Recent comments by user

Very nice video leonard. I liked it a …

Comment posted on Resume by pedantickarl

Very nice video leonard. I liked it a lot.
I’m teaching myself the Russian alphabet.

practicing:
Ф “ehf” as in face
Я “yah” as in yard

pedantickarl also commented

For Bob and anyone wanting to know about YT changes.
The short answer is: Without a decent set of documentation and facts, I have no idea what YT is up to. I’ll take a stab at some cursory info, and I’m sure Marina will get more details as time goes along.

The current issue is:
“Most Viewed” video versus “Most Popular” video.
I think the Most Popular category is (relatively) new? I tried to look at Wayback Machine to see what it was in the recent past, but they are choking on something.

In the past, when you visited YT and clicked the Video tab, you saw the 1st page of the top 100 “Most Viewed” videos; the defaulted category. Now, the defaulted category is the top 100 “Most Popular” videos.

What does “Most Viewed” mean?
On the surface, you would think that most viewed also means most popular and the one with the most numbers wins, right? I guess it used to be that way, but now the bean counters are getting into the act and mucking up the simple and making it complex.

Marina did a fantastic and outstanding job at explaining the meaning of Most Viewed here. Essentially, “Most Viewed Honors”, is not the same as Views. The Most Viewed Honors do not include views from outside the YT domain.

Now, enter the “Most Popular” category which is now the defaulted category. You would think most viewed means most popular. Apparently, YT is adding more algorithmic stuff to the most viewed numbers and tweaking them and calling it Most Popular. In other words, its video views with some kind of offsetting bias.

The elements that go into the tweaking of the views (most views) is some kind of time element, relative comparison to other videos in each category, and other factors that are not documented by YT. The information currently available is sketchy at best by searching keywords; “insight” and “popular”.

Here is an example:
Let’s say video A has 50,000 views, but is two years old and gets 10 hits a day. Video B has 300 views, but is only 2 days old and gets 30 hits a day. Video B is the most popular video.

Marina and others fear that this will be the death of the YT partners. She didn’t specify, but here is my guess.

Since most visitors will look at the top 100 pages, they are less inclined to look at the other top 100 honors such as Most Viewed. One has to now click on that category, which most people won’t do.

Since the Most Popular videos are now the default page for visitors to see, it skews those videos into favor, besides having their Honors position already being biased.

The video above is at position #31 on the Most Viewed pages (page #2)

Go to the Most Popular pages, and Marina’s video is not there.
Plus, YT had removed the Partner’s red flag, and then the little icon for some time now. So, there is no telling which video is a YT partner. So, Marina’s fears may be correct and I’m sure all of the YT Partners will rebel against this YT change.
Did you see that quiggles, we both posted at the exact same time regarding getting our calendars.
Yes, Bob, I am familiar with what is going on a YT. Give me a few minutes to get my thoughts and links together and I’ll post up above.
Yeahhh, guess what? Marina is in the mail. {wishful thinking}
Errrr. I mean the HFW Calendar is in the mail, well, FedEx specifically. OK, tracking it now… left Illinois, should be here any minute now. {wishful thinking again}
I saw, I saw, very nice tac on that.

Recent comments by pedantickarl

Sexual Words in the Dictionary
Damiana,
I answered Rijk over here regarding the question of spam.

I only list a few known items that can cause your comment to be flagged as spam. I can tell you from personal experience that when I post a comment on my own blog as a non-logged in user, all of my comments are flagged as spam and I can only guess that it is either related to my domain or it is related to the username being on a list (black list) from other postings elsewhere. I would have to research the spam filter’s rules to see what’s going on.

In your case, if you created another username such as Damiana1 for example, and if your comments were still being flagged, it would indicate a blacklisting of your domain or cookies. Clear your cookies and see what happens. Of course you will lose your personalizations and you would have to key your username and passwords back in again.

As background information, here is the Wordpress information on the spam filter called Akismet.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Combating_Comment_Spam
Tissue + Sneeze
Hi CK,
My reference to accessibility refers more to the idea of usability in terms of browser standards and ability to present a consistent user experience across all platforms and browsers. Handicapped accessibility certainly is one of those elements and comes under a variety of guidelines such as WAI, UAAG, ATAG, ADA and others.

Hearing impaired Closed Captioning is usually done by people with the skillset and technology to create accurate captioning. It is not a trivial task unless a TA has that skillset or the time. Of course you don’t have to be a TA to volunteer to do this kind of work. Anyone with the time and skill set can do it.

All one needs is to get permission from Marina to replicate the video and then to insert the captioning which can be either hard captioned (visible at all times) or Closed Captioned using YouTube’s player technology.

A two minute video would take me about 20 min to an hour or more to transcribe and add the captioning. The reason for the time is that some words require to be looked up, insert corrections as needed and verify the proper transcription. Someone with a transcribing skillset would be able to do it much more quickly than I could. There are tools that can help, such as speech to text converters. I have not tried it on these videos yet.

Many of the hearing impaired institutes hire people to do these kinds of tasks, and I think many of them are very busy. There is always the question of demand and how many hearing impaired users would this help.

I would think that anyone aligned with the hearing impaired community would take the lead in this endeavor in order to create and implement a plan for captioning.
Tissue + Sneeze
Hi Jan,
I added a summary of Marina’s 9th visit to the O’Reilly Factor show in the Forum. You can also see my previous summaries of all of Marina’s visits to O’Reilly.
COP15
Hello Rijk,
I don’t think you meant, “… my super-girl got spammed…”
I think you meant to say that a comment posting by my super-girl was flagged as spam?

I don’t think the number of comments per thread would cause a comment to be flagged.

There are a few things that I am aware of that can cause a comment to be flagged as spam. Some of them are:
1. Repeated editing when trying to apply an illegal HTML code.
For example, lets say that I want to add some HTML code and it didn’t turn out right. Then, I edit the comment again and tweak the code to try to get it right. After a certain number of attempts, that will cause a comment to be flagged.

2. Adding too many links can cause a comment to be flagged as spam.

I’m sure there are others, and I don’t know all of the violations that can cause a comment to be spammed. Another factor could be the domain that she is logged in from. Sometimes the spam filter can falsely flag a user as a spammer due to association with other known spammers in that domain. (ref black lists for example)

All of the above have happened to me on this site and also on my own blog.
Interview for Associated Content
Wonderful article Jan. I enjoyed reading your second article on Marina. I remember reading your article last year which was published in July ‘08. There have been many changes along the way for Marina in almost a year and a half and your new article reflects those changes very nicely.
The first article that you wrote in July 03, 2008 is located on this site here.