At See3 we have worked for organizations that have it in their mission to be accessible. For example, See3 client Easter Seals is all about helping people with disabilities. They need to model being accessible in their physical spaces as well as on their website.

See3 Director of Interactive Marketing and Fundraising, Shirley Sexton was the VP Interactive at Easter Seals for 8 years. She couldn’t do everything she wanted to do with video because videos playing in a Flash player — like those on YouTube — are not accessible. If you can’t see and hear it, it won’t work.

We have created workarounds for this within our own projects. And when asked about broader-based captioning what we have always said is that it’s a value, but it’s expensive. Someone has to create good captions before they can be added to the video.

We have been watching carefully the advances in speech recognition online with interest. People such as David Pogue are big believers in speaking into their PCs instead of typing. It didn’t seem a huge leap to us that someone would take this technology — which is amazing — and apply it to video. [Here's a review from Pogue of this software from 3 years ago, and it is much better today than it was then.]

So it came as no surprise to us that Google is the one to step up. They have been leading advancements in all kinds of translation and other technologies, and oh, they also happen to own the biggest video site on the web, YouTube.

Here’s the lead from today’s NYTimes:

In the first major step toward making millions of videos on YouTube accessible to deaf and hearing-impaired people, Google unveiled new technologies on Thursday that will automatically bring text captions to many videos on the site.

While the technology can only insert captions on English language speech, Google is giving users the choice to use its automatic translation system to read the captions in 51 languages. That could broaden the appeal of YouTube videos to millions of other people who do not speak English but could use the captioning technology to read subtitles in their native language.

The speech recognition technology that Google uses to turn speech into text is not new; Google currently uses it to transcribe voice mail messages for users of its Google Voice service. But Ken Harrenstien, a deaf engineer who helped develop the automatic captioning system, said the technology had never been applied on such a large scale.

“This is some thing that I have dreamt of for many years,” Mr. Harrenstien said speaking through an interpreter. “To see it happen, is amazing.”

You can read the whole article here.

I diluted my own opinion in my last post. What I said I wanted was a way for people who are part of YouTube’s nonprofit program to be able to collect email addresses and not just donations. YouTube doesn’t do that. You will only get someone’s email if they actually donate. I then said, well… maybe it would be OK if they allowed you to connect like in Facebook.

The problem is, YouTube isn’t Facebook. While there are people who use YouTube as a pure social network, the majority of YouTube users are passive viewers of video. So connecting through the traditional social networking type of connections doesn’t have the impact on YouTube as it would on Facebook.

So, back to my original request. YouTube knows the email addresses of every registered user. With a single click, a user could give their information to the nonprofit, through YouTube. That would be a huge benefit to the nonprofit and I think it would prove to be much more valuable than the donation functionality they have given. It could be a double opt-in — meaning the individual would first have to click on the opt-in on the video page to give their name to the nonprofit, then they would get an email from YouTube giving them a link to confirm that this is what they wanted to do. In this way, no one would mistake their opt-in for spam.

We can thank Google for giving nonprofits access to Google Checkout. But a cynic might point out that Google is trying really hard to get people used to using Google Checkout and so this gift has a self-serving feel to it. Add to their functions the ability to really give the nonprofits something of value — a relationship with individuals on their own terms — then we could really celebrate the Google/YouTube Nonprofit initiative.

I have been telling my loyal readers for almost two years now how video is really important for nonprofit organizations. People want to SEE your story. They want to HEAR from the people you serve and experience the work that you do. You can’t do that in a brochure or on a static website. With the growth of YouTube, DoGooderTV and other video sharing sites, people are used to seeing video content. If you are waiting for the right time, the right budget or the right moment to start developing and using more video, you are waiting too long.

In addition to what individuals are doing online, news sites like the New York Times, CNN, and Washington Post, have invested heavily in bringing video to the web. They know that people want to see and hear and experience. Online video is the juggernaut that can’t be stopped.

The trend in online video has corresponded to a trend in advertising. Advertising dollars are shifting from broad-based media (think TV ads) to more targeted and measurable advertising online. The 8000 lb. gorilla is Adwords, Google’s platform to match text ads to search terms and websites with relevant content. This one product makes up almost all of Google’s billions of revenue and has, by itself, thrown the entire advertising industry into turmoil.

Google just announced that they are are going to begin adding video ads into search results. What does this mean? It means if someone is looking for information about helping the homeless and a great organization has a terrific 30-second spot about how they are helping — they are going to get the mindshare that will lead to more supporters, more advocates and more donors. This is a big move by Google and it means organizations must be thinking how to create compelling media and RE-USE and RE-PURPOSE the video materials they already have into short, compelling videos for use online.

That is what we are pioneering at See3 and I am more excited than ever that we are able to take our clients’ stories and create fundraising and communications’ strategies online that will bring an increasing return on the dollars invested.

If I was a nonprofit CEO or IT director, and I wasn’t totally over invested in Exchange Server and I didn’t have more than 100 people, I would go with Google apps for email and shared calendaring. Google apps allow you to have web-based service at your own domain running on Google servers and for free. Google, in partnership with NTEN, just announced that they have extended the additional features of Google Apps for education to all 501(c)3 nonprofit organizations.

For all of you folks struggling with servers and infrastructure, some advice: Buy less servers and Microsoft and spend the money you will save on more bandwidth.

Here’s a note from Google that was in the most recent NTEN Connect newsletter.

Jess Daniel, Google

IT infrastructure is hard work for any organization. Having worked at a nonprofit prior to coming to Google, I know that the combination of long-standing legacy systems and limited resources certainly doesn’t make things any easier. Now that I’m member of the Google Apps team, I spend my time working on simple but powerful communication and collaboration tools for organizations. And so it’s with special satisfaction that I share this bit of news: Google has extended the Education Edition of Google Apps to registered 501(c)(3)s.

You may already be familiar with Google’s standard suite of free hosted services, including private-label email, calendaring, and online-document sharing. But the Education Edition offers a number of value-added admin features at no additional cost, including email migration tools, phone support for critical issues, and extensibility APIs. (Ads are also optional, in case you’re curious.) There’s no need to take my word for it, though: if you attended NP.IT recently — the Google-NTEN midsummer mixer — you may have bumped into a few nonprofits with their own Google Apps success stories.

At the end of the day, enabling good works through Google Apps — in any capacity — both inspires and humbles us. We’re excited to offer this worthy sector a low-investment, feature-rich IT choice. Find out more or apply for an account.

All of our clients are very interested in the number of visitors to their website or the number of views of their videos. Makes sense right. I want to know whether the investment I made in this marketing is paying off. But what we tell clients is that in addition to basic tracking you need to define what you mean by payoff. If you are trying to raise money, count the money. If you are trying to educate people, you have to define a successful educational interaction before you can count it.

When we talk “viral videos” we tell the clients the who is as important as the how many. I can guarantee your video to get tons of views if you let us do Jacksss-style stunts or not-so-subtly incorporate busty models into our concept — but is this the engaged audience you are looking for? Probably not. Will a list acquired this way perform well later when you ask them to do something else? Surely not.

The issue of website traffic is big in the commercial world because it relates directly to ad revenue. Counting site traffic — hits, visitors, “uniques” — have been mired in controversy since the early days of the web. The problem is that my server keeps logs. Those logs only show a kind of raw data about page loads, image loads and the like. To translate that into a number of visitors I have to make some assumptions. For example, someone surfing my site from the same IP address (a unique number that corresponds to the access point of the Internet) who accesses specific pages (based on the logs) over a contiguous period of time represents a visit. Problem is, every program that parses my server logs does this a little differently. So the best use of the numbers is to show trends and growth.

There is an even bigger problem for companies such as comScore, Nielson/NetRatings and Alexa that are trying to tell us how many people went to a site when they don’t even have access to the server logs. So they are using a variety of methods from surveys to panels. comScore, for example, says they have “2 million participants under continuous measurement.” And then they extrapolate.

The big news in this area is that Nielson/NetRatings, recognizing that Web 2.0 is changing behavior, thought they needed a different way to measure. Here’s the issue: On many new website pages, you can see lots of content without reloading the page. For example, my Google home page has RSS feeds from many different news and blog sources. I can click on those feeds and expand them, without reloading the page. I could read all day on the same page.

So Nielson/NetRatings did a new calculation where they added time spent as a factor. Guess what happened? All hell broke loose when their new calculation showed that AOL was on top — above MySpace and Yahoo and Google and MSN. Read more about it at CNET’s News.com.

I was reminded today about an email that I received years ago. It said that when you go to Google and search on the word “Jew” you get an neo-Nazi site. And so, this email went on to say, please put the word “Jew” on your site and link it to the Wikipedia page for Jew. This is what’s called a Google Bomb — when a group of sites get together to manipulate Google’s search results through the use of links. It worked right away, and the top search for Jew has been, for years now, a link to Wikipedia.

I hadn’t thought about this in a long time, but I had occasion to search on the word Jew again. In the Sponsored Links section of the Google results page (the Adwords links) there was an ad from Google, with the title: Offensive Search Results. When I clicked on that link, what I got was a nice window on how Google operates:

An explanation of our search results.

If you recently used Google to search for the word “Jew,” you may have seen results that were very disturbing. We assure you that the views expressed by the sites in your results are not in any way endorsed by Google. We’d like to explain why you’re seeing these results when you conduct this search.

A site’s ranking in Google’s search results relies heavily on computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page’s relevance to a given query. Sometimes subtleties of language cause anomalies to appear that cannot be predicted. A search for “Jew” brings up one such unexpected result.

If you use Google to search for “Judaism,” “Jewish” or “Jewish people,” the results are informative and relevant. So why is a search for “Jew” different? One reason is that the word “Jew” is often used in an anti-Semitic context. Jewish organizations are more likely to use the word “Jewish” when talking about members of their faith. The word has become somewhat charged linguistically, as noted on websites devoted to Jewish topics such as these:

* http://shakti.trincoll.edu/~mendele/vol01/vol01.174
* http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/jonah081500.asp

Someone searching for information on Jewish people would be more likely to enter terms like “Judaism,” “Jewish people,” or “Jews” than the single word “Jew.” In fact, prior to this incident, the word “Jew” only appeared about once in every 10 million search queries. Now it’s likely that the great majority of searches on Google for “Jew” are by people who have heard about this issue and want to see the results for themselves.

The beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google, as well as the opinions of the general public, do not determine or impact our search results. Individual citizens and public interest groups do periodically urge us to remove particular links or otherwise adjust search results. Although Google reserves the right to address such requests individually, Google views the comprehensiveness of our search results as an extremely important priority. Accordingly, we do not remove a page from our search results simply because its content is unpopular or because we receive complaints concerning it. We will, however, remove pages from our results if we believe the page (or its site) violates our Webmaster Guidelines, if we believe we are required to do so by law, or at the request of the webmaster who is responsible for the page.

We apologize for the upsetting nature of the experience you had using Google and appreciate your taking the time to inform us about it.

Sincerely,
The Google Team

p.s. You may be interested in some additional information the Anti-Defamation League has posted about this issue at http://www.adl.org/rumors/google_search_rumors.asp. In addition, we call your attention to Google’s search results on this topic.

There are a whole group of new companies challenging Google on search. Yes, it’s true. Google is great, but lots of results are useless. Some of these new companies working on better search are combining the algorithm — that automated formula that uses context and links to determine relevance — and combining it with human editors. The results are often better.

There are a growing number of these companies, including ChaCha (which has actual people helping you with search) and Mahalo which has edited results for the top 10,000 search terms and the algorithm for everything else. Will one of them create better search? Maybe they can. (In the end, I think all of those companies are really a play to get bought by Google or Yahoo or Microsoft.)

The charge against Google is that they are too reliant on the computer. They deny it. Google says that they are also looking at the role of human editors. But I think the letter above clear show’s Google’s belief in the power of the machine.

The Facebook news is big. First a little background. Facebook is the second big social networking site behind MySpace. Facebook used to be only open to college students but, realizing they couldn’t play with the big boys, opened to the public about a year ago. They are growing like crazy. Try 100,000 new subscriber A DAY! And they aren’t all kids. Facebook is still independent — they haven’t been bought by any big company yet. And their pages aren’t nearly as ugly as MySpace pages.

These sites are places where I can make my page, connect with friends, ect. You know all about that. But then you also have widgets. Widgets are big. Widgets are little applications that live on some other page on the web, where the info in the widget comes from some server somewhere else. Technically, an ad server is a widget – displaying a banner coming from DoubleClick, for example. Embedding a YouTube video is a widget, as are fundraising widgets, Flickr photostream, Photobucket, Slide and many others. Widgets make the web mashable – meaning you create your own web with pieces of this and pieces of that. My Google home page has a weather widget, clock widget and of course RSS feed widget. All the data in these widgets come from different places and are assembled for my convenience.

So widget makers have put things like video and photos on MySpace for a while. But what if I want to put an ad in my video? MySpace don’t play that! The VOICE from on high says… “You are a guest here at MySpace with your fancy shmancy widget and please do not even think for a minute that you can monetize my eyeballs! I am Murdoch the Great and I own these users and you cannot have them! We are the only one allowed to run ads. So show your photos or embed your do-dad, but watch out, or we will cut you off at your knees.”

Now comes Facebook. They say… We want to be THE PLATFORM. So we aren’t going to worry so much about whether you make money off our people, in fact, the opposite. If you can make money you will spend a lot of time and effort developing really cool applications that can integrate into Facebook, which will keep people on our pages longer, which will attract more users and so on. So Facebook said go and develop. And they opened up their own development tools to the developers. Go and develop not a simple embeddable widget, but go and development in a native environment that makes use of all the tools we have, the connections between people, for example.

So, Amazon says, OK, we will create an application that allows people to publish book reviews right on their own Facebook profiles, fully integrated into Facebook, but also back into Amazon. Forbes, Twitter, Washington Post… are among the 70 companies that developed applications in time for the announcement. And my assumption is that people haven’t even begun to think about how they can use this. I can imagine almost any application that’s online going native with Facebook.

For us nonprofit types, we have heard that Change.org is going to be developing for the platform as did Project Agape, the temporary name for “a new startup that is applying viral principles to altruism and social causes.”

This feels big. It feels like a moment when we might be seeing the development of another Google, another company that is able to grow very big very fast and stay independent. Just to make you feel a little sick, the CEO of Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg and he is 23 years old.

See the New York Times coverage here.
See TechCrunch coverage here.
See Read/Write Web coverage here.
See Fox — owner of MySpace — nasty coverage here.
See Marshall Kirkpatrick’s nice overview of this on the SplashCast blog.