I changed my WordPress blog, danielgreene.com, to the Mystique theme. I love it! It has this widget on the top with links to my RSS feed, Facebook Page, Twitter profile, Flickr photostream, and YouTube channel. It has a combo widget on the right that shows recent comments, top posts, archives, tag cloud, and category lists. And it uses a beautiful font that has true italics. I like!
Blog Archives
I love my new blog theme!
Google Video Shutting Down*
In case you ever uploaded a video to Google Video and didn’t get the memo that they’re shutting down, here’s a copy of the email from Google yesterday:
Dear Google Video User,
Later this month, hosted video content on Google Video will no longer be available for playback. Google Video stopped taking uploads in May 2009 and now we’re removing the remaining hosted content. We’ve always maintained that the strength of Google Video is its ability to let people search videos from across the web, regardless of where those videos are hosted. And this move will enable us to focus on developing these technologies further to the benefit of searchers worldwide. [*Google Video is shutting down as a content host but will continue as a video search.]
On April 29, 2011, videos that have been uploaded to Google Video will no longer be available for playback. We’ve added a Download button to the video status page, so you can download any video content you want to save. If you don’t want to download your content, you don’t need to do anything. (The Download feature will be disabled after May 13, 2011.)
We encourage you to move to your content to YouTube if you haven’t done so already. YouTube offers many video hosting options including the ability to share your videos privately or in an unlisted manner. To learn more go here.
Here’s how to download your videos:
Go to the Video Status page.
To download a video to your computer, click the Download Video link located on the right side of each of your videos in the Actions column.Once a video has been downloaded, “Already Downloaded” will appear next to the Download Video link.
If you have many videos on Google Video, you may need to use the paging controls located on the bottom right of the page to access them all.
Please note: This download option will be available through May 13, 2011.
Thank you for being a Google Video user.
Sincerely,
The Google Video Team
Google Video was the pioneer in closed-captioning Internet videos. They first introduced closed-captioning for Google Video on September 19, 2006. I was one of the first people in the world to use the technology when I publish my closed-captioned Google Video on October 4, 2006. Google then bought YouTube on October 9, 2006. They later introduced YouTube Captions and Subtitles on September 22, 2008, and I didn’t find out about it until May 7, 2009, when I uploaded my first closed-captioned video on YouTube.
Since then, I went back and closed-captioned all my spoken videos on YouTube and I continue to closed-caption the videos I upload to my YouTube channel.
My Article on Vague Language (VL) Featured in RID Views
My article “Interpreting Intentionally Vague Language” was featured in the RID Views, Spring 2011. If you read the article, or are already familiar with VL, I would like to know your thoughts on the subject, so please feel free to leave a comment on this blog post.
In case you’re interested, I teach workshops on VL and other topics– and love to travel. 
Flickr tags not changing case
Has this happened to you on Flickr lately? You’ve tagged photos at various times with lowercase and title case keywords, and you decide you want to make them lowercase for standardization. You go to your All Tags page and click Edit to the right of one of the lowercase / capitalized tags in the list; for example, I wanted to standardize “accessibility, Accessibility” to “accessibility.” After clicking Edit, I get an “Edit this tag” page that shows Accessibility in the text entry field, and below that, a line that offers “Or, use a different format: accessibility” with “accessibility” as a hyperlink. I click accessibility, and Flickr puts the lowercase version of the keyword (tag) in the text entry field. I click Save and a dialog box pops up that says, “Are you sure you want to replace accessibility with accessibility?” (I know that looks odd, but the first instance of “accessibility” in that sentence is the database version of the tag, which will always be lowercase, and the second instance is the display version of the tag.) I click OK, but does Flickr change the tag? No. And there are only four (4) photos are tagged with that keyword! This has been going on for me for the past three weeks. In fact; the first night, I wasted two hours changing tags from title case to lowercase only to find out in the morning that Flickr hadn’t changed any of them.
If you think I’m crazy for caring about tag standardization and spending two hours working on it, then this blog post is not written for you. I know this is not something most people care about—and, God, do I know there are worse problems in the world!—but I’m sure there are a lot of others out there like me who do care about this and are bugged by it. This screenshot got 5,704 views in its first 24 hours on Flickr, so obviously I’m not the only one who’s having the problem and searching the Web to find out who else is.
I posted about this problem in a thread in the Flickr Help Forum three weeks ago and have not gotten resolution. Two weeks ago, Flickr staff changed the title of the thread to “[resolved] Batch tag update not working“– even though the problem is not resolved. If you are still having this problem, I encourage you to go to that Help Forum thread (link above) and let them know this problem is still unresolved and you would like them to fix it.
The Smithsonian featured a photo of mine
I just remembered that I forgot to share the good news with everyone that The Smithsonian featured a photo of mine last March. It appeared in a Click! Photography Changes Everything post in the webzine The Bigger Picture – Visual Archives and The Smithsonian.
I am honored even though I realize that The Smithsonian has featured photos by thousands of photographers over the years. Still, how many people can say that The Smithsonian featured a work of theirs. It’s exciting to be a part of a great American institution.
