Month: November 2008

captions: helping users, helping yourself

YouTube now supports video captions.  Captions are uploaded as a separate text file.  YouTube also provides automatic translation of these captions into many languages.  Web tools for creating caption files are free and easy to use.  I recently used overstream to create captions for a docudrama some friends and I made.  Making captions takes time and is an art in itself, but technically it is now easy to do.

Even in its “advanced search” page, YouTube doesn’t offer search limited to captioned videos. Search limited to captioned videos would be an easy feature to implement, because the associated caption file readily indicates a captioned video.[1]  This search type would be helpful to deaf and hard-of-hearing persons.  Moreover, a person’s use of it would provide valuable information for delivering useful ads to that person, e.g. social events and social networks for deaf and hard-of-hearing persons, hearing aids and accessories, etc.

YouTube has a lot of room to improve its revenue.  It could implement a premium-paid tier, which might offer videos longer than 10 minutes and better video quality. Its search-choose model with Video ID has much potential.  YouTube has added video annotations, which users value and which over time will provide more information for targeting advertisements.  The APIs for its video platform will over time provide more information for targeting advertisements.  Despite all the hype about Hulu’s revenue, I still think that worse content with higher-value advertising can beat better content with lower-value advertising.

Note:

[1] Videos with captions included within the video stream would be much harder to identify.  Unlike the “closed captions” discussed above, these “captured captions” can’t be turned off and on, can’t be automatically translated, and can’t be searched as text.  The presence of videos with captured captions doesn’t seem to me to be a good reason for not providing search limited to (closed) captions.

real-time visual communication

Real-time visual communication using a mobile phone doesn’t seem to be happening.  Working with Kodak, Motorola announced early this month the Motozine ZN5.  It’s relatively cheap mobile phone with a high-quality digital camera.  Sharing a photo with this device means uploading the photo to a website or emailing it.  So the Motozine ZN5 isn’t a show-and-tell communicator.

Other developments suggest possibilities for innovation.  Pure Digital Technologies has trumped the large, established consumer electronics companies with its easy-to-use Flip Video camcorders.  Since the launch of Flip Video in May, 2007, more than 1.5 million of the camcorders have been sold.  The Flip Video Ultra is now the top-selling camcorder in the U.S. Perhaps a lesson: a real-time visual communicator will have to be easy to use, but a small, new company’s easy-to-use device could be successful against a large variety of devices from traditional mobile phone providers.

Google recently announced voice and video chat conveniently integrated into Gmail.  Video chat from a desk-top computer provides much less interesting communicative context then video chat (or photo sharing) from a mobile device. But possibilities for mobile devices will surely expand rapidly with the development of the Android platform. So the innovation necessary to produce a successful real-time visual communicator will occur in an open field for device design.

Despite little evidence of it thus far, real-time visual communication still seems to me to be a propitious area for future communications industry growth.

Hammurabi’s code on social relations in ancient Mesopotamia

Ancient Mesopotamian legal codes had broad purposes.  For example, the Code of Hammurabi, written in the city of Babylon about 1760 BGC (about 3768 years ago), declares as its purposes:

to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak; … [to] enlighten the land, to further the well-being of mankind. … Hammurabi, the protecting king am I. … [I] brought prosperity to the land, guaranteed security to the inhabitants in their homes; a disturber was not permitted. … That the strong might not injure the weak, in order to protect the widows and orphans, .. in order to bespeak justice in the land, to settle all disputes, and heal all injuries, set up these my precious words

The Code of Ur-Nammu, written in the city of Ur about three hundred years before the Code of Hammurabi, specifies in its preface:

Ur-Nammu … in accordance with his principles of equity and truth … [did] establish equity in the land; he banished malediction, violence and strife … the orphan was not delivered up to the rich man; the widow was not delivered up to the mighty man; the man of one shekel was not delivered up to the man of one mina [sixty shekels].

The Code of Hammurabi, like other ancient Mesopotamian laws, represents the ruler as a father to his subjects.  Consistent with this idea, it and other ancient Mesopotamian laws recognize the vulnerability of widows and orphans, who are persons without male benefactors/protectors.[*]  Yet, in contrast to the position of the male ruler, whose power and riches the laws glorify,  the Code of Ur-Nammu specifically condemns a high-status [“one mina”] man exploiting a low-status [“one shekel”] man.  This concern for low-status men is less conceptually consistent,  more unusual, and less appreciated than the father-ruler’s concern for widows and orphans.

An all-powerful king’s concern for low-status men probably responds to the social obviousness of some men’s extreme exploitation of other men in ancient Mesopotamia.  Ancient Mesopotamian social structure (and the law codes themselves) clearly distinguished classes of persons, including a numerous class of chattel slaves.  A free man could be made a slave as punishment for crime or debt.  One man making another man into a slave is an extreme form of exploitation. Because exploitation of men was so extreme and so obvious, the all-powerful king declared implicitly that only he had authority to exploit other men.

Hammurabi issuing Code of Hammurabi

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Note:

[*] The epilogue to the Code of Hammurabi imagines and represents a subject figuring Hammurabi as a father: “Hammurabi is a ruler, who is as a father to his subjects, … who has bestowed benefits for ever and ever on his subjects, and has established order in the land.”

[image] Hammurabi, King of Babylon, issuing the Code of Hammurabi. Bas-relief on the Stele of Hammurabi. Made between 1793 and 1751 BGC. Preserved in Louvre Museum as accession # Sb 8. Image thanks to Mbzt and Wikimedia Commons.