Since then I’ve received my beta testing login details. With a great deal of excitement I went to Hulu.com to see what fantastic wonders would be presented to me.

None. If you’re in Australia, bad luck – it’s a case of look, but don’t touch.

For now, Hulu is a U.S. service only. That said, our intention is to make Hulu’s growing content lineup available worldwide. This requires clearing the rights for each show or film in each specific geography and will take time.

Being limited to North America because of distribution rights, international users are agonisingly teased by a long list of currently popular TV shows they can’t watch – Arrested Development, Family Guy, Scrubs, King of The Hill, My Name is Earl, The Office… the list goes on, and unless you have a beta login to Hulu (get on the waiting list) none of those links will get you anywhere.

With a login, choosing any episode from one of those shows takes you to the video player screen, right to the excited point of ‘Loading Video’ before slapping you in the face – rejection.

But I want to take advantage of the options alongside the video player – share, embed, watch it full screen! Hopefully it’s not too long before something is up and running for Australia.

In a desperate attempt to see the video player in action, I tried some older shows in the hope they were no longer affected by distribution rights. Thankfully, even Doogie Howser episodes (Breaking Up is Hard to Doogie) from 1989 were unavailable.

The potential of this application is huge. When I read the description of what it would do, I couldn’t wait to try it. Unfortunately the interface isn’t entirely user-friendly at the moment, but it’s in beta, so expect something great to come.

For what is obviously planned for this media player the ABC is again demonstrating why Australians go to them for original online audio and video content – because they try to make it easily accessible.

Often they succeed in the attempt, and that’s why their podcasts and vodcasts have enjoyed such popularity. ABC digital content has succeeded because it is available. If there’s not much to choose from, people move on. The ABC’s integration online of text, audio and video content is impressive, to say the least.

If you haven’t seen it, check out an example of their in-page video player on this story.

The News Ltd paper I work for (full disclosure) went so far as to declare in March 2007 that “YouTube’s dominance of online video content is about to end”.

Hulu.com is the outworking of that effort and is now in beta, and it’s looking pretty good.

Something very few news sites are doing today is incorporating social networking opportunities into their structure.  Even less are incorporating social networking into their video content – which remains for the most part clunky and unappealing.

Hopefully Hulu will change that for News Ltd/Corp.  This aspect of the current beta player is promising.

The “embed” function allows you to set in and out points, so you can embed just a selected chunk of a video clip on your blog.

I really hope this technology gets rolled out to all News Ltd/Corp sites, because it will exponentially enhance video content accessibility.

A review of Hulu at LostRemote.

The other day I discovered news feeds on Twitter. I started following the New York Times world news feed with mobile phone message updates. These consist of a headline and a URL link to the full story.

For anyone on an internet-enabled phone, this is a quick and easy way to get news updates. My mobile phone isn’t internet-enabled, so just getting the headlines wasn’t entirely useful, and the SMS messages filled the inbox within a few hours.

For the media outlet, the cost of putting headline updates on Twitter is minimal if done manually, none if the process is automated.

For the consumer there is no cost for receiving, or ‘following‘, the updates via Twitter.

They get a headline delivered. If they like it, they follow the link to your site.

Twitters (messages left on Twitter) are limited in length, much like a text message on a phone, but would be very handy for imparting brief, quick instructions to everyone in a work group immediately on their mobile phone.

via Phil Windley’s Technometria:

…using Twitter as a messaging endpoint in what Rohit Khare calls a “syndication oriented architecture,” or SynOA. Jon Udell and Rohit talked about this on IT Conversations a few weeks ago.

I’m using Twitter in a similar way in my class this semester. My students are writing servers that send updates to a Twitter account via the Twitter API. Anyone can then subscribe to those updates through RSS, via SMS, or simply by going to the Web page. Easy, simple, and pretty effective.

Tags: twitter, social networking, rss, sms

The Digg Effect: A Deconstruction | Linux Brain Dump

Apparently MySpace is no longer cool.

Facebook has grown by 273% in Australia in the last four months alone, mainly thanks to university students.

But it’s also been “invaded by tons and tons of old people“.

MySpace and Facebook popularity is counted by the number of ‘friends’ you have.  But really, how many of them are friends (best link), or is ‘friend’ just being redefined?

For Windows users there’s Windows Movie Maker, while I’ve found iMovie for the Mac is an ample resource for those quick edits and exports.

If you don’t have any video software that you can use on your hard drive, or are up for a little experimentation, there are a lot of online editing solutions.  I would recommend not trying them on dialup (as I have to at home).

Mashable has put together a very comprehensive resource.

Video Toolbox: 150+ Online Video Tools and Resources

There’s more information there than anyone can reasonably be expected to digest, and the following are just the categories under which they list resources:

• Live Video Communications
• Online Video How-to
• Online Video Editors
• Online Video Converters
• Video sharing
• Video hosting
• Video organization and management
• Vidcasts & vlogging
• Video mashups
• Mobile video apps
• Video search
• Online video downloading services
• Miscellaneous tools
• Online TV

They also have other posts in the series, with the Online Photography Toolbox, Blogging Toolbox, and Online Productivity Toolbox.

I’ve signed up to a few popular sites to see how useful they are – and because I’m a complete nerd. I did hold off for a quite a while on signing up to some of these, but I now feel it’s almost a responsibility to be involved and try to understand them more.

I honestly haven’t put much effort into expanding my social networks across these sites yet, and hadn’t visited some for several months before writing this post.

I’m on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace, Friendster… probably something else, but I can’t remember at the moment.

You can read about Twitter in this article in The Australian yesterday, where it’s suggested Twitter may not be a complete waste of time.

“There are people who talk about their frivolous daily activities,” Owyang says.

“I remove them. For me it’s more of a business communication tool than a frivolous personal introspection tool.”

LinkedIn has been described as invaluable for professional and career networking. The following is a profile link promotion button. It will probably be part of a future redesign of earleyedition.com.

And Twitter has been described as inane, which of course it can be, as can blogs. But there are useful ones out there too. The badge below may be incorporated into that redesign I mentioned.

Of course the online arm of a commercial broadcaster is going to try and drive traffic back to television. Independent online broadcasting and video content will not still be trying to push an analog wheelbarrow.

Yes, the ‘owners’ of video, TV, are being beaten to the online visual punch by their print rivals.

It’s also predicted online video advertising revenue will make up one-third of ALL online ads by 2012.

It’s no surprise then that TIME Magazine is launching an in-house studio to develop online video content.

The distinction between print, radio, and television will continue to blur as they all produce similar content for online consumption.

Sources:
LostRemote – Time to build a video studio
LostRemote – Newspapers beating TV sites to video revenue

I’m sure they will still be printing in five years, but it’s a pretty telling quote from one of the most respected papers in the world, which has also spent a great deal of time developing their web presence into one of the best online news sites.

It’s either something in the water or their information technology teachers, who provide a weekly computer education lesson for each class, are good. Very good. At least good enough for one of them to receive a Smart Classrooms ICT Teacher award.

Oh, and you can read all about the history of the school, if you like. They could market a t-shirt at their next school fete.

The first, from Our Lady of the Assumption in Enoggera, told how the Year Fours were almost done with their podcasts. Podcasts! My first thought is simply, “Cool.” Then logic kicks in and I think, “Wait, is that really important? Shouldn’t they be doing grammar or mathematics or something?” And then, finally, I kick logic in the teeth and say, “Learning the skills needed to work in a multimedia environment is probably the most important training those kids can get, and at such a young age, they’re off to a good start!” You’ve got to give credit to the teacher who came up with that project. The Year Four page at the school’s site doesn’t yet show the podcasts, but I’ll be keen to check them out if they do post them.

The second billboard was from the primary school I attended during my only year of primary education in Australia, Ashgrove State School. They took out Primary first place in the best web-based student newspaper category for their Kid’s eZine. It’s fairly basic in design and writing, with most of the stories about 100 words in length, but a great achievement for 6-10 year olds! My only suggestion to them would be to put dates on their stories so people know how current they are. My favourite story was one about Ashgrove sports teams written by four of the boys. In it they ask the question, why do Ashgrove sports teams achieve so much? The answer, they decide, is that “the coaches don’t yell, they encourage their teams with firm but quiet talk.” Great stuff.

This sort of information on school noticeboards is much more interesting than the usual “Congratulations Jack and Jane – State Finals”. Apart from Jack and Jane who may get a sense of pride seeing their name by a main road, the general public haven’t learnt much about any of the school’s (possibly) great programs. These boards actually caught my attention and made me interested in what the kids were achieving, underscored by what’s obviously an interesting and fun program. And what they’re doing is great. As I said before, giving young children practical training in a multimedia environment is setting them up for the future.

UPDATE: The title of the post, School 2.0, refers to the now commonly used term Web 2.0, the “supposed second generation of Internet-based services … that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users” (from Wikipedia).

Crikey – Google buys YouTube for a cool $US1.65 billion

Pajamas Media: GoogTube!:The $1.6 Billion Boys

LostRemote – Lessons learned from YouTube

LostRemote – Details of the Google-YouTube deal

LostRemote – Google buys YouTube

Google makes video play with YouTube buy | Tech News on ZDNet

Google buys YouTube for $1.65 billion – MSNBC

BBC NEWS | Business | Google buys YouTube for $1.65bn