jebsblog

Perhaps you may have overlooked this in your own attempt to gather as much information about your web visitors as I had. I am talking about Google Analytics’ requirement that users make sure they have a Privacy Policy which lets visitors to your website know that Google Analytics (GA) are being used on the website.

I just finished writing a Privacy Policy for the jebswebs site and will be adding a link on the blog to point to it.

Personally, I am not overly concerned about privacy on the web, but many people are, and I can certainly understand this. I am concerned about some of the “biggest offenders” who have made the press lately. It’s one thing to have an online service that gather’s information, it is something else when you don’t let people/visitors know about it – or if you constantly change the requirements to keep your information private. The “biggest offenders” are also guilty of creating a false sense of security by creating the illusion of a “gated community” when all the while, their patrons’ personal information is available to those beyond the “gate.”

So, I am a bit ashamed that I didn’t catch this a few weeks ago when I stated adding GA to several of my sites. Rest assured I’ll be remedying that in the next few days.

For those who don’t know about GA and wonder, why all the fuss, let me explain.

Google Analytics is a neat and free service provided by Google to website owners and developers. The developer inserts a small amount of JavaScript code on the pages of their website, and every time someone visits that page, the script grabs some information about the visitor and adds it to the owner’s GA account database. The website owner and/or developer can access this database information by logging into their GA account and seeing charts and graphs which aggregate the data collected. The information collected ranges from what pages are being visit, what browser is being used, and how long they stayed on the site. It should be noted that no personally identifiable information (i.e., names and addresses) are gathered through this interaction. There may be some debate about the use of IP addresses. GA’s policies say they are not harvested, but GA does give you location data – at least in terms of country of origin – and that would have to come from IP data.

It is important to note – and this is where the Privacy Policy comes in – that nearly all of this information is rather innocuous and completely anonymous. But, because the information is also sent to Google, and in the theme of complete disclosure, it is important that visitors know this. I guess you could make the case that by virtue of visiting your site, the visitor’s data is already collected, but let’s not go there…

BTW, just to play it safe, Google offers a free browser plug-in called the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on which, when installed in a browser [at this point available for Internet Explorer (versions 7 and 8), Google Chrome (4.x and higher), and Mozilla Firefox (3.5 and higher)], the information gathered by GA will be shared with the site owner, but not Google. So, if you are concerned about your privacy, you may want to install this.

Note: In researching for this blog entry, I came across an Australian news article on just this topic. Reading it next.

UPDATE – March 10, 2010: Yes, it is true. Google has announced that the “automatic captioning service” first detailed in November, is now available to all accounts (channels). It appears that, for now, you have to “request” the service (although it appears they automatically had captioned my latest video which was posted several months ago), and they will eventually get to all of them. Pretty cool. More on the announcement. Directions on how to caption

I recently heard the news about the new “automatic captioning” that Google is providing to certain YouTube accounts. According to the “Official Google Blog:”

…we’ve combined Google’s automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions, or auto-caps for short. Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video. The captions will not always be perfect (check out the video below for an amusing example), but even when they’re off, they can still be helpful—and the technology will continue to improve with time.

Apparently, Google is rolling this out with a select group of partners and on specific channels. My understanding is that Google will simply start captioning videos in these groups using this new automatic system.

Anyone who knows anything about captioning knows that automatic systems are fraught with problems. It seems the best captioners are still human beings. And, well, I’m guessing Google is not interesting in hiring half the population of the planet and training them to become transcriptionists. Cause that’s what it would probably take to get enough human power to deal with the zillions of YouTube videos out there.

But if you can’t wait for Google to automatically caption the home videos of your kids opening their Christmas presents, you can use another, lesser-known, and equally free service called CaptionTube. It is not clear from my reading if CaptionTube is a service that Google Labs developed themselves or whether is was acquired through some kind of company merger, but in any case, the price is right. I’m still playing with it so I don’t have an official opinion yet. If you are a master user, send me a comment or an e-mail.

I have, for a year or so, been also playing around with an application called MovCaptioner that runs on the Mac OSX. SynchriMedia, the maker of MovCaptioner has been promising a Windows version, but I’m thinking CaptionTube might be the right product at the right price. MovCaptioner costs $39.95 for one license which provides free updates. Multiuser licenses are also available for a discount.

Both MovCaptioner and CaptionTube work essentially the same way. You load your video (in the case of CaptionTube, you can work off an existing YouTube video that has already been  published). As you play back your video in the application, you can stop (marking the time code automatically) and type in what the people on the video are saying. It is not really easy to do, so I have developed an new affinity for the people who do this work professionally. People do not talk in nice tight sound bytes, so you will quickly find it is hard to “stop the tape” at the appropriate spot and add the caption. You also have to have pretty good listening skills. You will end up often repeating the clip to get the wording correctly. Again, it’s not easy.

After you have created the text for your captions, you click some buttons, uploading the caption file, and check back in a little while and see your YouTube with captions. In the case of MovCaptioner, you have a number of options for saving and publishing your video. MovCaptioner has the advantage of saving a file that can use it with, or converted for use with any media player, not just the Flash media player that YouTube uses.

Both captioning systems appear to use an “closed caption” method meaning the caption transcript is kept separate from the video file (not embedded like subtitles in old movies). It can be turned off and on by the user, and the transcript itself can be saved and used separately – with or without the time codes. This is a nice option.

I’ve made this all sound very simple; it’s not. But, it is not all that difficult either. Like anything, it is an acquired skill.

I am hoping this new automatic service from Google takes off and become universally available soon. At the very least, Google could first provide this as a service for folks who need to get their videos captioned now (e.g., educational institutions, governments, etc.). Maybe even open it up with invites like they did with GMail and GoogleWave. I’d be happy to be a beta tester.

Anyway, a solution to finding a quick and inexpensive way of captioning short videos is coming closer to fruition. Exciting times. Stay tuned!