I’m trying to put together a proof-of-concept for work to do a virtual tour while trying to do it for as little money as possible, and avoiding the “you get what you pay for.” Here at work we have a Flip Ultra that we got from Amazon for around $125. I have been messing around with it seeing what type of movies and video we could produce with it.
We currently don’t have a virtual tour, and I would love to get one going. So, I decided to give the Flip a try. I’m an oddball in the web industry and use Windows, so I planned on using Windows Movie Maker (WMM) to do all the video editing since it comes with the operating system (Vista if you are wondering). I found some music from Musopen that is free as well. Going royalty-free and price-free greatly limits the choice of music, but I found something that fits my purposes. I also had 3 voiceovers to produce as well. So off to Movie Maker I go.
I import the movie files, then go to narrate a section of the video, which was very easy. Then I go to import the music. Rut Roh! The music imports, but it pushes the narration I had done to the end of the 4 minute song. Not good. A quick Google search reveals my dilemma in which WMM just allows one audio track. This keeps WMM simple to use, but limits the functionality in this case.
My workaround isn’t pretty, but if you are on a tight budget this may help. Go get Audacity and install it. Once this is installed I imported my music track. Now begins the not so pretty part. I had to go to WMM and write down the times I wanted the voice overs to start. Then inside of Audacity I had to add the right amount of silence in front of my voice overs. You can see below how everything looks inside of Audacity.
Screen shot from Audacity.
Once everything is in the right spot, I exported the tracks as a single file. Then I imported that file into WMM to merge with the video I shot. Total cost was the $125 for Flip, all the software was free or included with Windows. The result was a 1:53 minute that looks pretty good (biased opinion) for a proof-of-concept. If we get the go ahead to do a whole series, we will need to combat the jitter, but I shot this as I was walking. Any other suggestions are welcome.
Some numbers and interesting things from August 2008.
Total visits: 289,879 visits (53,354 unique) - these numbers include on-campus and indicates about an 8.5% increase in traffic (~22K increase). Most likely due to an increase in the number of students on campus. We will investigate further when we compare the off-campus numbers by themselves.
82% of visits are IE and of those 65% are v7 and 34% are v6 (37% last month, it seems as if some people have upgraded. We can only hope!)
92% of visits are Windows and 7.5% are Macs. There is less than 1% combined of many others including iPhone (.16%), and iPod (.04%).
Our Nintendo Wii traffic increased from 2 visits to 5. We also added a visit each from the Playstation 3 and the PSP.
Off-Campus Visits
Total visits: 164,039 visits (about 56% of our total visits) - Interesting. I would have thought to see a big jump in the internal traffic, not the external. However, it seems our external traffic as a % of total visits increased by 3%. If this continues, it may be worth our while to try and see where they are going.
The top 4 countries stayed the same. However, the United Kingdom edged out last months #5 (South Korea) by 5 visits.
United States
India
China
Canada
United Kingdom
Benchmarking
Google Analytics offers a benchmarking utility that offers some interesting insights. You can’t put too much credence into the numbers, because it all depends on how many peole are participating in the service. It does benmark in the same sector and size, for example the following numbers are compared against Colleges & Universities of similar size, so it’s also not like the numbers don’t mean anything. How Google determines similar size is briefly explained to be number of site visits.
So, there are 6 areas of comparison, but I will only look at 2 for right now, visits and pageviews.
As stated we had 289,879 visits in August compared to the benchmark of 259,762. So we beat the benchmark for the month by 11.59%. Every business day we beat the benchmark, but on the weekends we are below the benchmark.
For pageviews, we are below the benchmark by 23.71%, 618,850 compared to 811,157. In this category there is no day that we are above the benchmark.
Microsoft Photosynth was released yesterday to the public, and the servers were quickly overloaded. This technology has some limitations out of the gate: all synths are public and only Windows. However, according to the blog and the Get Satisfaction page they realize those two major shortcomings and appearantly will get thos taken care of. In the meantime I did manage to snap some pics of my cubicle with an AT&T Tilt camera phone and uploaded them. This technology could prove very useful to incoming students to give a 3D account for various buildings, classrooms, and labs across campus. Would be really cool to be able to do a campus wide, but at first glance that may not work all that well.
So I was reading Rachel Reuben’s guest post on .eduGuru (nice paper by the way, you should check it out) and the part about Twitter got me thinking about real world use for Twitter-like applications. Rachel’s paper gears toward the ‘Marketing and Communications’ side of the university, and it is hard to disagree with her and hermanysources.
But the propeller head in me thinks, “Surely it can be more than just a marketing tool. How can it be used internally?” My gut reaction is, it can’t, at least not in it’s current state. And I’ll expound.
Graph from Google Trends
I’ll be comparing a few other micro-blogging sites with Twitter in an effort to come up with one that I think could be used just as Rachel’s sources state, but also provide a valuable internal tool as well. I will be examing Twitter, Plurk, Rejaw, and Indenti.ca.
Twitter wins hands down as far as user base (1,244,982 as of investigation according to TwitDir, but I know that is quite a bit off because according to Twitterholic I was in the 14 million to sign up), but we all know about the growing pains they have been through. Twitter is simple and due to the API has many desktop applications so that you really never have to go to the website. Also, it will hard to move the user base away from Twitter. The APIs auto-update at certain intervals, but the web site does not.
Plurk (65,448 users according to Plurk Mania) wins hands down in functionality. The biggest complaint, I believe, is the sideways scrolling. Plurk search and Twitter search indicate that it seems there is more negative than positive. Other than that it allows you to embed pictures and videos. It allows for threaded conversations, and has groups. To be widely accepted I think Plurk needs to adopt an “official” API. They have the unofficial one at Google Groups, and there are some desktop apps that are slowly creeping out.
The other two are small and don’t have many users (to be fair to Rejaw, they just launched June 5, 2008). To me, Identi.ca is just like Twitter except open source. Rejaw allows all the embedding that Plurk does, but it does have two things that make it stand out to me. Its website updates using push technology instead of pull as it seems all the rest do. It also jumped ship on the 140 character limit and raised it to 1000 characters.
So all that being said what needs to happen for massive internal adoption. The best features from all the above could make a very good communication tool.
A simple interface that has more options if you want them. For business use, you should be able to embed items directly into the post.
Better privacy and groups, because not everything is public knowledge.
More fine grained search, to allow people to only search what they should see.
An API so that the application can be ported to where the user is and not force the user to come to us.
Push updating. Makes it closer to IM than what is currently on Twitter.
Higher character limit. 140 is to low for business use.
I don’t think that is too much to ask for, do you? If you have some new thoughts, let me know. By the way, I am on all of these services (username: ctbarber), but really only interact on Twitter. Why? Because that’s where all the people are.
I thought I would start sharing some of the analytics we are gathering from the main page over at work.
These are for the month of July 2008.
Total visits: 267,285 visits (49,833 unique) - these numbers include on-campus
83% of visits are IE and of those 63% are v7 and 37% are v6 (update your machines people!!)
93% of visits are Windows and 7% are Macs. There is less than 1% combined of many others including Linux(.18%), iPhone (.12%), and iPod (.02%). We even had 2 visits from a Nintendo Wii.
Off-Campus Visits
Total visits: 142,812 visits (about 53% of our total visits)
Top five countries
United States 139,776
India 468
China 312
Canada 263
South Korea 193
Not all of our pages are being tracked, but as we roll out our new templates we are including hooks to Google Analytics. Once all our pages are reporting I can start to give more info about our most popular pages.
