Here are a few things to consider when analyzing the depth of the problem:

• Reusable content, the raison d’être of SCORM / AICCC, sounds like a great idea, but never materializes. It turns out that organizations want to completely customize and tailor their learning experiences so reuse just falls flat on its face. I’ve found it to be near impossible to achieve reuse across departments within a single organization, let alone industry wide. Even with soft skills, companies rarely are willing to use a generic presentation. Its always amazing to me to see the lengths and expense organizations will go to chase reusable content without ever achieving it.
• Testing (SCORM + LMS) has been a failure. Despite all the fancy API features you still can’t reliably certify results. Physical environments and instructors are still required for anything needing mission critical result certification. We might as well be using simple survey tools rather than bloated standards.
• The cost of developing lean forward elearning experiences is at least an order of magnitude greater than its pitched at. In fact elearning is pitched as a cost saver when in reality its usually a net loss. Most elearning is PPT based because the cost of creating a compelling experience from an SME’s physical course is so high (at least that’s been my experience).
• Every LMS / LCMS vendor I’ve worked with gets a FAIL. They’re bloated, difficult to administer and use, and often require organizations to wrap their infrastructure around them (which just doesn’t happen too much). Again these tools are pitched as cost savers, but typically require full-time administrators and the large vendors have notoriously bad service track records.
• Distributed content / repositories reign supreme whether on the Web or across organizations. Again the LMS / LCMS get a FAIL and SCORM SCOs have had little tangible value.
• A real infrastructure and community never really developed, at least not on the scale we should reasonably expect. Actually you could say the Web raced ahead and that search (GOOGLE), Wikipedia, Creative Commons, etc. form the backbone of real elearning. Adding community features doesn’t mean your going to build a great community and standardization here might hurt more than it helps.
• The elearning industry failed to fundamentally improve the old classroom led paradigm. Big institutions still employ SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) as course developers and instructors. The elearning movement as we know it has largely failed to create tools that can effectively allow SMEs to create elearning courseware. This meant the introduction of a new class employees–IDs (Instructional Designers) and Courseware Developers. In most cases we’re talking about new hires under different managers and even departments. There’s a huge level of distrust between these groups based on paranoia, ego and organizational allegiance. All of this results in increased operational overhead (financial and development).

All this said, there are some really fantastic people in the elearning world–maybe they’re going to kick some ass and surprise me with SCORM 2.0. :-P

I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone, outside the DOD / ADL who doesn’t think SCORM and AICC are over engineered pieces of junk. And the LMS / LCMS products and vendors engender pure hate at every contact point whether purchaser, content develoeprs, admins or end users. Do a couple of white-papers do anything to help remedy the situation?

It’s weird that companies make so little effort to understand the psychology. It’s as if they just want some mechanical lever they can pull. I’m guessing the anonymity of advertising buys, whether web, radio or tv has created this disconnect. You pay an outside firm to think about your brand, then yet another to think about how to connect your brand / products / services with an audience and then hire a mass distributor to crop dust your freshly commissioned message. When pressed to communicate internally you hide behind a PowerPoint and commission “white papers” to be handed out to customers who want to look deeper than your tag line. On second thought its crystal clear why these companies are failing. The only thing protecting them from the consumer apathy they inspire is monopoly money (corporate Amex) and strategic spending (use it or lose budgeting).

Whether its actually harder to raise awareness is an intriguing question. Sure there are more startups than ever and therefore a lot more noise, but the audience is also much bigger–a lot more people are online and engaged. Better development and communication tooling in conjunction with self-broadcasting at scale contribute to the noise, but also make it easier to find and collaborate with people of like mind and distribute your message.

I’d argue that consumers are increasingly sophisticated and impatient which means you have to be very skilled at building both your products and your message. It’s not enough to just make a great product–you need web style WOM business / marketing savvy and a bit of old school polish to boot. Get one side of the equation wrong and people will blow right by–they’ve got too many choices and too little time otherwise (maybe that’s all Hank was really saying).

It feels like some aspects of the industry are simply maturing. I believe Danah Boyd and others have pointed out that the tech industry has a long way to go before its branding / marketing reaches the level of sophistication found in the brick and mortar world. Pure utility isn’t enough, you have to start selling lifestyle which we sometimes call “experience” in the software world. As the lifestyle + utility play matures consumers will inevitably become ever more bored until eventually businesses will spend more time entertaining their audience in an effort to overcome consumer skepticism (Super Bowl commercials come to mind).

Of course while the tech world is in some ways an infant it also represents an evolution. This translates to the often surreal experience of advergaming (interactive, entertaining advertising), funded, for the most part, by slick sophisticated old world brands (old world being brick and mortar in this context) and delivered side-by-side with the redneck desktop shareware and terrible 2.0 web markets. Sort of makes you smile when you think about it. It’s still the Wild West and that makes it the place to be if you’ve got a round or two in the chamber and the taste for adventure.

With that out of the way we can move on to another deficiency of mine–regular expressions. I don’t know diddly squat here, and usually avoid them like the plague or hope that Google or some fancy tool will just magically save my ass. There’s something about that compact, no white space syntax with all of its black magic quantifiers, metacharacters and metasequences and obtuse flags that brings out that first day of kindergarten feeling and sends me off to my feed reader. Oh, but back to the point. The other day I was asked to use a whitelist to validate filenames that the Screencast.com server can’t handle. It had been a year since I even wrote a regular expression, so of course I was crapping my pants. Obviously, I immediately Googled ActionScript RegExp whitelist, but came away with nada.

So there I was, left forlornly looking at the Flash / Flex docs with the realization that I was going to have to figure this one out on my own. And so I dug in and spent an hour or two reading the docs and playing around in the Flash script window (its still my choice for just sitting around and riffing, even though I spend most of my time staring at butt-ugly Eclipse–I’ll take the ugly though since Eclipse makes me “feel like a real developer”). Turns out RegExp are both a nightmare and not so bad. I think this is like the 5th time I’ve said that to myself though, so maybe its just safer to conclude I’m an idiot. Regardless, I was able to take a list of valid characters that the server folks handed over and determine if any filename the user wants to upload includes invalid characters (yep, now you know why Yegge makes me feel stupid).

On the off chance there’s some other developer mortified off their ass and desperately Googling for an ActionScript RegExp whitelist I’ve included a screenshot of some basic stuff that might help you out.

Oh and since some people get angry when they try to copy and paste code out of screen grabs, here’s some text (I’m too lazy to mark it up to look pretty which is why the screenshot came first).

// some simple basics
// no constructor expression literal
var p1:RegExp = /[a-z]/i; // pattern is case insensitive search for any a through z character
// the i is a flag indicating case insensitivity

while ( match != null )
{
match = pattern.exec( data );
if ( match != null )
{
trace ( match.index + “: ” + match[0] );
}
}


Grant’s free RegExr tool is also helpful when you’re trying to gain a better understanding of regular expressions, but I found I had to dig in a little and understand some basics (again) before I could come back to it (you guessed it, Grant makes me feel like an idiot as well).

I’m also a fan of RegexBuddy, but alack my Windows days are long behind me and they haven’t stayed current with cross-platform coolness.

I’m guessing based on “the dance” here that we can’t expect any actual deep linking to automagically appear.

Right now we’re being spoon fed information. What I’m hoping to hear soon are the implementation details. SEO is effective because it can be exploited. People just relying on the search engines to “get it right” often aren’t all that happy–you’ve got to be on the first page. This means, like most things, the devil is in the details.

So you cats at Adobe can read this as the first wave was effective. I’m tuned in–alert and listening. Now feed me more.

I’m obviously not in the loop and can’t add much, but it was curious that Adobe, by the looks of the announcement, is not collaborating with Microsoft. Google and Yahoo get mentioned like eight times, but no love for the girls in Redmond. I’m just wondering if this is because:

1. Microsoft, as a distant third, in the Search game is irrelevant and not worth the effort to collaborate with.
2. Microsoft, as a distant third, is being collaborated with, but is irrelevant.
3. Microsoft is not interested and is choosing not to offer a service to a direct competitors platform file format.

I mean they’re still giving out bronze medals in the Olympics aren’t they? Curious omission in otherwise good news for those of us living off the platform.

*Update*

If you read the fine print (the actual message from the suits) there’s a vague declaration about wanting to make the technology more broadly available…whatever that means. ;-P

However, during the process I started to have that sinking feeling; “this takes too much time, I don’t think I’ll do it more than once or twice.” This sucks because I really like wine (full bodied reds) and want to learn, share and interact with others who know a hell of a lot more than I do. I’d like to bookmark and rate what was good, get reviews from others and have shopping / wish lists filled. Turns out I’m not alone and someone in the same shoes had already expressed a better idea.

I think it’s pretty clear that Cork’d has transaction costs which are too high for many, if not most, enthusiasts to bear. The reward of “bottle bookmarking”, or getting a review isn’t enough to outweigh the pain of taking notes, writing reviews and tagging. Ultimately some form of these features is probably part of a potential success story, but too often we just assume that a great idea and a web presence with social features (tagging, ratings, comments, friends, api, media) is all that it takes. Services have to do more than fill a void, they have to find the pain and then assuage it. Bring the service to the customer rather than forcing them to come to you.

The ideal social site for wine looks an awful lot like Cork’d except it has a mobile, rich media twist (phone pics as Justin notes). Combine that with a catalog of vintners / vintages and OCR technology capable of extracting label and vintage information from the bottle and you’re well on your way to having transaction costs low enough to inspire repeated, consistent use. Then you bring in tagging and ratings that are proactively suggestive and wine enthusiasts will eagerly provide the body of knowledge and social networking needed to make the service thrive.

Oh and did I mention there are business models here? I’m sure Google and the other search brats would love to place targeted ads for the thousands of wine retailers and wholesalers out there. A retailer with web presence like Wine Library or a consortium of wine retailers / wholesalers would be perfectly happy to have an active social network on their property with the ability to fire off an order with a single button press. Hell, bring Amazon into the mix and pass them the shopping lists generated on the social site. Amazon takes a small fee, passes some back to the social network operators and lets local distributors actually fill the orders–it’s a win, win for everyone.

In short, we need to be better at connecting the cloud to people. Find their passions and bring the service to them. It’s that simple.

Bill Gates was smart and exploited every opportunity that he could. However, it’s just as easy to make the argument that the industry is still trying to recover from they way he ruthlessly exploited Microsoft’s scale. It’s fine to recognize Mr. Gates’ actual achievements, but spare us the grandiose drivel.

The use of constituencies rather than parties is telling. The American political system’s implementation of Montesqueian separation of powers provides a durable, but extremely rigid political system by pitting institutions against each other (gridlock). The US system also uses a single member district plurality / winner-takes-all voting system that promotes two-party entrenchment. This balanced, if unwieldy, system tends to constrain American political thought within a well defined sphere of ideals or political realities (one of the reasons for the dearth of great political thought from within one of the modern world’s earliest democracies). What’s not clear is if Mark’s take is a sin of ommission–the result of an American cultural tendency to assume an immutable democratic process–or a nuanced understanding of realpolitik (in a domestic political connotation).

I’m left wondering, perhaps naively, whether lower transaction costs in the political sphere have resulted in a tsunami (party and process change) which we just aren’t aware of because we are in the relatively deep, open water the system, process and cultural bias provide; or whether we’ll just see wildly spectacular, but relatively unremarkable surface waves (issue constituencies emerging within the big-tent, two-party system). Technology has so far failed to deliver easier participation in actual democratic action (voting), but is successfully connecting people and values in social networks with which they can influence rather than act. The question is how empowering are these networks and just how much change can they exact? Will they be subsumed by the existing modus operandi, or fundamentally change the system?

Realistic video search seems to be a long ways off from where I sit, but I’m not sure I buy how disruptive tagging actually is. Yep, I’ve read Shirky, I use del.icio.us regularly and I appreciate and argue for tagging in the applications and services I use. The problem is I actually loathe it. Most of the time I can’t be bothered to tag anything. I’m lazy. I don’t tag diddly squat in Lightroom, and find tagging in del.icio.us a chore (I appreciate it later on when I’m looking something up, but man does it suck during creation). Granted, I’m a weirdo, but I don’t think I’m alone in being a belligerent and lazy tagger.

In my view it’s going to be up to client software to automatically tag items for me. Working for a screen capture / screen recording company I often think of this in terms of the the recording client tracking what application I’m using or what URL I’m visiting and attaching metadata to my output. This “contextual use” data would be stored alongside things that normally come to mind when you think of automatically generated metadata — time, operating system, geographic location, etc.

When you combine baseline metadata with contextual information I think you end up meeting the “good enough” threshold Bernard establishes (sprinkle in some good old demographic data and things get even more interesting). And this approach is not confined to screen recording clients and the media they spit out. All content creation clients need to get “smart” and provide this extra layer of data, or at least expose it as a set of automatic default tags which can easily be cleared away or supplemented.

Perhaps I’m just not seeing the forest for the trees — the open, public social media repositories on the web and massive scale of users may mean that none of us actually have to tag all that much. Or maybe speech recognition is all that’s needed to really need to drive down the tagging pain threshold. If you’ve got insight, I’m listening.

Call it old media, or old software, but one thing is clear — neither seems to really know who the hell their audience / customers are. You see this reflected back in passive ads that fail to engage (why pay attention if what I’m watching has no relevance to me) and unsightly, uncompelling software that’s difficult to use.

It’s no longer possible to assume a broad and captive audience, but that’s a good thing if you’re a content creator, advertiser or software developer that has a deep understanding of who your audience is and where they’re at.

To pull a Clay Shirky, the real problem is that the distribution of video is no longer monetizable. Control of delivery guaranteed “final cut” over content creation and total leverage over monetization. Since relatively little could be known about the viewing audience (who was watching and their level of interest) only mass market content was financed and marketed to consumers and advertisers. This is any easy system to administer for distributors and advertisers, but is extremely inefficient.

Other factors also have contributed to the old model’s decline. Television replaced radio as the only game in town for a largely rural / suburban population, but has since been challenged by the increasing number of entertainment options available to a highly mobile and increasingly urbanized population. Combine these factors with the rise of social computing and interactive media and you have a lethal cocktail.

As with most things, I see a lesson in software development here. Old software assumes a broad, apathetic, if not quite passive, audience and tries to lock them into a one-size fits all model. Old software doesn’t really understand its audience, so it tries draw an audience by offering a smorgasbord of diluted features. Old software won’t be effective in making an emotional connection with its audience (beyond anger) and isn’t relevant enough to withstand cost or vertical pressure.

…at least that’s the way I see it. :-)

In the software industry we often pride ourselves on iteration and view the ability to quickly change an interface as inherently good. It’s nice to be reminded of the costs of “improvement”.

Danah Boyd on personalization within the context of tailored branding:

Bret Victor on context-sensitive information graphics:

One of the reasons Flash has been so important to the brand conscious on the web, is because its ability to present emotional, powerful branded aesthetics combined with rich contextualization. What Danah and Bret do extremely well is explain why this is important. Going forward I’d argue that most software–desktop, web, RIA, or otherwise–will be judged by the market on its ability to deliver the two pillars of rich experience:

• personalization
• contextualization

Here’s what gets returned to me by Jing after clicking the “embed / tag” button:

However, what I really want most of the time is an image (img) tag wrapped by an anchor (a) tag. The anchor tag contains the link to the article where the screenshot was taken:

I call this technique disclosure to context (maybe “establishing shot” is more apt–spit it out if you have something better). Annotated screenshots and screencasts are brilliant at providing micro-context (hey, this over here is what I find interesting), but fall flat when providing macro-context (where the hell did this come from and why can’t I see). If you put them together however, you have the ability to “stream” what you find salient within its broader context - a more cerebral form of lifestreaming. There’s all kinds of contexts where this can be used…maybe I’ve stumbled on a new microblogging format (jingstream, screenstream, dstream - desktop stream, vstream - virtual stream).

I’d love to know if anyone knows of a microformat which does this for items that don’t have a web URI (this is my image and this is the application, or context, it came from). Also any pearls on embedding this type of information within the binary file itself with XMP, or otherwise, gets you a beer or my undying gratitude the next time I run into you. ;-)

Why screenshots of the UI? Like it or not, everyone considers themselves a UI expert. An application or website UI is likely to draw a considerable amount of feedback (or ire — anyone remember the great Adobe icon debacle of ‘06). In the case of the “icon debacle” by releasing previews early Adobe was able to free the actual product release window from considerable negative noise by showing the icons early and engaging in a dialog with the protestors. Adobe didn’t change the icons, but it gave consumers a chance to digest the change and develop an alternative set of icons that could be used if you were a hater.

A stream of ui screenshots seems like a trick every product marketer / PM should have in their bag. What I’d really like to see is a stream that went from start to finish. It would be great to see the complete evolution of ideas from the initial designer comps to the final build. On release day throw together a time lapse video and you’ve got ready made marketing Kool-Aid that illustrates the hard work and refinement that went into the release.

For the record, I liked the CS 3 icons then and still like ‘em now. ;-P

• Read file info (basic metadata).
• Split or cut files.
• Merge two or more files.
• Convert to iPod.

Read basic file info from an MPEG-4 file:

Split / extract / cut an MPEG-4 file:

Read the info from one of our splices and make sure we’re getting what we expect:

Concatenate / merge multiple MPEG-4 files:

Merged file information:

Convert to iPod file:

MP4Box is a GPAC project, but they only distribute the source (no binary downloads). If you are like me and not keen to try and get Make to compile the source you can grab a binary from here. One last thing–read the docs–you’ll be amazed.

An empty wiki page.

Downloads MIA.

I tried to hit the SWFFix dev blog to check for additional insights and found that if I tried to get to it via a google search (hitting the top link named ‘SWFFix Dev Blog’) it redirects to a domain parking page.

I hit the top link in the search results with a URL that matches what I want

I end up redirected someplace else.

If I type the url (http://www.swffix.org) manually I get to the blog without issue. However, there’s no mention of any Google Code issues.

…Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. I did another Google search for SWFObject 2 and this time the search results sent me the actual repository. It turns out my first search results had led me, (for some unknown reason) to a Google Code Project with a nearly identical URL.

The actual Google Code project.

The incorrect Google Code project.

Easy mistake to make, but what the hell is up with Google giving me craptacular / inconsistent search results and the results resolving to different urls than they should be?

…I’ve got my eye on you Google.