The Ayman and Naaman Show

From about 7 days of use of the latest Microsoft Office software (I guess that would be Office 2007), on both the Mac and the PC (using VMWare), I have to say I am blown away. Didn’t think Microsoft can come out with such lovely software. I love the submenu grouping, the templates and auto-formatting (e.g., for Word tables) and layouts (for PowerPoint). There are some new PowerPoint features like snap-to-align and a set of quite beautiful presentation templates (unlike any of the old boring ones) that make it pretty close to replacing Apple’s Keynote (not quite yet). Just thought I’d say it.

Also, their Seinfeld-Gates videos are funny.

Still as evil as Ayman, though.

Work has me transcribing video footage these days. While the work is interesting, I thought to make a footswitch…makes the transcribing easier. Armed with an Arduino, a VOX amp pedal and a little bit of code, I made my first instructable.

This growing repository of procedural knowledge is pretty sweet. A happy stomping!

My grande latte friend likes to think in pictures. Most people tend to gravitate towards text…or at least its easier to build texty things over imagey things (where you apparently have a fight on your hands).

Thus began the hunt to mix text into video in a meaningful way. Nico Nico did something stunning with regard to design and implementation. Occlude the video - show the comments. In a sense, the video becomes a MacGuffin.

Really, it is quite something - the above video is someone cooking chicken. The sad thing is - there is no English version of the site…I did manage to log in by setting the language to Spanish. Running with the idea, Anodos decided to kick it up a notch (or back) over to the sofa:

The $2,000 prototype gives you that MTV4 SMS comment stream on any TV channel you might be watching…course its a hardware tv widget. I’m left wondering (and hoping) if this is becoming a style of virtual temporal graffiti.

Jim Wilkie Smiling politely

I always enjoy trying to think about new research methods or employing some innovative approach to different elements of the study. At Y!RB (RIP), we have even tried several new things, including one pretty successful “integrated” solicitation for a study on Zurfer (not RIP yet: use it!).

That’s why I greatly enjoyed running into the following call-to-action inside a simple Facebook display ad:

PhD Jim Needs You: Find yourself with time to kill? Why not help a PhD student by taking 3-10 min. online studies? You can win prizes for each completed!

Complete the ad with a picture of Jim smiling smugly from ear to ear, and I couldn’t help by clicking through to Jim’s Facebook group, where he collects participants and distributes studies. Help Jim Wilkie*, research czar, get a biased sample of the world**, right here!

* A Northwestern PhD student - Ayman, and I thought nothing good came out of Northwestern since the PhD student that graduate ahead of you!

** I hope his studies are not sensitive to this selection bias.

Frank reports on a bad experience with the NBC Olympics site - the 200m dash may have been the fastest ever, but NBC took their sweet time putting the footage on their site. I had the same experience a few days ago, when Bolt made a joke out of 7 other runners and the world record on the 100m dash (yes, I was going to write about it anyway, but thanks Frank for the trigger). I heard about the race (having taken place in some ungodly US hour) in the morning, from the news and from a friend that called from Israel. Immediately heading to the NBC website, I was disappointed to only find an article about the race and no link to video - not even “video will be published at XX:YYpm” that would have saved me a couple of minutes of fruitless exploration of their site.

Turning to YouTube was mostly useless - it’s too popular now and the copyright police patrols it often enough (I did find one low-quality recording that was almost enough to satisfy my curiousity). The savior? an Israeli news website that did not block non-Israeli visitors.

So, NBC is delaying posting of videos to rescue their prime-time coverage. But with alternative global sources, and various pirating methods that easily escape copyright, all they are doing is losing and alienating viewership. Great job! The most annoying bit in all this is that the prime-time coverage does its best to hide the fact that the races are pre-recorded and shown with considerable delay. Tell it like it is, NBC! Start getting used to a new media world.

Not unlike my other friends, Naaman decided to draw my attention to Omnisio’s acquisition.  Now its not like we all haven’t seen this before.  Google’s acquisition, well, it just follows the time.

At Yahoo! Research Berkeley, we investigated the hypercontexts around sharing and linking videos through social constructs.  Last year we claimed pragmatics are more important than semantics.  It was a pretty bold research move (but was typical of myself and my tall colleague).

The core of whats happening here (and hopefully Google knows their purchase is indicative of this) is we dont always consume media for content.  We watch videos to be conversational.  We watch videos to add or listen to commentary.  For example, violence during a soccer match can be conversationally funny—we saw the hilarity ensue. YouTube’s annotations were a start but I didn’t see much come of it.  Maybe Omnisio will help.  The tricky part is making something useful available to people, be it in sync or async. Oh, and you should checkout Andy Baio’s use of Viddler; its my favorite video tagging usage to date.

So, I made a bold statement some time ago. I declared the Semantic Web dead, and started a conversation (e.g., SEW). Unfortunately, although not unexpectedly, many articles took the title from that post at face value, and did not bother looking inside. Thus, some people never found out that I never thought or claimed that semantic technologies are dead - just that the capital-lettered Semantic Web is dead.

Since I wrote about the “death” of the Semantic Web (now first search result on Google and Yahoo! if you look for ‘semantic web dead‘), I am proud to say, Yahoo! has been making some great progress in enabling - and motivating - the small-lettered “semantic web”. SearchMonkey in particular generates powerful motivations for developers to use lightweight semantics for their content. The benefits of these semantics could outweigh the effort, finally tipping the scale towards inclusion of semantics in key web applications - and in search.

Why am I reminded of this topic now? Search Engine Watch (again!) posted a good write up yesterday summarizing the views of Peter Mika (of Yahoo! Research Barcelona, “the last existing Y!RB“) about the semantic web. They do a rather good job quoting him, I guess, but a horrible job quoting me (”Naaman’s reasoning was the limitation of microformats” - in fact I claimed the opposite, the light-weight formats will enable and drive the available semantics).

More on the semantic web later, I am sure.

Updated: fixed source of recent article.

It seems like everything had been said about Chad Dickerson (who happens to be my boss) leaving Yahoo!. So instead of saying something new, I decided to take what was said by everyone (on Twitter, that is), visualized as a TagCloud using Martin and Fernanda’s ManyEyes project.

OK, I’ll add a few words of myself. For Chad’s new employees: you will be happy to come to work. Even Ayman will agree to that.

* The Twitter data was download using Summize, using a very short script I wrote last week for other purposes; more about my experiments with Twitter later, I hope

Facebook ads are not rolling said company to high financial grounds quite yet, but the impact of the platform is getting its lingo used in ads elsewhere. For example, Brazil, on a bus station in New York:

Unfortunately, unlike the Facebook page, there’s nowhere to click.

Only 2,128 fans? All the Brazilians still on Orkut?

hey naaman? did you get a new iPhone yet? i figure you must have since you tend to geo-code maps into most all of your day to day activities. recently a friend of mine pointed out that the GPS is not accurate enough to give turn by turn directions. as a result, we resulted to using me (ayman) to navigate from south park to the in-n-out at pier 39. so i got to wondering, how does a friend compare to your iPhone? lets take a little run down of the features:

so you see naaman, while its a tough heat when you look at the feature list, i am clearly more superior than the iPhone 3g. the question is, do you still have that beta invite code? b/c if not, i dont think you could afford the upgrade.