Archive for the ‘Google’ Category
Google and The Arcade Fire Team Up for some HTML5 Goodness
Monday, August 30th, 2010HTML5 is everywhere. I know something is getting big when I hear my non-techie friends talking about it over a pint at the Loft. Now, with today’s release of The Arcade Fire’s interactive video (available only in the Chrome browser), a bigger chunk of the populous just got introduced to the coming wave that is HTML5.
There’s a screenshot from the adventure below, which includes a Google Maps-enabled run down the streets of my hometown (kinda – Google didn’t want to drive down all the lonesome roads of Wenatchee and I grew up on a private street) and a section where you write an HTML5-ized version of a post card to the past you.
Here’s the link to the video for my boyhood home: The Wilderness Downtown – Wenatchee Style
YouTube Rolls Out Site-wide Video Captioning
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010The previously announced auto-captioning beta on YouTube has finally gotten a site-wide roll out, but it’s still only available for English speaking countries. Although an extremely useful tool in theory, the results have been less-than-impressive for many users.
Voice recognition software has always gotten a bum rap from the beginning and no one has been able to get it quite right – though, not without a lack of trying. Even though Google’s technology is some of the best we’ve seen, it can’t escape the inevitable mistakes that plague voice recognition services. Engadget turned its critical eye on some of the more hilarious auto-captioning results:
Of course Google understands it’s not perfect and most users have come to expect a tolerable amount of error. YouTube offers the following caveats in their latest blog post:
- While we plan to broaden the feature to include more languages in the months to come, currently, auto-captioning is only for videos where English is spoken.
- Just like any speech recognition application, auto-captions require a clearly spoken audio track. Videos with background noise or a muffled voice can’t be auto-captioned. President Obama’s speech on the recent Chilean Earthquake is a good example of the kind of audio that works for auto-captions.
- Auto-captions aren’t perfect and just like any other transcription, the owner of the video needs to check to make sure they’re accurate. In other cases, the audio file may not be good enough to generate auto-captions. But please be patient — our speech recognition technology gets better every day.
- Auto-captions should be available to everyone who’s interested in using them. We’re also working to provide auto-captions for all past user uploads that fit the above mentioned requirements. If you’re having trouble enabling them for your video, please visit our Help Center: this article is for uploaders and this article is for viewers.
For users and companies with a massive backlog of un-captioned video content, this tool is an invaluable head start in the race to make their content accessible to everyone. It’s far from a turnkey solution and requires users to manually submit their video for captioning, then perform a secondary quality check that can sometimes be daunting, and finally do a manual language conversion for non-English captions. However, given the alternative, YouTube has made everyone’s jobs a hell of a lot easier. Spending the time updating your video’s captions now could pay huge dividends down the road as Google starts properly indexing video content.
The Real Winner of the Super Bowl: Google
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010It’s undeniable that the Saints and the people of New Orleans were the real winners of Sunday’s Super Bowl XLIV, but there was also a different battle being waged— not on the gridiron, but in 30 and 60-second intervals between stints of athletic prowess – the commercials.
Yes, the storied Super Bowl commercials were out in full force again this year, aiming to bring laughter, thought, and that sudden urge to reach for one’s wallet through the TV screen and into the real world. Where typical Nielsen ratings and surveys drop off, the world of social media will step up to fill the data void.
Using Radian6, we tracked Tweet volume of the top brands using a combination search of “Super Bowl” + “Brand Name” and here’s what we found . . .
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Chatter surrounding Google’s first-ever television venture, dubbed “Parisian Love,” overshadowed that of even the second-place finisher, Doritos, which ran more than four ads total during the game. Brands such as Audi, Bud Light, GoDaddy.com, and others saw continued success via the buzz and heightened talk around their brands in the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl. One advertisement that got a good deal of attention around the Web but didn’t translate into quite as much of an actual reaction on game day was the Focus on the Family 30-second piece featuring Heisman Trophy winner/ Florida quarterback Tim Tebow and his mother Pam Tebow.
Looking at brand mentions on game day, we were able to expand beyond Twitter to blogs, forums and other social sites to pull in brand mentions from a wider spectrum. The numbers collected go on to back up their heightened ranks in the Twitter mentions and show that those ads deemed important enough to tweet about were also important enough to be shared through other social media tools. The numbers broke down like this:
In order to see how the discussions moved through other social media channels, we widened our search for a period of 72 hours after the game and found some interesting aftershocks that we attribute to a second wave of users seeing and talking about the ads.
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Likewise, you can see the downstream effects of social sharing in the number of brand mention and YouTube video views for some of the most-popular ads. The Super Bowl ad game isn’t just a one-time impression number in the days of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, but instead is a game of staying power and resonance with users.
Audi clearly benefitted from the long-tail discussion of their Green Police spot in the days following the Super Bowl as it jumped in the rankings and pushed Tebow’s Focus on the Family spot off the top five.
So, while the Saints may have taken home the Lombardi Trophy, Google can sit back and enjoy their social Web win with their first foray into television advertising. Not only did they see the largest volume of Tweets the day of the game, they also saw the largest aftershock in the following days. In fact, for every tweet mentioning Google since the Super Bowl, they also received .7 discussions via blogs – that’s a pretty good rate.
So– well done, Google. But we already can’t wait for next year . . . who knows, maybe the answer to “Who Dat?” will be the Seahawks.
Harshtag
Thursday, March 5th, 2009@ EricSchmidt Don’t you think that an email system is kind of just a poor man’s version of a robust social media network? Plz discuss: http://tinyurl.com/aw5ml8
Google to Tweak Ad System
Friday, August 22nd, 2008If you do a lot of buying across search engines and networks like Google and LiveSearch, you’ll want to dig into this announcement from Google. Cnet has a top level overview about some upcoming changes to the way they “score” or “auction” the spots in which you can buy placement.
Cnet quotes the Google AdWords blog, which explains, “We are replacing our static per-keyword Quality Scores with a system that will evaluate an ad’s quality each time it matches a search query. This way, AdWords will use the most accurate, specific, and up-to-date performance information when determining whether an ad should be displayed.”
It seems one other interesting feature is that Google will recommend prices you should expect to pay in order for you to place at a high level, rather than the old way of just recommending a minimum price.
We’ll dig into this a little deeper in some of the forums, and ask the guys from Reach Machines to provide some more insight on how this might affect methodologies and strategies.
