Video’s en filmpjes om je business te pushen krijgen plots een héél andere en vooral extra dimensie. Comments geven op filmpjes zijn meestal een meerwaarde maar dankzij een interessant project wordt dit nu nog interessanter. Wat als jij tweets kon verzamelen in de tijdslijn van jouw filmpje? Fantastisch toch? Timeline comments voor video zijn hier!
uTitle – Tweets in de timeline van video’s
Een tijdje geleden botste ik toevallig op een interessante post over het idee van time based comments voor video plaatsen. Martin Hawskey, e-learning Advisor in de UK (precieze details kan je best in het interview checken), was namelijk bezig met een dergelijk project uit te werken. Ondertussen zijn we een maand of 2 verder en staat het experiment op punt en kan jij er ook zelfs gebruik van maken voor jouw website.
Het principe is héél eenvoudig: je logt in met je Twitter account, post een tweet op het punt waar jij een comment wil plaatsen tijdens het afspelen van de video en deze wordt getoond in de tijdslijn. Een ferm stukje technisch vernuft waar ik gebruik van ga maken.
Om de boel wat meer open te gooien heeft Martin ook een WordPress plugin voor uTitle gemaakt en zelfs de source code online beschikbaar gesteld. Hopelijk krijgt deze plugin een kans en zet dit andere services aan tot het overschakelen op dergelijke video comments. Ik ben er fan van.
Ik ga niet teveel woorden meer verspillen. Check het filmpje, installeer de plugin en test het zelf even uit. De rest laat ik over aan Martin in het interview.
Interview met Martin Hawskey
Q: Can you introduce yourself in a few words. What do you do for a living? What are your goals?
My name is Martin Hawksey I live and work in Edinburgh. My day job is e-Learning Advisor (Higher Education) for the JISC Regional Support Centres (RSCs), specifically I work for RSC Scotland North and East. To explain a bit more about JISCand how the RSCs work, JISC is a government funded body created to assist UK colleges and universities in the innovative use of digital technologies for education and research. JISC fund a number of areas including the data connection between institutions (JANET), a wide range of infrastructure, innovative projects and studies, and a number of support services.
The RSC remit in at our Centre is to focus on the colleges and some of the smaller higher education institutions providing information about JISC services, ICT-related awareness-raising, support and training. Typically my role covers the broad areas of: supporting e-learning development, providing information and advice about national services and initiatives and building regional partnerships. As part of this I am interested in researching and disseminating how technologies like social networks and web applications can be used within education. This interest occasionally takes me out of my ‘official’ role, but my passion isn’t 9 to 5 so instead I like to develop some of my ideas in my own time.
Q: What is uTitle actually all about? Did you develop this for fun, out of frustration or for a certain purpose? Did you miss something in other services to come up with this idea?
uTitle has evolved from an earlier project called iTitle which was inspired by the work of Tony Hirst at the UK Open University. Previously Tony had developed a solution for creating a subtitle file of tweets around an event hashtag which could then be uploaded and played with a YouTube video. When he asked the community if this could be done with the BBC’s on-demand TV service iPlayer it was a challenge I had to accept and iTitle was born.
iTitle, with support from Tony, has since evolved to allow Twiiter ‘subtitles’ to be created and replayed with a wide range of media sources including YouTube, Vimeo and others. iTitle is all about transmission, the user consuming tweets from an event in the past contextualised with media from the event they were made in. To expand the idea away from broadcast and back towards on-demand, I thought it would be interesting to see what would happen if you provided an interface which would allow users to make time-based comments on videos using Twitter – uTitle (this video demonstrates an earlier version of the concept).
Time based commenting systems aren’t particularly new, other services like SoundCloud include the functionality for signed up members to make timeline comments on music tracks. The limitation for me are these comments are stuck in the SoundCloud system, distribution is limited to their network and it creates a barrier for social amplification. You can see a number of web services realise this, connecting with social network sites so that when you make a comment this is pushed out to your chosen networks, but I wanted to turn it around, using Twitter to make the original comment which is then picked up and displayed by the service. I obviously have no control over what YouTube picks up as a comment on a video so as well as providing an interface for making comments via Twitter, uTitle also detects and replays existing comments. Essentially uTitle is the glue, it pulls existing tweets from Twitter and the archive service Twapper Keeper, and videos from YouTube or Vimeo, nothing is stored locally.
Q: What for future do you hope uTitle will have / evolve into?
Currently uTitle sits on one of our hosted websites which isn’t ideal. The main issue is currently speed. As the code lookups existing comments from Twitter and Twapper Keeper each time the page is loaded the processing could really do with being put on a dedicated server. To help the experiment evolve I’ve open sourced the code and created a WordPress Plugin which makes it easier for blog owners include uTitle’d videos.
The next milestone will be the roll out of Twitter Annotations. Annotations will allow developers to attach some additional information (metadata) to a tweet without impacting a users 140 character limit. Currently uTitle identifies comments by searching for a video identifier hashtag and a separate timecode hashtag within a tweet, this means 140 characters become 120 which isn’t ideal.
Making the project open in terms or its source code and development as recorded on my blog I’m also interested in how other people develop the concept.
Q: Do you use this feature already for your clients of for yourself? Do you get positive feedback? Or do you still have to explain it’s possible impact to your clients/boss/marketing department?
uTitle is still very embryonic and it is too early to say if the concept will sink or swim. Part or the problem as I’m not interested in commercialising the idea I haven’t spent too much time pushing it. Certainly in terms of educational uses there is strong alignment between stimulating discussion resulting in learning. The problem with this sector is there is probably I widespread understanding or the positive impact service like Twitter can have on education.
A part of the uTitle concept which might mean it is too radical for mass adoption is currently there is no moderation of comments. Any comments tagged with a video identifier will appear as a comment with the video. Adding moderation is technically feasible but it moves uTitle away from being some ‘glue’ towards a full blown service like Disqus. For now I’m happy to keep it all open and see what happens.