European cranes want to be free

  

This wonderful video of European crane courtship is currently copyrighted and not freely licensed. The video comes with a button that allows you to embed it in a website and its article has a button where you can order the video.

The video is on the website of Stichting Natuurbeelden and they made a nice offer; 50 of their videos will become available under the CC-by-sa license. There are many great videos to choose from and for all kinds of reasons, the initial offering is to choose at most 50 of them. 

Organising this selection will not be easy and the relevance of some videos is very much in the context of nature in the Netherlands. European cranes are breeding again in the last few years. When the fifty videos are selected and when they are used in our projects, these videos will be seen quite often. At the moment when I write this, the number of views for this video is only 136.

Thanks,

     GerardM

#Spring is in the air

I received a happy e-mail announcing that the #birds are at it again. The website shows how eight types of birds are busy doing their spring thing; making a nest, laying eggs, sitting on the eggs, feeding chicks and seeing them fly away.

Experience spring !!

There are already five feeds for five species of birds and, it would be cool when we could incorporate such feeds in our articles on these birds or on the subject of spring. It being a feed, it shows the real deal and in a way it is quite compulsive watching these animals doing .. not that much really.

Technically it may be a challenge. For us and for potential partners like the Dutch society for the birds it is a great opportunity as it brings the reality of nature to a much greater public.

Thanks,

       GerardM

Conferences come and go ..

Conferences come and go and when it is held in an "exotic" location like Kosovo it is more likely that the audience do not find it exotic. The conference in Kosovo was part of a series of events that started with a conference in Vlora, Albania and culminated in a big conference in Kosovo.

The Kosovo conference was video taped.. The result is that presentations by people like Rob Savoye, Leon Shiman and Peter Salus are available to you on archive.org. Kim Bruning presented about Wikipedia ..

Another recent conference was Europeana in Amsterdam. Its presentations were video taped as well. Several of the presentations can be found on things like slideshare. The presentations will be coming soon as well it is advertised.

Wikimania in Gdansk had its presentations taped but I wonder if and when they become available. It is really sad that these videos are not on line as many people were networking in stead of presentation hopping in the understanding that it would be possible to see them later.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#wikiconfnyc has its video on line

What is in effect the USA chapter, organised in their home town New York for the second time a Wiki conference.

They have great speakers, Clay Shirky and Sue Gardner, they have a "View the live-stream here!" and to top it off, Clay Shirky's speech is already available online.

I wish I was there ..
Thanks,
     GerardM

A new #Wikipedia related logo just spotted in the wild

This logo was spotted quite prominently on the website of the Open Video Alliance where it is announced that Google has freed up a VP8 codec for HTML5: the WebM project. It is good news.. read all about it :)
Thanks,
      GerardM

#IE9 has inbuild irrelevance

#Microsoft announced on its blog that it will only support H264. As a consequence it does not support video as provided by the projects of the Wikimedia Foundation notably Wikipedia.

Video is technically about to get to the stage for Wikipedia where it will become more and more visible. There are contacts with GLAM that will provide us with relevant material, material that will not be provided in H264.

So there is this stand off not unlike the Apple and Adobe situation. The difference is that Microsoft has no control over the platform. In Europe Microsoft has to offer the choice of an alternative browser. It is quite easy to bypass IE elsewhere as well.

Given that Facebook is to provide Wikipedia content, two of the most popular websites will be suboptimal supported by the "new, mega, wonderful (insert your marketing adjective)" offering of Microsoft. As you are the customer and as you can, you can vote with your feet.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#BrooklynMuseum discovered from across the pond

The Brooklyn museum has been partnering with our Wiki world and, with the recent news of their contribution to Commons, I wanted to learn more about what this museum is about. Yesterday, I included a link to their object of the month. Today I had another look and found a video where the curator of the Egyptian department explains why he likes this object.

I looked at youtube for more material from the Brooklyn museum and I found this gem..



I love their attitude and their witty way of showing not only the value of art, but even more that the art at the museum is there for people to enjoy. I hope that the material that becomes available will find its place in Wikipedia articles and I hope that one day they will find me at their doorstep for a visit.
Thanks,
       GerardM

dotSUB

With the news that Wikipedia is going to provide support for video, I am sure that a wealth of information will become available in this way. As video is created everywhere, much of it will not be understood because of it being in this language that you do not understand.

At the OTT'09, the open translation tools conference, I met Ed Zad of dotSUB. DotSUB is a project where people add subtitles to video. The functionality of dotSUB is quite important and I wonder how we will do this for the content for Wikimedia projects. The cool thing is that at dotSUB they are considering making their cool functionality open source.

Ed was an inspiration at this conference; he has a long career in translation and he brought the perspective of the translation industry to this conference. For me it gave this conference the depth that makes this a wonderful conference.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Why SignWriting

Adam Frost created a wonderful video, this video was originally created for the Cherasco conference and has now found a home on the SignWriting website as well.

Adam's presents a compelling case for being able to write in your native language. Adam's mother tongue is American Sign Language. SignWriting allows him to do this. Have a look and I am sure that you will agree with me that the point is well made.

The ability to write in a mother tongue has been proven to be of benefit for the whole of the academic career of a person. Even when the career perspectives are better in another language, this is however another issue :)
Thanks,
GerardM