Rush Limbaugh was released from the hospital today and says doctors found nothing wrong. It makes you wonder if the thousands of hysterical people wishing Rush Limbaugh death on Twitter are feeling a little foolish.
Online tools have played important roles in the Iranian protests; right from the start, the appearance of videos on YouTube and trending topics on Twitter helped spread awareness about the disputed presidential election.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command, otherwise known as NORAD is tracking Santa Claus’s rounds this year, keeping up a tradition that has been going on for 54 years. Norad has been working with Google for several years by way of Google Maps and Google Earth. Last year, they started using Google Analytics as well. Google is now sharing a video of last year’s Santa tracking: On the YouTube blog, Jeff Martin writes : Oooh, it’s almost Christmas! And that means that Santa is about to leave his digs at the North Pole to embark upon his ‘09 World Tour, placing presents under the trees of good little girls and boys all over the planet. Where will he be, and when will he make it to your house? You can find the answer at www.noradsanta.org . You see, every year, NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, tracks Santa’s journey from the time he lifts off from his Arctic village to his final stop in Hawaii at the end of a looooooooong night. You can join the ride at Noradsanta.org or try m.noradsanta.org if you prefer to do your Santa tracking on a mobile phone. You’ll also want to subscribe to the NORAD Tracks Santa YouTube channel , which will contain videos of many of his stops around the world, all captured by NORAD’s Santa Cam network. Check out the related articles below for our coverage of Santa tracking from years past. If you go to NORAD’s site , you can see a live countdown leading up to Santa’s flight. Have You Read This? > Tracking Santa’s Web Analytics > Google Teams With NORAD To Track Santa > Google To Track Santa With NORAD
Read more here:
Google/NORAD Santa Tracking About to Begin Again
Hulu has a new captions search feature available via Hulu Labs. The feature allows Hulu users to search the captions of videos across hundreds of different shows. Show and video pages now have a “Captions” tab, and search can be found there. “Recently I watched an episode of House, and they made a funny joke about the resemblance between Dr. Foreman (Omar Epps) and Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin. I couldn’t remember which episode it was in, let alone which moment of within the episode,” says Hulu’s Eugene Wei. “With the new caption search, I just type in ‘mike tomlin’, and voila.” Users can hover their cursors over images to get quick previews. It will show a short segment of a video centered around the search term. This will play in the thumbnail. This is a good example of how video search is going to be improving significantly. YouTube, the world’s most popular video site (and 2nd largest search engine) recently announced that it would be including automatic captions on videos . This makes videos much more searchable as far as dialogue goes. “One bonus that comes with caption search is what we’re calling the heat map. This is a visual graph of the user interest throughout the span of a video and is available on any captioned video that has accumulated enough user views,” says Wei. “It appears at the top of the captions tab for those videos. We analyze a variety of viewer behaviors to generate the heat map.” The heat map can be used as a navigation tool, and to find popular segments of video. Wei talks a bit more about the heat map aspect here . Hulu’s Caption search is still just a beta feature, so it is subject to imperfections. The site is openly encouraging feedback via feedback@hulu.com.
It should now be easier than ever for advertisers to get their videos in front of YouTube users in different countries.
PBS has partnered with YouTube to create a channel for its long running nightly NewsHour program. The YouTube Blog offers more details. “The PBS NewsHour channel on YouTube
More professionally-produced, full-length programming (along with a lot of clips) is coming to YouTube, thanks to a deal with a television channel called Five.