The Jason Salas Experience

Guam's Mr. Media - making people think, making people laugh, pissing people off

Friday, January 20, 2006

The missing downloads from my GMA Web 2.0 talk

Some tech guru I turned out to be. I had posted an update with slides and MP3 downloads from last week's talk I gave to the Guam Marketing Association on "Hyperdistribution", my company's digital & interactive media management philosophy...or so I thought. Apparently, my post never saved, and I didn't realize it until today when Jonah pointed out the missing materials after waiting patiently all this time. How embarrasing.

At any rate, here at long last are the downloads:
Also, my next talk is going to be on new media applications for use in educational markets, at the MASCOT conference (download video about my speech) Saturday the 28th at the University of Guam Field House. Try and make it out...I PROMISE to make downloads available soon after.

Thanks Jonah...and enjoy everyone!

posted by Jason Salas @ 9:03 PM  

13 Comments:

  • At January 23, 2006 11:40 AM, Anonymous jonah said…

    Hi Jason,
    Thanks for sharing the material with us. I do have a few comments and opinions.

    "Data Fragmentation"
    For this you gave an example of being able to get "Interview 1" via podcast but for "Interview 2" you'll need to visit your website. I tend to think that this approach will quickly become tiresome for typical users. Though it might be fun initially as users get to play with all their digital toys, I think that in time it will be too much to ask for users to jump through hoops to get your content via some "other" service you provide when the current service and their current device is more than capable of delivering it. I imagine it can be especially frustrating for users relying on timeshifted content to find out that the interviews they are most interested in are not available via podcast but instead are only accessible via streaming video on your website. Understandably - time constraints you face when doing a TV broadcast might force you to redirect viewers to one of your alternate services for more information but it's hard to find good reason to do the same for someone subscribing to your podcast or visiting your website. If I'm not mistaken - your reason is to be able to control and direct traffic to specific services you feel will give you a better return for the attention of your users. This is a valid concern although I for one will be more annoyed to have to bounce around several different places to get the full picture. I'd even be willing to pay a reasonable subscription fee if it meant that I could get everything I need from one place. At the end of the day, as far as getting my news fix is concerned - it's about getting what I want in the most efficient way.

    "Internationalization"
    I'm more curious as to what your approach is for this effort. You mentioned stories will be translated "on the fly" - does this imply machine transation? If so are you using 3rd party services for this - I'm especially interested in the Chamorro and Tagalog services as these I'm sure are hard to find. If you are using machine transations - I imagine there would be concern for translation accuracy. From my experience - the state of machine translation solutions today are barely good enough to get the jist of your source material and for sure no where close to what you would get from professional human translations. In addition - again assuming machine translations is the approach - Japanese should be the least of your worries as there are numerous Japanese machine translation services available - http://www.worldlingo.com/ and http://babelfish.altavista.com/ are just two of several. And the .Net / SQL server combination has great support for processing and storing unicode data (Japanese is part of the internationalization framework).

    Now if machine translation is not the approach then you'll have several other issues to deal with. One of the many would be to determine how well you're existing system (website) lends itself to being translated. Are you internationalizing just the stories or will it be your entire website? Either way I would imagine you will need to think about some kind of workflow to handle how your site deals with content creation and updates and understanding the ripple effect this has on the internationalized versions of that content. Integrating human translation services as a major contributor to the content of your website can be a whole 'nother problem all together - but undoubtedly should be a part of the overall workflow.

    Lastly, it would have been nice if you had included the Q and A session after your presentation. I was especially interested in what the guampdn folks had to say about your observation of the future of print media. Often times it's the Q and A portion of a presentation that prove to be the most interesting because when you have people coming from many different angles chances are you'll get to hear interesting observations that are different from yours as well as the presenter's. Thanks again for sharing this event with us!

     

  • At January 23, 2006 12:08 PM, Blogger Jason Salas said…

    Hi Jonah,

    Thanks for checking out the downloads and for commenting...great feedback!

    To respond to your concerns:

    For this you gave an example of being able to get "Interview 1" via podcast but for "Interview 2" you'll need to visit your website. I tend to think that this approach will quickly become tiresome for typical users

    Understandable, but again, the separation of the data is deliberate - we keep the critical, must-have stuff in one platform, and the augmenting data across other platforms. So our news stories are text-based and available via the desktop WWW and over our mobile product, as well as streaming. But additional long-form videos are available in VOD/podcasts and other web-only content platforms. This works out for us on a business level because we can bundle our services, and let people pick-and-choose which to buy. We have more revenue flexibility this way. The key thing to keep in mind is that the essential information is easily accessible, while augmentable services contain stuff that's a bit expendable.

    And also keep in mind that we're weening people to other platforms (Web==>cell phones==>TV), so there's admittedly some forceful hand-holding going on. ;-)

    You mentioned stories will be translated "on the fly" - does this imply machine transation?

    I did a .NET programming turorial on this awhile ago, profiling how to get non-ISO languages moved to

    Essentially, the UI will have a drop-down list featuring all available languages, with English as a the default. When a user changes the language, an alternate language is displayed with variable page encoding. And it's only news stories...doing the entire site would be too laborious, and honestly, not worth it. The hard part is that services like Google's translation engine and BabelFish don't include Chamorro or Tagalog, so this means rolling something completely unique. There's some stuff I can't talk about...yet...but it'll be really cool.

    It would have been nice if you had included the Q and A session after your presentation

    I agree. Because I was mic'd up using my iRiver 799 with a simple lapel stereo, the range of clear audio was all of about 10 feet (you can hear the silverware clink in the background, but you can't make out voices). I initially had the Q&A in there, but you realistically can't hear anything. Next time I'll plug directly into the house PA system.

    I was especially interested in what the guampdn folks had to say about your observation of the future of print media.

    Curiously, they agreed with me more than I thought they would. They're friends as well as colleagues, so they knew I wasn't taking a cheap shot, and openly admitted print is in bad shape right now. They do good work, but they know they have to change to keep up. The big criticism came from a magazine company in attendance...I got some nasty looks for a bit. ;-)

    Thanks again for your comments...I appreciate it! I've got another talk coming up this weekend...I'm speaking to local teachers about using new media in the classroom...more exhibits after that one, too!

     

  • At January 23, 2006 12:20 PM, Blogger Jason Salas said…

    Also on the fragmentation point, keep in mind that we're using such to exhibit media that we can't fit into our core competency (broadcasting). And, being a media company, people are a little more tolerant of us doing cross-platform stuff.

    It would be rather goofy for an insurance company to have a web-based video on investing and then force the user to jump on their phone to get a rate schedule, but it works a little more for our industry. We couple this with creative promos and whatnot, so people enjoy the process.

     

  • At January 23, 2006 1:19 PM, Anonymous jonah said…

    Jason,
    Thanks for the quick response.


    This works out for us on a business level because we can bundle our services, and let people pick-and-choose which to buy.

    I guess the point is that if the content is capable of being delivered through a podcast or service - the user should have options to get it via the podcast or service. Then I think it's a matter of determining what is premium content and what isn't. The whole membership thing again comes into play - in my opinion it's a model that makes more sense as apposed to limitations driven by "platform".


    Essentially, the UI will have a drop-down list featuring all available languages, with English as a the default. When a user changes the language, an alternate language is displayed with variable page encoding. And it's only news stories...doing the entire site would be too laborious, and honestly, not worth it. The hard part is that services like Google's translation engine and BabelFish don't include Chamorro or Tagalog, so this means rolling something completely unique. There's some stuff I can't talk about...yet...but it'll be really cool.


    I think I understand the concept, I'm more interested in the "translation" bit. For example how are you going to translate a story from english to chamorro? Is it human translation or machine translation? To me this is the bigger issue than dealing with the technical details i.e. those related to programming. Unless you had in mind building your own chamorro machine translation engine which in itself would be very impressive. Human language is so complex in itself that I can only imagine how much of a huge undertaking that would be.


    And it's only news stories...doing the entire site would be too laborious, and honestly, not worth it.

    Laborious I would agree, though if the objective is to have your non-english speaking audience be able to read your stories - how will they know how to get to the stories if they aren't able to navigate your site?

     

  • At January 23, 2006 5:25 PM, Anonymous jonah said…

    I initially had the Q&A in there, but you realistically can't hear anything. Next time I'll plug directly into the house PA system.

    Cool! Though in the event you are un-able to plug into the house PA system, repeating the questions / comments then addressing them is usually good enough. :)

     

  • At January 23, 2006 7:17 PM, Blogger Jason Salas said…

    The Q&A didn't take too long. We touched on the 'print is dead' theory for a few moments - it wasn't that the crowd agreed to being anti-print, they were just wanting me to acknolwedge that radio/TV is also getting slammed...which I did.

     

  • At January 24, 2006 8:41 AM, Anonymous jonahu said…

    I did a .NET programming turorial on this awhile ago, profiling how to get non-ISO languages moved to

    Essentially, the UI will have a drop-down list featuring all available languages, with English as a


    On an un-related note, it seems like some text has been munched in this section. It's happened also in some of your previous posts.

     

  • At January 24, 2006 8:50 AM, Blogger Jason Salas said…

    It's probably because re-posting text that's already been posted at least one other time makes the Blogger system think it's comment spam. It's probably a QA thing.

     

  • At January 24, 2006 10:03 AM, Anonymous jonah said…

    ..It's probably because re-posting text that's already been posted at least one other time makes the Blogger system think it's comment spam. It's probably a QA thing.

    That's unfortunate :( anyway, do you have any more feedback on my comments above - I am actually very interested in the "internationalization" topic. Specifically how you plan to translate English to Chamorro.
    Thanks!

     

  • At January 24, 2006 10:27 AM, Blogger Jason Salas said…

    That's the part I can't talk aboout...yet. :-)

     

  • At January 24, 2006 10:40 AM, Anonymous jonah said…

    That's the part I can't talk aboout...yet. :-)

    ok fair enough - you must be excited to finally move this to production after 3 years of hard work - please keep us posted on the progress. Do you have a time-frame in mind?

     

  • At January 24, 2006 10:44 AM, Blogger Jason Salas said…

    Yep...but that, too is under lock and key.

     

  • At January 24, 2006 11:19 AM, Anonymous jonah said…

    Yep...but that, too is under lock and key.

    wow! i don't think even microsoft is that secretive about product release dates - though they do have a history of missing them anyway :)

     

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