Last month I had the opportunity to visit the Mozilla office in Mountain View. While I was there I had an interesting discussion with a few people from the SUMO team (short for support.mozilla.com) about some of the challenges with adding screencasts to their support articles. Since the volunteer community creates most of the content, it’s not always feasible for screencasts to have narration. Also, if they did, they’d somehow have to be localized into more than 70 languages.

But I’d love to see a way to make screencasts with narration work in a situation like this because they’re so much easier to follow. Here’s an example: Silent vs. Narration

So over lunch we kept kicking ideas around and David had a thought about breaking the video up and pairing it with text instructions that I think could make a system that will degrade gracefully (or looking at it from the other direction – offer progressive enhancements).

How it could work is that you see a short video with narration and text explaining the first part of the instructions. Then you click to move on to the following steps. Example: Video-Narration-Text

If there is no narration available for the video we’ve still made it easier to follow along (and to localize) by breaking it up into short pieces and by including text instructions right below or beside the video. Example: Video-Text

And if there isn’t video available at all, screenshots can be substituted. Example: Screenshots-Text

MP4 Download

This video is 1280 x 720 – watch it in fullscreen to see the details.

This is, sadly, a report about the present. I read reports yesterday about an attack on all versions of WordPress except the very latest – 2.8.4. I have a bunch of sites that I maintain and many of them were pretty easy to upgrade by using the built-in automatic upgrade feature. I also have a few sites that are old and inactive. Those needed to be upgraded by hand. The thing that I noticed on ALL of the sites that were not already running 2.8.4 was that they had hidden admin users on them. The sneaky thing about that is that you may not have any other symptoms besides these hidden accounts and then think you are safe once you’ve upgraded. The are, essentially, back doors left on your site to be exploited later. So you have to make sure to get rid of them. The process is a little tricky – at least it’s not a typical WordPress user operation so I’ve documented two ways to do it in this screencast.

More info:
Old WordPress Versions Under Attack
Wordpress Permalink & Rss problems
How to Keep WordPress Secure

Ryanne, Jay and I have been trying to come up with a good way to embed ogg video with the new video tag and have it still work in browsers that don’t support that yet. We want to show people how to set that up at the Open Video Conference. We came up with a method similar to this but hadn’t finalized it yet. Anyway, Kroc Camen’s Video for Everybody code is better.

There were a few things about the Video for Everybody code that I didn’t like so I edited it so that it validates as HTML5 and in the interest of simplification I took out the fallbacks for “QuickTime Installed but no Flash installed” and “No QuickTime and no Flash installed.” Also, the QuickTime object fallback is simplified because it assumes playback only on the iPhone.

So check it out the test page with a self hosted Flash player fallback
and
one with a YouTube fallback.

If you are using FireFox 3.5 beta you will get an ogg video, If you have Safari 3 or 4 you will get an mp4 and if you have FF 3, IE6, IE7 or IE8 you will get the Flash player (actually playing the same mp4 that Safari is playing).

Here’s the code snippet with a self-hosted flash player
and
Here’s the code snippet with the YouTube flash player.

The one big stumbling block to this whole thing at the moment is that poster image attribute is not supported yet and (because of that?) the video will load whether you play it or not. My understanding is that it’s supposed to be resolved in Firefox 3.5 before release (who knows what Apple’s plans are with Safari).

MP4 Download SD
OGG Download SD

Following up on the last post about HTML 5 and OGG video, here are some ideas that I’ve been thinking about in preparation for the Open Video Conference. If you have some ideas please leave a comment here or email me.

MP4 Download HD

Today I was playing with Ogg video (Theora) and the new HTML 5 video element which is supported in the Firefox 3.1 beta. This is a short screencast showing Ogg video playing in the new Firefox and the simplicity of using the video element. This video is 1280 x 800 so be sure to click the fullscreen button to see the details.

There is an Ogg version embeded after the jump. (Get the Firefox 3.1 beta)

This is a nearly hour long presentation to the Library of Congress by Michael Wesch who gave us The Machine is Us/ing Us last year. His talk is about his (and his students’) study of video practice on YouTube. I’ve never been a big contributer to YouTube but I have been seriously involved in videoblogging and web video for four years now. Most of that time has been spent contributing to and interacting with the community of people centered around the Videoblogging email list where we’ve seemed to have gone through an experience parallel to the one Wesch outlines in his talk.

One of the ideas Wesch brings up by way of McLuhan (at about 26:00) is that of new forms of self-awareness. I know I certainly have a much different view of myself today than I did four years ago. And now, not only how we view ourselves as individuals but also how we collectively view ourselves is becoming something that’s undergoing constant revision. What exactly this provides is hard to say because things are rushing along at such at such a rapid pace. Sometimes, like Reuben was talking about recently, it may make you feel a bit crazy but ultimately we want this because as my experience has shown me and what I think Wesch concludes is that, this will be an extraordinarily good thing.

Custom Video Players For Your Show – You’ve got a unique video show, why not have a player that matches? This session will take you through detailed examples using two popular Flash video players. We’ll show you how to create custom skins and get them set up on your site.

Please vote for your favorites on the SXSW 09 Interactive Panel Picker.

Ubiquity is another release from Mozilla Labs that, along with Aurora has me thinking about the future of not just how we’ll use the web but also everything on our computers.

Over the last few years web apps have really transformed the way I use a computer. Every day I have less and less need for actual desktop applications. If it weren’t for all the video production I do on a daily basis I could just grab most any computer with wifi and be instantly connected to just about all of my stuff. And now that the iPhone has a mostly usable web browser, most of the time I don’t even need to take my laptop with we me anywhere. I love that.

So in the middle of watching this demo I started thinking it would be great if all the applications on your computer, not just web apps, could play together like that or maybe all your apps would be web apps (more likely) and your operating system would be the “browser.” Then you could just invoke a new view, document, video, website, virtual world or whatever and combine information in whatever way you needed to right then instead of in whatever way a particular application lets you do it. I can’t wait.

My friend Rupert pointed me to this video of Keven Kelly. It’s a really great 20 minute summary of a lot of ideas that have been floating around for awhile. The basic thing that I get from it is that we’re all becoming part of one global machine and what really makes it powerful is us being open or transparent to it.

Being open to the network is an idea that I personally find inspiring and liberating. I have a few blogs, I participate in a number of social networks and virtual worlds and I post lots of videos and photos of myself, my friends and my family online. Some people find that kind of behavior somewhat alarming – especially where my kids are concerned. But I’m looking at it from a little farther down the road. A cell phone used to mean you were on call 24/7 but now it means you have access to everyone and everything 24/7 and that’s powerful. I think for many people, putting yourself out there on the web feels like an invasion of privacy. If you were only one, I’d agree it might feel like being the only naked person in the room. But if everyone were naked, then maybe it’s not such a big deal.

I’m not saying there aren’t issues with everyone putting everything online but I’m optimistic that we’ll figure it out as we go without turning the world into some version of Gattica or 1984. Either that or the cyborgs will be showing up soon and they’ll start making their way through the list of TED speakers.

Also posted here.