YouTube adds some new features
YouTube has added a few new features - and while they aren’t available on all videos yet, they seem to be catch-up features.
First, they’ve added a theater view, putting a video larger and in the center of the page, darkening the rest of the screen and adding a red curtain to the sides of the video, hence the term “theater view.” You’ll see the Theater View link above the video and below the title. Here’s a screenshot:
YouTube's theater view links
The other new feature is the “Lights Off” feature. It’s similar to Hulu’s feature that darkens everything else on the page but the video. A bit useless, but it’s there if you want to use it.
Lights off mode. Click for a larger version.
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Webinar Registration Deadline
Friday, September 19 is the registration deadline for this webinar. If you haven’t yet registered, please do.
On September 24 at 1 p.m. EST, I will be presenting a webinar with HigherEdExperts.com entitled Beyond YouTube: How to host and promote your online videos on the Web.
This webinar will provide an overview of the available video sites out there including the different types of YouTube channels, affordable and scalable cloud hosting, Facebook, Vimeo and more. He will also share tips and best practices to promote and track the success of your videos on the Web.
Whether your institution is just getting into online video or you’re experienced, I think you’ll find this webinar informative and educational. You can register online.
I’ve attended as well as spoken at several webinars put on by HigerEdExperts.com and they are always informative and get you thinking. Karine Joly, HigherEdExperts wrangler and EduWeb keynote speaker, always makes sure that things are running smoothly and the sessions are productive.
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Student Intern Perspective
This past weekend, I read a great blog post by Benjamin Kudria, a student who was just finishing a programming internship at the New York Times.
In it, he talks about the project he worked on, the tools and code he used, and other really interesting stuff like their use of the cloud, especially Amazon’s S3 and EC2. People are quick to say newspapers (like email) are dead or dying, but a giant like the New York Times is really doing some groundbreaking stuff on the web.
By the end of the summer, I was reluctant to leave (both The Times and my East Village apartment paid for by The Times), but I was grateful for the incredible learning experience. I learned all about S3 and EC2, all the intricacies of REST, and more about the internal quirks of PHP than I ever wished to know. I helped build an application and API that utilized all the inner workings of The Times, including the Linux servers, the database access layer and caching mechanism, the web server, and the PHP libraries, so I became familiar with the total infrastructure used to serve the extremely popular NYTimes.com. All the technologies and techniques I learned were helpful and interesting
Posts like this also motivate me to make sure that I can offer the students that work for me the best experience possible, and allow them to get experience with multiple tools, much like Jason Brown did for me when I was a student at Duquesne. That approach certainly worked for me and I think it’s worked for my students over the last six years here - many of my past students are now working full-time web development jobs in the private and educational sectors.
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