I have been asked numerous times as to the best way to caption YouTube videos hence this blog post. When I initially started to caption videos, I used the ever popular MAGpie software but found that captioning YouTube videos proved to be extremely tedious with MAGpie. Fortunately, there are a number of free tools available on the web that makes the captioning process a whole lot easier. Below is a review of the tool that I use CaptionTube:

CaptionTube

It has taken a while but Google have finally come up with their own tool for adding YouTube captions. Unfortunately it does not integrate with YouTube as fluidly as we may want it to but neverthless works efficiently as a caption editor once you get past the learning curve. It allows you to connect directly to your YouTube account and have access to your videos within CaptionTube. Once the captions are created though, you will need to export the file and then upload the file to your YouTube account, this is where the fluidity is lost. Add a functionality to automatically add the caption to the YouTube video and I think we are on to a winner app. CaptionTube is what I used to caption the LSBU YouTube videos

Screenshot of captiontube

Other tools that I have found useful include:

• Subtitle Horse
• dotSub
• Easy YouTube caption creator

Screenshot of the LSBU YouTube Channel

Things have been quiet on my blog over the past few weeks as I have been extremely busy at work and one of the projects the web team here have been working on is the launch of the YouTube channel for London South Bank University (LSBU).

What makes our University channel different from every other University channel out there you ask? Simple, our channel is “probably the first” University YouTube channel to ensure every video uploaded also has captioning incorporated that makes use of YouTube’s captioning system, you can turn the captioning on or off and even use the inbuilt google translate engine to view the captions in a language of your choice. Matt Cutts goes into detail about the YouTube Translation functionality in his blog.

Let me know what you think of the channel. It has around 10 videos up at the moment and I will be hoping to build on these over the next few months. The University is slowly but surely making it’s debut into the social media realm and the web team here intend to make the best use of Web 2.0 . Only a month ago I created the LSBU Twitter page and without any publicity we have already managed to pull in nearly 200 followers. In the grand scheme of things, these may just be baby steps but the web team here have a lot planned to ensure that the University embraces the latest social media technologies.

Twitter 101

Twitter has just just launched their dummy’s guide to using twitter – “Twitter 101″ with some really interesting case studies about how businesses have successfully implemented Twitter into their online strategies. Twitter have also provided on the site a downloadable slide version of their guide for those of us thinking about promoting Twitter usage within our organisations.

Visit the Twitter101 website

Twitter have done their research before compiling this guide with Biz Stone stating on the Twitter blog -

We coordinated with business students and writers to surface some interesting findings, best practices, steps for getting started, and case studies. The results demonstrate how customers are getting value out of Twitter and suggest techniques businesses can employ to enhance that value. While this work was envisioned for businesses, it’s also useful for anyone using Twitter so have a look if you like.

The Twitter business case studies include Dell, JetBlue, Teusner Wines, Current, Tasti D Lite, CoffeeGroundz, Etsy, NAKEDPizza, America Apparel and Pepsi. Recommended bed time read for all you social media strategists!

The site contains six sections. They are: “What is Twitter”, “Getting started”, “Learn the lingo”, “Best practices”, “Case studies” and “Other resources”.

See my vCard for contact details

Social media provides us with a means of reaching out and interacting with a huge number of people that only a few years ago would have been practically impossible. But with the ever increasing number of social media sites we are on, for most of us it has become a nightmare to keep track of our profiles or even to decide which of our profiles would be the best to give out as our main point of contact.

The easy solution would be to create our own site and just add all our social media links on it and use that as our online contact card. Unfortunately not everyone has the web design skills to go about implenting their own site. This is where the Card.ly comes in very handy, it provides a very easy interface where people can easily add their online profiles, pick a theme and create a good-looking online mini business card of their own in just a couple of minutes. They are then able to share this out to the world through a very easy to remember URL – http://www.card.ly/yourname .

There are nearly 30 odd themes you can choose from for your contact card, most of which are free, though personally only found 5 or 6 that are visually pleasing (yeah I am a picky old SOD).  Some of the themes also have a stream tab, that pulls in your twitter and RSS feeds to display within your contact card, unfortunately the stream overflows the design borders, so I would not recommend going with this option atelast until they get better themes. What I really like about Card.ly is that it creates an online contact card that is hCard compliant and anyone can easily download your vCard by clicking the an icon under the title.

Card.ly also provides a widget that you can embed in your blogs/websites e.t.c to link to your online busines card. You could also pay $24.99 a year for the premium version which has a extra goodies like more themes to choose from, unlimited RSS streams, usage stats and advertisement-free cards.

Below is a screenshot of my Card.ly profile - http://www.card.ly/niroism

Screenshot of my Card.ly contact card

Twitter – @digitocrat