Back in June 2007, I got an email from Nora Young. The subject line read:
that tech show
At the time, I knew Nora had been working on a pitch for a show called Spark. I’d heard the pilots, and they sounded great. But in June 2007, when I first got Nora’s message, I had no idea that I’d end up spending the next four and a half years of my working life on “that tech show.”
Working on Spark has been one of the most rewarding things I’ve done in my time at CBC Radio. Every day, I work alongside a small team of really talented people, making the kind of show I’d want to listen to (I mean, seriously, what other show would let me dedicate the majority of a broadcast to an in-depth look at the history of QWERTY?). I count myself very, very lucky. Sometimes people ask me what I do for living, and I tell them, “I call up smart, interesting people, talk to them, and put them on the radio.” Sure beats any other job I’ve ever had.
Which is why today is bittersweet.
Today is my last day working at Spark for at least for a year. And even though I’m leaving for a pretty awesome year-long adventure in France, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little bit misty-eyed. I’m going to miss it all: the story meetings, recording interviews, slicing and dicing tape in Pro Tools, and interacting with “the broader Spark community.” But more than anything, I’m going to miss Nora and the whole team who work so hard to put Spark together every week.
Spark, when it works — when it really, really nails it — is a show about what’s next. It’s a forward-looking show made by forward-looking people. So yes, I’m sad to be leaving. But at the same time, I can’t wait to hear what Spark comes up with next.
How can the CBC be relevant and meaningful in the future?
How can the CBC best deliver content to all Canadians?
Should the CBC only provide different programs and services than private broadcasters?
Does the CBC’s programming meet all of its objectives?
What more (or less) should it be doing?
What should it do differently?
Do you feel the CBC reflects your specific Canadian interests and needs?
Does the CBC fill your need for reliable and authoritative news and information?
Interestingly, the CRTC is using the third-party commenting service Disqus to collect submissions. That means, even though they don’t publicize it, there’s an Atom feed for all submissions:
About a year ago, frustrated by the CBC’s terrible online job board, I used Yahoo Pipes to jerry-rig an unofficial CBC Jobs RSS feed and Twitter account. The feeds chugged along just fine (and largely unattended) for almost a year. Then, CBC HR asked to take over the Twitter account. So I handed it over to them. The very next day, automatic posting stopped.
Today, after receiving two (two!) separate comments about how crummy the new, official CBC Jobs Twitter feed is, I set to jerry-rigging again. I was delighted to learn that Yahoo Pipes has reasonably adequate screen-scraping tools built-in.
The result: working, automatic CBC job posts, with permalinks, as an RSS feed and Twitter account. Submitted for your approval:
Most everyone I meet feels pulled in more directions than ever, expected to work longer hours, and asked to get more done, often with fewer resources. But in these same audiences, there are also, invariably, a handful of people who are getting things done, including the important stuff, and somehow still managing to have a life.
What have they figured out that the rest of their colleagues have not?
The answer, surprisingly, is not that they have more will or discipline than you do. The counterintuitive secret to getting things done is to make them more automatic, so they require less energy.
I wholeheartedly agree.
For instance, when we do pre-taped radio interviews for Spark, immediately after the interview, we record a “wrap” — a quick, 30 second web-only audio intro and extro. We tidy up the ends, then drop the audio file onto a script that encodes an MP3, adds metadata, uploads the interview to the web, and spits out a URL suitable for blogging. Because it’s part of the routine, and highly automated, putting full interviews online requires only a small amount of extra work.
In other words, it’s easy because it’s been ritualized, or (as I like to say) “baked into the process.”
This week’s CBC tech column is all about the current state of video search. There’s a version up at cbc.ca/tech, and one below, for posterity. You can also download an MP3.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
When I do these things, I sometimes wonder — as Michael Ridley did in his 2008 talk “Beyond Literacy: Are Reading and Writing Doomed?” — how far we are from a truly post-literate society.
According to recent numbers from internet measurement firm comScore, Canadians are voracious online video watchers. Collectively, 22.5 million Canadian users watched 388 million hours of online video in March. That’s 17.2 hours apiece — higher than any other country in the world.
But while our appetite for online video seems to be growing, our ability to search deeply within those videos isn’t keeping pace.
We already have pretty good tools for searching through text on the web. I can get quick, easy and accurate results when I search for for encyclopedia articles, news stories and long-lost friends from junior high school. Computers “get” text. Beyond basic keyword searches, computers can now be programmed to understand the relationships between words, the syntactical structures of language, and they can even analyze the sentiments behind the things we type.
But video? Not so much. Computers have a much harder time with moving pictures.
Basically, video search has all the challenges of static image recognition (a classically difficult task for computers), multiplied by 30 frames per second. Sure, computers can process and analyze video with increasing sophistication, but they stop short of truly understanding the content of moving images.
As both online video production and consumption increases, the issue grows.
Human help
“Now Dan,” you might be thinking, “doesn’t video search work just fine already? If I want to see a video of a funny cat, I can type in ‘funny cat video’ and spend all afternoon on YouTube.”
Yes, you can. But there’s an important distinction here. The reason you can find those funny cat videos is because someone somewhere named a video “funny cat” or included the tags “funny” or “cat.” Or maybe they linked to the video and the link text said, “funny cat video.” Or they added the video to their “Top 10 Funny Cat Videos of all time” playlist.
The reason you can find that funny cat video is because a human being labeled it as such. It’s not because the computer understands the content of the video, or even has the slightest clue what a “cat” is or a how a cat could be “funny.”
The real challenge in video search has to do with searching inside videos — helping computers better catalogue the depth of their content.
This is particularly relevant to the eduction sector. Many universities, colleges, and in some cases, high schools, post video lectures online. For certain courses, it’s not uncommon to have access to hours and hours of online lecture material. At that scale, the challenge becomes searching deeply for relevant content, not skimming across a shalow layer of metadata.
Last week, I talked to Larry Rowe, president of the multimedia research lab FXPAL (Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory). His team is working on exactly this problem, and recently launched TalkMiner, a video search tool.
Here’s how it works. TalkMiner analyzes online lecture videos, searching for PowerPoint-style presentation slides. When it finds a slide, it scans the relevant text, notes the video’s timestamp, and adds this information to a searchable database. This allows users to search for text that might not be in the lecture’s title or description, but might be buried 45 minutes in.
One of my test searches on TalkMiner took me back to Grade 10 biology: “meiosis and mitosis.” Though many of the results had these words in their titles, the first result was a lecture from Berkeley that didn’t mention meiosis until a presentation slide almost five minutes in.
Transcription
Of course, scanning presentation slides from existing lecture videos is just one technique, most effective for a particular style of online video. But the central idea is there: let’s design technology that helps a computer make long video more searchable, and more useful.
There are other techniques. In late in 2009, YouTube announced an experimental feature called automatic captions. Basically, it takes the audio part of a video, runs it through speech recognition software and generates a transcript. Since the transcription is text, it can be added to a searchable database to make that video easier to find. The feature is now available on all English-language YouTube videos.
Outside of the academic and consumer space, the U.S. Department of Defense is working on video search, too. It is developing a system that could be used to analyze footage to identify people, vehicles, and certain types of action in a scene.
So why is this important? For me, it’s the scale that makes this such and interesting and relevant problem. According to YouTube, 35 hours of video is uploaded every minute. That’s staggering. And sure, many of those videos are funny cats. But there’s also an enormous amount of knowledge contained in some of these online videos. Just look at the TED Talks series, for instance.
But right now, video search is clunky. It doesn’t always work as well as we’d like. And in most cases, searching deep inside videos is impossible. Reliable direct video search is still the stuff of science fiction.
Online video production is growing. Online video consumption is growing. Without decent search tools, we risk getting lost in a sea of abundance: knowing that what we want is out there, but being unable to find it.
Update June 7, 2011: MediaJobsSearchCanada’s RSS feed no longer includes 8-character CBC job numbers (e.g. EDM00183), which breaks the whole thing I’d rigged up in Yahoo Pipes. I may someday write my own scraper for CBC’s terrible jobs site, but until then, the feed won’t be updated. Curiously, the MJSC change seems to have happened one day after CBC HR took control of @CBCjobs. Coincidence?
Update May 19, 2011: A representative from CBC HR asked for control of the @CBCjobs Twitter handle. I agreed to change the Twitter username of my automated CBC job posting robot, allowing them to create a new account with the @CBCjobs username. It appears that they’ve created a new account under the name @CBCjobs, listing it as the “Official account for HR @ Canada’s national public broadcaster.” As I write this, the account seems to be manually updated, without automatic job postings. Too bad.
If you still want automated CBC jobs postings, you can now follow @workatCBC on Twitter, or subscribe to this feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/workatCBC. If you were previously following @CBCjobs, Twitter should have automatically switched you over.
===
Here’s the short version of this story: The CBC’s jobs website doesn’t have an RSS feed. So I made one:
This feed is completely unofficial, and comes with no guarantees. You can also follow @cbcjobs @workatCBC on Twitter if you’re into that sort of thing.
You’re welcome.
—
Here’s the longer version of the story: The CBC’s jobs website (“Powered by Taleo“) is basically pretty terrible. And astonishingly, it doesn’t have an RSS feed. If you want new CBC job postings via RSS, you can get them from a couple of places, but these sources aren’t exactly what I was looking for:
CBCJobsBC on Twitter (seemingly official, but only posts jobs in British Columbia)
MediaJobSearchCanada’s main RSS feed (updated frequently – by a scraper, I suspect, but contains every media job in Canada, and links point back to MJSC, where you can’t directly apply for any jobs)
So, using Yahoo Pipes and Feedburner, I cobbled together a feed that I hope will be useful to some people. Basically, this pipe takes the frequently-updated MJSC feed, and then filters out postings that don’t have “CBC RADIO-CANADA” listed as the Company. Then, it grabs the 8-character CBC job number (e.g. EDM00183) from the title, and appends it to
This past Saturday, along with Jimmy the Uke and Steve McNie, I was once again on GO to pimp the ukulele. It was a lot of fun, as always. Here’s an mp3 of the segment:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
You know the kind of site I’m talking about? It’s just like you can imagine it printed on glossy paper and being given to you by hand. And it just doesn’t look like a web page.
But it’s the next line that’s the kicker:
It’s on the web. But it’s not of the web.
And right there, Joel put his finger on exactly what bugs me about so much of what CBC does online, particularly with radio show websites. Yes, it’s on the web. But it’s not of the web.
A few weeks ago, I spent some time in Winnipeg with team DNTO. While I was there, we watched the world premiere of three short animations based on some of Sook-Yin Lee’s stories. This one, directed by Jim Goodall, is my favourite of the three, and I’m not just saying that because they used my voice (very briefly):
You can check out all three animations on DNTO’s YouTube page. The CBC “Entertainment” “Portal” has copies too, but lacks permalinks, so I won’t bother linking there.