I spend a lot of time recording and editing audio interviews for two shows: ITConversations and Perspectives. I also do a lot of interview-style screencasts. I’ve been meaning to write up a FAQ for interviewees, so here goes. Preparation As the interviewee, you need not prepare anything. Your life is the preparation. You might, however, … Continue reading FAQ for podcast (and screencast) interviewees

I’ve cobbled together a way to turn an Internet data feed into a video crawl that can run on my local public access cable TV channel. Before explaining how, I need to explain why. Here’s the short answer: As much as I want everyone to use the Internet for all it’s worth, most people don’t … Continue reading Turning Internet feeds into TV feeds

I’m loving YouTube’s new video annotation feature, which Phil Shapiro alerted me to. Lots of people are going to have lots of fun with that. If you remember when MTV first started doing popup video, you’ll have some idea how much fun. But from Phil’s perspective and mine, this is a seriously useful tool as … Continue reading Serious uses for YouTube’s new popup video feature

On this week’s ITConversations show I finally got to meet Jean-Claude Bradley, the Drexel chemistry professor who coined the phrase open notebook science and who champions the principles behind it. There were a couple of surprises for me. First, I was intrigued to learn about Jean-Claude’s vision for mechanized research. I’ve always thought of open … Continue reading A conversation with Jean-Claude Bradley about open notebook science and the educational uses of Second Life

This week’s Perspectives is a two-parter: an interview and companion screencast on the topic of cluster computing in the classroom. The interview is with Kyril Faenov, the General Manager of the Windows HPC (high performance computing) unit, and the screencast is with Rich Ciapala, a program manager for Microsoft HPC++ Labs. The project demonstrated in … Continue reading Cluster computing, with large data, for the classroom

Today I’m launching a new Microsoft-oriented interview series called Perspectives. The show will touch on a variety of topics including robotics, digital identity, e-science, and social software. I’ll be speaking mostly with passionate Microsoft innovators, and sometimes also with key partners from academia and industry. The format is an audio podcast and a blog, where … Continue reading Perspectives, a new interview series, launches today

While I was editing today’s screencast I kept a log of my edits, and I’ve included that log below. As is typical when I edit screencasts, this one squeezed down quite a lot: from almost 54 minutes to 34 minutes. The result not only saves the viewer a precious 20 minutes, but also unfolds in … Continue reading Behind the scenes: The editing of a screencast

I was pleased to see the announcement that Novell and Microsoft are collaborating on the User Interface Automation (UIA) stuff. My mom can use all the help she can get. But as I discussed in Automation and accessibility, beefing up our ability to automate software in a consistent way can give us huge leverage in … Continue reading From screencasting to automation

Back in July I interviewed Bill Crow about HD Photo, the image format that’s being considered for standardization as JPEG XR. One of the advantages of this new format, as Bill explained on his blog, is that it can preserve data that would normally be lost when a camera decides what color values to include … Continue reading How HD Photo will make happy snappers even happier

Tomorrow is the third anniversary of the term screencast. Taking stock, I’m reminded of all the uses of this medium we’ve seen since, and also of those still in the pipeline. The diagnostic use that I recommended to Mary Branscombe here is one of those still-emerging uses for most people. And after describing the Windows … Continue reading Jing’s the thing

In a comment on an item last month about Photo Gallery, Mary Branscombe writes: I’m having an issue at the moment where renaming a file in Windows Live Photo Gallery seems to reset the date on the file so WLPG sees a file from May 2006 as having been taken today. Has anyone else seen … Continue reading “It won’t repro”

Reacting to a Washington Post story on crime in Second Life, Gardner Campbell is troubled by calls for increased surveillance in virtual worlds. But while the notion of being watched by the authorities is as creepy in cyberspace as it is in the real world, we pay less attention to another kind of surveillance. Whether … Continue reading We are all watchers now

Hat tip to the CardSpace team for enabling “long tail” use of Information Card technology by lots of folks who are (understandably) daunted by the prospect of installing SSL certificates onto web servers. Kim Cameron’s screencast walks through the scenario in PHP, but anyone who can parse a bit of XML in any language will … Continue reading CardSpace for the rest of us

Beth Kanter made a birthday card for the third anniversary of the term screencast1, and included a screencast in which she reflects on her use of the medium, and on what the future may hold. Beth’s using Jing too, thinks it may be part of an emerging micromedia trend, and points to Jeremiah Owyang’s definition: … Continue reading Beth Kanter’s birthday card to screencasting

I’ve been doing some experiments to find out how the Silverlight plug-in will work as a player for screencasts. On this test page you’ll find four different versions of a 23-second clip. There’s one for Quicktime, one for Windows Media, one for Flash, and one for Silverlight. Some important variables, from a screencaster’s perspective, are: … Continue reading Silverlight for screencasters

It’s been a couple of years since Ray Ozzie kicked off the Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) initiative on his blog. It’s not so easy, by the way, to know exactly how many years it’s been. If you search for sse ray ozzie you’ll land on this page which is dated Nov 20, but no year … Continue reading From Simple Sharing Extensions to FeedSync

I was chatting the other day with Jim Hugunin about an earlier posting on automation and accessibility, and Jim highlighted a point that’s worth calling out separately. If you had a script that could drive an application through all of the things shown in a screencast, you wouldn’t need the screencast. The script would not … Continue reading Screencasting and scripting

A while ago I published a blog essay and screencast on the evolution from a folder-oriented to a tag-oriented metaphor for storing, organizing, and searching for digital objects. The subject of the screencast was Windows Photo Gallery, an application that lives at the intersection of those two metaphors. Since then, I’ve looked for opportunities to … Continue reading Tagging and foldering

I am an immediate fan of Common Craft’s style of concept videos. Their explanations of how and why to use del.icio.us and Google Docs are crisp and entertaining. They convey the essence of these activities more clearly than any other visual explanations I’ve seen, including many of the screencasts I’ve made. The style is called … Continue reading Appreciating Common Craft’s “paperworks” sketchcasts

In this week’s ITConversations show with Matt MacLaurin we discuss Boku, a programming environment in which kids can create their own games. What inspired Matt to create Boku was the following observation: If I’m a kid today, looking at the computer, am I going to see it as an art tool, as something that’s there … Continue reading Matt MacLaurin on creative expression with Boku

When I read this story about cancer care in the Sunday New York Times yesterday, I was struck by one particular information graphic which I thought was very nicely done: It turns out that Chris Gemignani was impressed too, and he decided to recreate the image using Excel. Here’s what he came up with: Going … Continue reading Chris Gemignani recreates a New York Times infographic in Excel

Today’s 4-minute screencast, which explores Vista’s common feed system, serves multiple purposes. First, I wanted to familiarize myself with this stuff, and do so in a way that would elicit responses that help me understand how other folks are reacting to it. I am intensely interested in the reasons why people do or don’t take … Continue reading A screencast about common feeds in Vista

Hans Rosling has been justly acclaimed for a couple of TED talks on global health in which he makes mesmerizing use of his (and now Google’s) GapMinder software, which he uses to tell compelling stories with data. The software is very cool, but what really makes the stories come to life is Rosling’s narrative. Data … Continue reading Data analysis as performance art

Henrik Frystyk Nielsen used to work for the World Wide Web Consortium on some key pieces of infrastructure including the HTTP specification and libwww. He left the W3C in 1999 and now works for Microsoft where his current project is Robotics Studio, whose tagline is: “A Windows-based environment for academic, hobbyist and commercial developers to … Continue reading Henrik Frystyk Nielsen on the RESTful architecture of Microsoft Robotics Studio

Last month in an item about working with crime data I asked: Will there be a role for IronPython (or IronRuby) here, someday, such that you could use these languages inside Excel? That’d be very cool. Several folks suggested that I should take a look at Resolver, an IronPython-based spreadsheet that deeply unifies Pythonic object-oriented … Continue reading First look at Resolver, an IronPython-based spreadsheet

While I’m back on the topic of screencasting, I’ve been meaning to mention another important use of the medium. Recently a colleague reported severe trouble trying to present demos that rely on a live connection to the Internet. My solution is a variation of the old joke: Patient: It hurts when I do that. Doctor: … Continue reading Screencasting for public speakers

Recently I began keeping track of interesting public data sources using the del.icio.us tag judell/publicdata, and invited others to do the same using their own del.icio.us accounts. That method sets up an interesting pattern of collaboration whereby all contributions flow up to the global bucket, tag/publicdata, but individual contributors can curate subsets of that collection … Continue reading Revisiting language evolution in del.icio.us

I’m always finding surprising new uses for screencast technology, and yesterday was another revelation. On Tuesday I left the MIX show for Berkeley, where I gave a talk at the School of Information to a group that included some of the students whose projects I discussed in my podcast with Bob Glushko and AnnaLee Saxenian. … Continue reading Screencasting and map exploration