January 2008 Archives

Brett Bendickson, a Web Developer in UITS, dug into YouTube's Help information and provides us with an RSS feed with which to subscribe to the UA's videos. The RSS feed URL is http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/arizona/videos.rss

I set up a feed in Firefox and it works nicely. This first screenshot shows that I pasted the URL into my location bar, hit enter and Firefox opened its "Add Live Bookmark" box letting me select where to add the Live Bookmark.

I chose to add mine to my bookmarks toolbar - see where the arrow is pointing.

And when I click on my Live Bookmark for YouTube : : Videos by ..., you can see that it displays the names of the videos in our UA YouTube enhanced channel (below). If you select one of the videos, it opens Firefox to that page in YouTube.

My thoughts on why YouTube does not feature RSS feeds is that they have developed the resource around subscriptions. If you have your own YouTube page, as millions do, you visit another YouTube page and can subscribe to the videos to your own page. This, in fact, is what I anticipate a lot of alumni and high school and undergraduate students doing with our UA channel.

I am glad to report that following a meeting with External Relations' Kate Jensen, I received approval to go public with the UA's YouTube Enhanced Channel.

YouTube's enhanced University Channel is pretty new and as far as I know there aren't that many sites participating. I've pretty much modeled our site after the way that USC and UC Berkeley have developed their channels. Since I have videos coming in for the UA on iTunes U, I am able to select ones appropriate for our YouTube channel.

Through YouTube the UA can feature campus events and programs that high school and undergraduate students are interested in following. Imagine if you will, that a high school student considering which college to attend is looking for videos about his possible choices. That student can subscribe to our videos on her/his YouTube page simply by clicking the subscribe button.

I am meeting with different folks on campus to discuss creating videos featuring UA students and faculty that would appeal to high school and undergrad students. For instance, today I met with Rafael Meza in the Honors College. The College of Science has an excellent program for research opportunities for undergraduates and Gail Burd and Glenda Gentile in COS are excited about the prospects of creating video for the YouTube channel of UA students talking about their experience. I am going to contact the directors of different cultural centers next - African American, Chicano/Hispano, Asian Pacific, and Native American - with similar proposals.

If you have any suggestions, please come talk with me. Of course, I'll be glad to talk with anyone on campus about the UA's YouTube enhanced channel.

Take a look at "UA undergrads do hands-on science" in today's Tucson & Region section of the Daily Star. [Note that if you are visiting this page after Feb. 1st, it's probably been moved off open access.]

A couple weeks ago I met with the College of Science's Gail Hurd, Glenda Gentile, and Bo Baylor. Gail spoke about how COS has an excellent program in which undergrads carry out their own research project and emerge from the experience with excellent research skills. The article focuses on the Undergrad Biology Research Program, which I think may be part of the overall COS program. Carol Bender directs the Undergrad Biology Research Program and is quoted in the article as a couple students who participated in the program.

Gail and Glenda are going to identify students and faculty and the LTC's Media Services unit will video. Our plans are to do students and possibly faculty speaking about how special this COS program is and put these videos on the coming UA YouTube enhanced channel.

Apple's weekly spreadsheet came this morning. [Download spreadsheet]

I was interested to see if Apple featuring the COS' Evolution Lecture series on the iTunes U main page last week would pump up the number of downloads. Apple selected six series to feature in the topic of "Science and Health." There were five downloads for two of the videos and four for the other two. Thought there'd be more than that.

This week's stats reflect the first week of the semester and what I see are some of the more "student-oriented" tracks being download. For example, there were 11 downloads for OSCR TV's episode 3 and 7 for one of Campus Health Services SexTalk tracks. Jim Collins is recording his MIC205A lectures and there were 8 downloads for his second lecture.

Overall there were 400 downloads this week and a record 10,621 visitors who visited a UA on iTunes U page. Note: if you look a the users stats page, you'll see other who visited our iTunes U webpage and went in via WebAuth. This did not give them any additional privleges, as it only passes them to the public page unless they have privileges created by Casey Boetcher, our LTC programmer/analyst who manages authenticated access to UA on iTunes U.

BigThink

No, it's not a sequel to HBO's Big Love. And I must say I find BigThink very interesting. It shows how uploading videos to a common site has become an accepted form of communication. Some people scoff at YouTube - as the NY Times article described it as a "popular video-sharing site ... for bulldogs on skateboards." The Times article incidentally, is Ex-Harvard President Meets a Former Student, and Intellectual Sparks Fly.

As I walking to the garage Monday night, I was showing Josh in OSCR my new Flip Video cam and discussing how many devices have come along to capture video that are incredibly easy to use and fairly inexpensive, especially when compared to a lot of video cameras. In my classes I bring up the remarks by Stan Davis way back in January 2002 when he was one of the keynote speakers at the UA's Harvill conference. He told us how we were two-thirds through the Information Age. The first two-thirds was dominated by numbers and words but in the final third of the Information Age sound and images will have the biggest impact. Over the past few years we've seen resources such as iTunes and YouTube, the use of Flash on websites commonplace, VOIP, and much more. Seeing BigThink made me think how it is yet one more example of how sound and images are having a huge impact on communication, learning, and collaboration.

I thought about using "Flipping Myself Off" as the title for this entry. This afternoon my Flip Video camcorder arrived. In just a few minutes I was able to record myself and upload the video to my YouTube page. Flip Video records to AVI format which YouTube is happy to accept and convert to Flash. If you like, you can open it in whatever application you use and export it to another format. For example, this little clip of Wayne was exported to MPEG4 using QuickTime Pro. If I wanted to do a podcast series of myself talking about, say, "This Week in the LTC," this would be a good device for doing it. Stop by if you'd like to see it.

It's Monday morning and the latest report is in from Apple on the number of downloads on UA on iTunes U. This report covers January 1-January 6, 2008. There were a total of 338 track downloads during this week. Below are the most downloaded. FYI, downloads count both new subscriptions and individual downloads off a given podcast's main page, as well as a new track added to a series that someone may be subscribed to. The main thing is that these are just for this 7 day period. BTW, Apple tracked 7,629 visitors over this week.

Linguistics Lectures
Who did what to whom: A cross-linguistic investigation 7
Genetics and the Acquisition & Structure of Language 7
Expression, Truth, Predication and Context 6
Issues in Database Construction: A Research Experience for Undergraduates 5
On the Difference Between Showing and Exhibiting: Morphosyntax, Morphophonology and
Double-Objects in English 4
Tense Parameters 4
Benjamin Smith Lyman and His Law 4

CREST
Hardest Decisions Part I 6
Hardest Decisions Part II 4
Hardest Decisions Part III 5

In case you didn't notice it, KUAT has a new name and a brand new web interface. The new name is Arizona Public Media and the new interface and new address is http://www.azpm.org/. Visit the homepage and read GM Jack Gibson's explanation about the name change.

APM's Hector Gonzalez, who I think has been the lead for the website re-design emailed that: "What you see now is basically a platform that better represents the services offered by the organization. It's built using a Django framework that departs a bit from the conventional LAMP model for building websites." Hector added that "We also wanted to facilitate the publishing of information to the site by those closest to the information - not webmasters. That's where we will be focusing our attention next. First the internal users, then everyone else."

Congrats to Arizona Public Media.

Casey Ontivares (he's in the next cublicle down) sent me an email with a link to odiogo.odiogo offers a free service for bloggers so I signed up my own blog. The idea is that it takes the text in one's blog and converts it to voice. And it also provides an RSS feed so you can subscribe to a blog and listen to the computer voice recognition of it. It is said to be “'Near-human' quality text-to-speech" and IMO it's as good as any other computer generated speech I've listened to.

Unfortunately, it isn't working properly. It took about ten of my previous entries and made ~30 seconds of MP3 audio out of them and it provides an RSS feed that shows up in my podcasts section of iTunes but does not pull in any media. on this page. Those 30 second MP3s are eaten up with 12 seconds of an odiogo introduction. Not mention that thirty seconds merely covers a couple two sentences in an entry. If this worked, or if it does work and I'm mucking it up somehow, it could have great potential for ADA.

It is working for Red Herring's blogs because I have successfully subscribed to the RSS feed and have received tracks for the podcast. I'll keep playing around with this to see if there's something I'm missing. If anyone reading this can point me in the right direction to get this working, please email me.

Apple sends a spreadsheet each week giving some usable data on our UA on iTunes U site. Here is some info on the report that came today covering the week of December 24-30, 2007.

Apple tracked 7,463 "visitors" to the UA on iTunes U during this week. By comparison, the previous week (12/17-12/23) Apple tracked 7,479. That's 7,463 for the week between Christmas and New Year's which could indicate that iTunes U is a known resource to the invisible Internet community.

I was interested in seeing that tracks from the Spring 2006 Faculty Fellows series were downloaded. For instance, Oscar Martinez lecture, "Why Is Mexico Poorer Than the United States?" was downloaded six times; William Broussard's "Facing the Facebook Phenomenon: The Impact of Cyber Communities" four times; several of the lectures from the COS Evolution and Global Climate Changes series were similarly downloaded. These stats count either individual track downloads off a series' main page or via a new subscription.

If you go to the iTunes U main page, you'll see that the COS Globabl Climate Change Lecture Series is one of six series that Apple is featuring on the main page under the feature "A Changing World." We're in good company, too, with an NPR series, another from Yale, one from Duke Law, one from Stanford, and one from American Public Media.

Here is a copy of the download count spreadsheet, if you want to browse through it. Let me know if you have any questions. I can be emailed at stuartg@email.arizona.edu.

One of the good things about the UA's Christmas/New Year's break is that you get uninterrupted time to work on projects that have been in limbo. Along with the WWII New Guinea nose art noted in a previous entry, I was able to get Tom Marshall's The Burro '03 up as a Web exhibit.

The Burro was the UA annual back in 1903 and is one of the artifacts in Patricia Stephenson's collection of materials, photos, and memorabilia left to her mother by Louise Foucar Marshall back in 1954. Tom was a UA student that year and is found in two Burro photos and mentioned in an article chronicling the year's activities. Visit the Web version of the 1903 Burro to (virtually) experience the UA and college life in Tucson roughly 105 years ago. You'll find photos and sketches of campus, a "brief history" of the University, read student "literary" works, and see ads placed by local businesses such as L. Zeckendorf & Co. Department Store, Martin's Drug, Fred Ronstadt, and Crescent Cigar Co. It's a fun trip down Memory Lane.

Almost all of the text was created by OCR so if you spot a typo, please let me know via email: stuartg@email.arizona.edu.