WebProNews

Tag: Videos

  • Valentine’s Day ‘Scroogled’ Video Has A Google ‘Cyborg’ Reading People’s Mail

    As you may know, Microsoft recently resurrected its “Scroogled” campaign against Google, attacking Gmail in the latest round. More on the campaign here, but the premise is basically that Microsoft wants Gmail users to be aware that Google serves them ads based on the content of their messages. They’re framing it as a privacy issue, though Google doesn’t actually have humans going through your email. It’s all algorithmic.

    We talked about the whole thing with Microsoft’s Stefan Weitz more in depth here.

    Anyhow today is Valentine’s Day, and Microsoft has put out a new Scroogled video for the occasion. The video shows a mail man (or a “Gmail” man) opening letters and reading them (again, Google has no humans reading your messages). It also shows an Outlook.com mail man delivering the mail without opening letters and reading them.

    Update: As Weitz points out in the comments, the Gmail ‘Man’ is supposed to be a cyborg. According to Wikipedia, a cyborg would be a being with both organic and cybernetic parts.

    It’s unclear how many non-keyword based ads the Outlook.com guy delivers.

  • Harlem Shake Spreads to Facebook & Google HQ

    I’m not sure if two of the biggest internet companies in the world actively participating in the latest meme craze is a fun thing or a death-of-the-meme- type thing. Either way, it’s happening.

    Both Facebook and Google’s employees have decided to get in on the Harlem Shake craze

    Here’s what’s going on at Menlo Park:

    And now for the folks in Mountain View:

    Who did it better? Where’s Mark Zuckerberg in all of this? Where’s Sergey Brin? Why is nobody actually doing the Harlem Shake? WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS?

  • Two Minutes of Goats Yelling Like Humans

    [RSVLTS via reddit]

  • For Developing News Stories, Google Says It Prefers One Page To Separate Articles

    After taking a month off, Google’s Matt Cutts is back online, and has put out a new Webmaster Help video. This one talks about news sites, and how to approach developing stories.

    The user-submitted question being addressed is:

    Do you have any specific tips for news sites, which have unique concerns compared with commercial sites? For example, if I have a developing news story, should I keep updating the same page, or create a new one when the content changes?

    Cutts prefers the same page route, keeping the information on a single page updated.

    “If it were me, I would tend to have one page because that’s where all the PageRank can accumulate,” he says. “People don’t get confused. Sometimes you even see people doing multiple stories over several days, and they don’t link those stories together, so from one story you can get to the other story, so you sort of lose a few people through the cracks that way.”

    “Marissa Mayer [former Googler/current Yahoo CEO], in the past, has talked about having living topics, or topic pages, that are really like exhaustive entries about a specific area or type of breaking news,” he says. “You can see something like Wikipedia as another example, where they have one page that just gets richer and more developed. At some point, a news story is over, and you want to move on to creating a new page, but given a certain story, often, I think it can be helpful to add updates, and add more information on the same URL.”

    He goes on to recommend reading Google News documentation and research more about what works for that. He references the recent news_keywords meta tag Google announced (without mentioning it by name), and suggests using authorship.

    The part about PageRank is interesting, and certainly worth considering, but unfortunately, he doesn’t get into how Google (or Google News) treats old articles that are updated (in terms of the freshness element), or the best ways to get these old articles in front of their audiences on their second, third, or fourth (etc.) rounds. Of course, there’s always social media, but in terms of search, it’s not that always that simple.

  • You Love Being in Love Because It’s Kind of Like Cocaine [The Science of Love]

    On Valentine’s Day, as you settle in with your significant other for some food, wine, and probable sex, remember that all of those feelings you’re feeling can be easily explained by chemical reactions in your brain.

    OK, maybe not all of it. AsapSCIENCE doesn’t want to take the mystery out of love or anything, they just want to let you know that your brain on love is pretty much the same as your brain on coke. And it’s the result of millions of years of evolution, baby.

    Yeah, evolution. You know how hot that is, baby.

    [AsapSCIENCE]

  • Kid Gives Proper Response to Hearing Bad Brains for the First Time

    Meet Adeline.

    Adeline is already pretty cool. But she’s going to be really cool when she grows up. Here, watch this video and you’ll see why.

    Here’s Adeline hearing Bad Brains for the first time. You can’t teach this stuff. As one YouTube user put it, “slamdancing is in our genetic code.”

    “Turn it up a little bit!”

    D’aaawwwww…I mean, MOSH!

  • The Walking Dead: AMC Posts Behind-The-Scenes Videos Of Last Night’s Episode

    The Walking Dead is finally back. The show returned to AMC after taking a couple months off, and now the network has uploaded a couple of new videos, giving fans an inside look at the mid-season premiere.

    Don’t watch them if you haven’t watched the episode yet, as the do contain spoilers.

    More The Walking Dead fun here.

  • Watch Game of Thrones Season 3’s Intense New Teaser

    “Chaos isn’t a pit. It’s a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail, and never get to try again – the fall breaks them. Some are given a chance to climb, the cling to the realm…or the gods…or love. Only the ladder is real.”

    Cue a bunch of intese closeups, and there you have the latest Game of Thrones teaser for season three. March 31st, people. We’re on the homestretch.

  • Inflatable Robots And More Discussed At Google Event [Solve for X]

    Google hosted its Solve for X Event last week, and has now released the presentations.

    Solve for X is a gathering of scientists, entrepreneurs, and innovators, who come together to present “moonshot” proposals, as Google calls them. These are ideas aimed at solving big problems in the world. It’s kind of TED Talks-esque.

    Last year’s presentations discussed drug delivery, imaging the mind’s eye, collaborative science, resource reclamation, etc. You can view some of those here.

    Here are some of the new ones on topics like replacing plastics, sustainable meat, inflatable robots, economic energy storage, space exploration, malaria eradication, and Alzheimer’s diagnostics:

    “One of the reasons we created Solve for X was to provide a collaborative forum to celebrate and help innovators who are in the process of attempting to bring radically innovative solutions to reality—attempting moonshots,” say Solve for X creators/co-hosts Megan Smith and Astro Teller. “Moonshots aim to make something 10x better, not just 10 percent. We need many more of us to take on and support moonshots if we are to solve the seemingly intractable problems we face in the world. To do that, we need to better celebrate the audacity of the attempt itself—at the start and in process.”

    Google has updated some features on SolveForX.com, including the ability to submit moonshots, “join and declare your X” and watch more ideas from other partners.

  • That Stupid, Inevitable Semi-Argument Couples Have Over What to Eat Perfectly Expressed with Drums

    I’m not sure why this is so perfect, but it is.

    You know how deciding what to eat with your significant other is usually one of the hardest things to do, even when you’re both hungry? Yes, you do. It’s a ubiquitous non-argument.

    Well, here’s that argument, but with drums instead of words.

    [charstarleneTV (Charlene deGuzman) via Patton Oswalt]

  • Airball Three Shots in Less Than a Minute, Then You Can Say You Had a Bad Day at Work

    I know you hate you job, but at least you’re probably doing it better than Mirza Teletović did his on Wednesday night.

    The Bosnian Brooklyn Nets player had a pretty rough 40-or-so seconds in last night’s game against the Detroit Pistons. On three consecutive trips down the floor, Teletović airballed a shot. Check it out:

    Everyone has bad days – even Kobe Bryant. We worked out the calculation and Teletović still made about $500 in that 40-second span of airballs. So, you know, we really are the peanut gallery.

  • Here’s One of the Best 2012 Internet Video Compilations You’ll See

    There are a lot of 2012 internet video compilations that have surfaced, and even though we’re already in February of 2013, I expect there will be plenty more. 2012 was the biggest year for internet video – bigger and more powerful than 2011, which was bigger and more powerful than 2010 and so on.

    Although there are a lot of 2012 video wrap-ups, this is probably the best and most fully-realized one I’ve seen so far – although it leans pretty heavily on sports, auto, and other feats of athleticism.

    Here’s twelve and a half minutes of what everyone was watching for the past year. Buckle up:

    [MiamiViceStyle via Gizmodo]

  • Facebook Launches Developers Live, a New Hub for News, Tutorials, and Live Video

    Facebook has just announced Developers Live, a new destination (in the form of a Facebook app) that allows developers to keep up with all of the latest news.

    Facebook says that it will be “central place to learn about the latest tools and to get access to the product managers and engineers who created them.”

    Developers Live will also feature tutorials and other speaking sessions – both live and recorded. There will also be interactive broadcasts at some point down the line.

    Here’s more on what Facebook will offer on the new video channel:

    • Mobile developers will learn how to go deeper and grow their apps with Facebook
    • Game developers will learn how to build better games across web and mobile
    • Websites and publishers will learn how to use Facebook to drive traffic

    The new video channel was announced on Facebook’s Developer Blog, which up until now has been to premier destination for developers to learn about the happenings in Facebook land. You can head on over to the Developers Live app today, but there doesn’t seem to be anything there yet.

    The first live event will take place on February 19th and will feature Director of Product Doug Purdy. You can register for that event here.

  • Here’s Why Google Doesn’t Turn Off Toolbar PageRank

    Now that Google’s Matt Cutts is back online, he’s been steadily putting out new Webmaster Help videos on a daily basis. It will be interesting to see how long this continues.

    Today’s is particularly timely considering Google just pushed out a toolbar PageRank update (the first of the year).

    Cutts responds to the following user-submitted question:

    Why don’t you switch off the PageRank Toolbar feature? It is widely used by link sellers as a link grading system. Why do you continue to display PageRank publicly? It appears to have little relevance, except to spammers.

    “My rough answer is: there are a lot of SEOs and people in search who look at the PageRank toolbar, but there are a ton of regular users as well,” says Cutts. “You would be really surprised at how many just regular people have the Google Toolbar, and user PageRank as a way to figure out…how reputable at something…I know it seems kind of strange, but it also seems strange that nofollow is only a single digit percentage of links on the web. We get into our tunnel vision, and we sort of say, ‘Oh, well no one else uses the PageRank toolbar,’ but the fact is a lot of people do.”

    He continues, “Now, one interesting twist is Chrome doesn’t really have a PageRank toolbar feature built in, and Internet Explorer 10, as I understand it, doesn’t allow toolbars or add-ins, or as Microsoft calls it, it provides an ‘add-in free experience,’ so if IE 10 becomes more popular, eventually it might be the case that the Google Toolbar is not as commonly used, and in that case, it might be the case that, it might be such that over time, maybe the PageRank feature is not used by as many people, and so maybe it will go away on its own or eventually we’ll reach the point where we say, ‘Okay, maintaining this is not worth the amount of work.’”

    He says Google will probably continue to support the feature as long as people are using it. With IE 10, however, he says, “the writing is on the wall,” so they’ll see how that affects things in the future (particularly for Windows users).

  • Jon Stewart Isn’t Surprised About Vine and Porn

    Twitter’s six-second video-sharing app Vine launched with a bit of a porn problem. Vine scurried around and quickly turned the porn problem into a much lesser porn problem by banning many porn-related searches and hiding NSFW material behind warning screens.

    Today, they launched an update to the app that carries a new 17+ rating in the App Store. Short of banning nudity, Vine has done pretty much all they can to make pornography as inaccessible to the wrong kind of eyes as they can.

    Anyway, Jon Stewart finally got around to addressing the porn issue. Watch the whole thing for some bonus jabs at Facebook.

  • Cute Baby Cutely Awakens and Cutely Freaks out over Gangnam Style

    Hey, it’s another video of a cute baby dancing cutely to Gangnam Style. Although the Gangnam Style craze has died down and we’re all hesitant to listen to the PSY hit (lest we get the wretched thing stuck in our heads again) – this is just too good to ignore.

    It wouldn’t really matter what song awoke our slumbering tot. It’s not Gangnam Style that makes this worthy of a watch. It’s her surprise and elation. It’s also her sister’s reaction.

    I must stop before I get too gushy over all the cute. What is happening to me?

    [sat ireland via reddit]

  • Matt Cutts Talks Referer Spam In Latest Video

    Google’s Matt Cutts is back online, and cranking out the Webmaster Help videos. He tweeted a link to the second of the latest series today, and this one is about referer spam coming from a YouTube video.

    The user-submitted question is:

    Why does a certain YouTube video appear to be visiting my blogspot blog? Take this video for example, it keeps appearing in my Blogger Dashboard as a referral..

    Cutts says they looked at the video, and found in the comments that there were multiple people complaining about the same problem – that the video spammed their blog.

    “This is an instance of what we call referer spam,” he says. “A referer is just a simple HTTP header that is passed along when a browser goes from one page to another page, and it normally is used to indicate where the user’s coming from. Now, people can use that, and change the referer to be anything that they want. They can make it empty, or there are some people who will set the referer to a page they want to promote, and then they will just visit tons of pages around the web. All the people that look at the referers see that, and say, ‘Oh, maybe I should go and check that out.’ And the link – whenever there’s a referer – it doesn’t mean that there was necessarily a link, because you can make that referer anything you want, so there are some people who try to drive traffic by visiting a ton of websites, even with an automated script, and setting the referer to be the URL that they want to promote.”

    He notes that some of the other comments on the YouTube video say that its creator is well known, and has no reason to spam people. Cutts notes that it doesn’t necessarily have to be coming from the actual creator.

    “The thing to know is that there’s no authentication with referer. Anybody can make a browser, and set the referer,” he says. “You can’t automatically assume it was the owner of that URL if you see something showing up in your dashboard.”

    Basically, you should just ignore it, he says.

  • Beyonce Gets Set On Fire In NMA’s Version Of The Super Bowl

    Next Media Animation (NMA) typically provides thoughtful analysis of major moments in popular culture, and the Super Bowl is no different. Here, the Taiwanese animation firm explores the big game, Beyonce’s half time show, and what really happened to the power.

    Here’s some more of NMA’s work.

  • Interested In The Google Science Fair? Watch This Hangout.

    Google announced last week that it is now taking submissions for the Google Science Fair. Today, the company posted the first in a series of Google Science Fair Office Hours Google+ Hangouts on Air. In the hangout, Jemma from the UK Google Science Fair team joins 2011 finalist Gavin Ovsak to address some questions about he Google Science Fair that the company has received from the GSF forum, the Office Hours event page, and the GSF YouTube channel.

    The Google Science Fair is a partnership between Google, CERN, LEGO, National Geographic, and Scientific American.

  • Here’s A Recent TED Talk About Prototyping Google Glass

    Tom Chi, one of the guys behind Google Glass spoke about prototyping the device at TEDYouth. He discusses how the company was able to speed up the creation process via “rapid prototyping”. He says it only took them one day to come up with the prototype (this was done with clay, paper and modeling wire). They were able to prototype projections for the device in 45 minutes.

    In actual Google Glass-related news, a headset with bone-conduction speakers was revealed in a recent FCC filing.

    More on Google Glass

  • Watch Paul Rudd & Seth Rogen Talk Samsung’s ‘El Plato Supreme’ Ad

    Watch Paul Rudd & Seth Rogen Talk Samsung’s ‘El Plato Supreme’ Ad

    We know that Paul Rudd and Seth Rogen will star in Samsung’s Super Bowl ad, directed by Jon Favreau. It’s slated to run for a whole two minutes and is called “The Big Pitch.”

    Apparently, that ad will “show Rogen and Rudd on a quest to become the Next Big Thing.” The fact that Samsung is continuing with that whole “Next Big Thing” thing shouldn’t surprise anyone – as that’s the language they’ve been using to pitch their smartphones to Apple fans (and others) for over a year.

    Samsung has just released a teaser of sort, which features Rudd and Rogen talking about trademarked phrases with their lawyer, Saul Goodman. Or maybe it’s just Bob Odenkirk.

    Nah, it’s totally Saul Goodman.

    [h/t 9to5Google]