deploy content. In its default configuration it requires almost no instruction on use while allowing nearly instantaneous creation and distribution of rich visual information.

It’s the ‘nearly instantaneous’ part which is really the key though. You see, multi-step workflows decrease the likelihood I’ll be an active content provider. Having to ‘think’ about deployment decreases the likelihood I’ll even make the effort to create the content in the first place. Even the possibility of making longer videos or editing decreases my chances of being an active content provider (post-production equals additional effort and thats an inhibitor).

The solution is really a no brainer. In order to increase social media participation you need to make the means of consuming and creating information as simple and intuitive as the capabilities we are born with. Hearing and seeing are physiological methods of perception–they’re hard wired into our brains. They, along with verbal communication, once acquired, have extremely low use barriers which is why we’re willing to leverage them on a frequent basis.

OK, so what does this have to do with Jing or social media participation? Good question. In order to increase participation we need a better means of communicating. I’m talking about organic software which empowers content creation and distribution and fosters community which leads me to John Nack. John threw down a post a while back discussing the potential of user generated help embedded within Photoshop.

Conceptually this idea sounds an awful lot like an application vertical of Jing (imagine Jing embedded seamlessly within Photoshop allowing the creation of five minute videos accessible and searchable from within a UI panel), but it was a comment response on the signal to noise ratio of user generated help which brought things full circle for me. High levels of noise (participation) reveal the real strength of community–volume of knowledge. Volume of knowledge in turn ensures a strong signal. Jing makes rich media noise effortless making it a critical facilitator of social media participation.

Call me crazy, but all of this leads me to believe that over the long run tools like Jing have much more potential than products such as Camtasia and Captivate. The pain to payoff threshold is just too high for old school tools to ever achieve the effortlessness needed for widespread participation.

Democratizing the Creation of Value

I’ve borrowed the title of this post from the Wikinomics site which describes how new communication technologies are reshaping the way the world does business by allowing the distributed voices of the rank and file to collaborate online.

Over the last decade some of the enormous untapped potential of the web has been realized as tools such as instant messaging have been complimented by blogs, wikis, and social networking platforms such as Facebook and MySpace. Rich media creation, presentation and distribution has also become accessible to the masses with the advent of cheap webcams, point and shoot digital cameras, and free software like Jing and Photoshop Express delivering media to sites like YouTube, Flickr and Screencast.com. And who would of thought even five years ago that behind the firewall corporate productivity suites would be threatened by the emergence of the web office space, but tools like Buzzword, Google Docs and SlideRocket are turning that once staid world inside out.

None of this is breaking news. Jeremy Alliare described the convergent technologies enabling and shaping this revolution early on and Tim O’Reilly set the tech world afire with his Web 2.0 description of the ‘new’ web. However, I think Wikinomics correctly hits on the core ramification–value is no longer locked up behind the firewall or in the boardroom. Content creation and distribution have become exceedingly easy (no longer confined to the geek class) allowing online collaboration to become richer and richer and thus more and more valuable. Look out, for better or worse, the genie is out of the bottle and is turning much of the business and social world as we know it on its head.

Props to my boy Aaron Silvers for turning me on to Wikinomics.

Flash Player Security Confusion

Maybe I’m not the sharpest tool in the toolbox, but it seems like every “security” related document I’ve ever read about Flash Player has been deliberately obfuscated to prevent ‘normal’ humans from understanding it. For instance, take a look at the example below regarding changes made to Flash Player 9.0.124 (image links to the article).

I had to read this sentence over several times before I felt like I understood the intent and I still wouldn’t stake much money on my interpretation. Even when drilling down and following the link it was several paragraphs before getting to what I believe is the salient point (its still not clear if I need to do anything if my web service doesn’t utilize request headers).

It’s absolutely insane that a security update to Flash Player that will ‘break’ existing content isn’t explained better. I’m not sure why concrete examples aren’t given that would help those not steeped in security lexicon understand the implications quickly and easily. For instance, it might be helpful to note that if you have a restful or SOAP web service (serves up xml) API which allows 3rd party content not hosted on your server to access the API, you’ll need to update your cross-domain policy file (at least this is what it seems like the the security bulletin is saying). I’m also assuming this effects all cross-domain data loading which means if you serve up JSON or AMF you’re impacted as well.

Yo Adobe, if you want to safeguard the reputation of Flash Player then you need to make this information a bit more friendly, clear and explicit–if only for obtuse folks like me. :)