A Greene Man’s Blog

YouTube Annotations

Originally uploaded by Daniel Greene

When I signed on to YouTube this morning, I noticed a new feature called Annotations that allows you to add Speech Bubbles, Notes, and Spotlights to your videos. I realized right away that the first two of these types of annotations gave me a way to caption my videos. They don’t allow for “closed” captioning; everyone who views the video sees them by default. There is a mechanism people can use, though, to turn them off while viewing them by clicking on the Menu button at the bottom of the player.

This morning, I captioned a video that I recorded on Mother’s Day. At the time of this writing, it seems that you can only see the captions if you view the video on YouTube. YouTube says that, once they get this feature out of beta, they will support embeds, meaning that the annotations will show up when videos are shared in blogs, on Facebook, and the like.

Although it was time-consuming (it took me about 45 minutes to an hour to caption a one-minute-forty-five-second [1:45] video), the graphical user interface (GUI) was rather intuitive. From my first experience using YouTube’s Annotations, I am certainly willing to use them again. Hooray for an easier way to caption videos!

I called my mom on Mother’s Day and sang her this song from Peter Pan that she used to sing to me when tucking me in at night. I tried to subtitle, but I couldn’t figure it out. The lyrics are:

The angel voice that bids you goodnight
Kisses your cheek, whispers ’sleep tight’
Your mother and mine
Your mother and mine

The helping hand that guides you along
Whether you’re right, whether you’re wrong
Your mother and mine
Your mother and mine

What makes mothers all that they are?
Might as well ask what makes a star

Ask your heart to tell you her worth
Your heart must say heaven and earth
Another word for divine
Your mother and mine
Your mother and mine

We saw this cute little pot-bellied pig on South Congress Street in front of Zen Japanese Food Fast. This pig (named Chorizo, which is Spanish for sausage) is owned by the same man who owns the restaurant. In the video, he tells as woman who asks if she can pet him that he just wet him down because he was hot. The woman says she used to own 13 of them and raise them. Then he says, “His name’s Chorizo…”

I uploaded this the night Flickr opened its doors to video. I know this would have been more timely news had I blogged it then, but better late than never. Anyhoo, enjoy the cute piggly-wiggly!