YouTube Captioning Makes Video More Accessible for All

Dear Google/YouTube,
We want it. We want it NOW!
xoxo,
Your Dot-gov Buddies

A big barrier to making video content available to people who can't hear is creating captions for the audio--like the closed captioning you see on TV. This is especially important to government because we are required-- by law and by mission--to make content available to all people, regardless of their abilities. So, the dot-gov space was a-flutter [I almost said a-twitter, and that was true too] when Google announced two new features to make videos on YouTube accessible to the deaf and hearing impaired.

First, and available to EVERYONE now, YouTube account holders can upload a transcript with a video and YouTube will be automatically generate, time stamp, and incorporate captions into your video.

What does this mean? Well, in order for captions to make sense, they need to be coded to match up with the audio on the video. Bottom line, using current technologies, it takes more than a few painstaking staff hours to time code a 15 minute video. This delays posting the video--or fosters a reluctance to create video content or, even worse, encourages posting video that people who are deaf can't access. This is a huge problem for time sensitive, safety messages.

Why is this extra cool? The generated YouTube caption file can be downloaded from YouTube and used in other versions of the video. Most federal agencies post their video on a dot-gov site in addition to posting on YouTube. This will turn around processes and let us create the timestamp file on YouTube to post with our videos. Yay! I know at least one hard working captioner who will be ecstatic to turn her attention to more video production and less caption production. Breaking news: IT WORKS!!

Second,

[Google has] 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, but even when they're off, they can still be helpful—and the technology will continue to improve with time. --Read more on the Google Blog.

Auto-caps is being piloted withUC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Yale, UCLA, Duke, UCTV, Columbia, PBS, National Geographic, Demand Media, UNSW and most Google & YouTube channels.

This is pure awesomeness--despite any imperfections in machine generated captions--because unscripted events require a transcriptionist at cost of time and money. If the captioner is also transcribing it can take an hour to get a minute or two of captioning done. Google's auto-caps is a game changer with the potential to make more video more accessible to everyone.

Let's let Google explain the service:


This is great news for people who are deaf or hearing impaired. This is great news for government agencies that struggle with the cost and expertise required to make video accessible to everyone. This is great news because government can't be transparent for most of the people--open government is only meaningful when it's available to all.

Dear Google/YouTube,
Thanks for this new service! We are happy to help beta test your auto-captioning feature. Give us a call!
xoxo,
Your Dot-gov Buddies

Shorts: Twitter Grows, Report Cards, Drupal and Memos

Twitter grows. Pew released some data last week about growth in Twitter use--from 11% of Internet users to 19% in just six-months. Other findings? Three groups of internet users are mainly responsible for driving the growth of this activity, social network users, people who are using mobile and folks under age 44. See more at the Pew Internet Project.

White Paper Report Card. Candi Harrison asks, "Web Manager Council’s White Paper – Is There Progress A Year Later?" In her post she recaps the goals of easily identifiable, relevant, accurate, and up-to-date information that is easy to understand, addresses citizen tasks, is consistent across channels, provides feedback channels and is accessible across reading, ability and language barriers. She gave government a mixed review. See more here.

White House goes Drupal. And TechPresident swoons as they announced that whitehouse.gov has moved to Open Source Software and dropped their proprietary system. I am not sure that this is a great advance for democracy--bottom line is that there will be a custom (read proprietary) system built on the open source platform. But it is good for open source. See more at TechPresident.

Finally, NextGov reports, no movement from White House on the issuing of the Open Government memo that the President announced January 21. See Next Gov.

4 Lessons for Dot-gov: What Makes a "Top" Website?

Last week, Time published its Top 50 Websites for 2009, and there was nary a government site on the list.

The closest dot-gov came was #39, BabyNameWizard.com's NameVoyage, which uses Social Security Administration data to help parents find popular--and not so popular--names across the ages. But ssa.gov didn't make the list.

Looking at the sites that did "make it," Time's criteria for selecting Top Sites are clear. There are four main themes shared by Top Sites, and four lessons for government site owners who want to meet citizen and stakeholder needs.

1. Do something. Pretty much every Top Site had a task for people to complete. From searching for something on Google to selecting the best name for their baby to booking cheap travel on Kayak, Top Sites are where people go to accomplish something. Can people accomplish something on your site? Is your offer worth their time?

2. Focus. Most Top Sites have a clear single purpose. You use Netflix to find and rent movies. You go to OpenTable to make restaurant reservations. Fonolo helps you skip a corporate phone tree and get to a live person. Pretty direct. Many government sites, on the other hand, are multi-purpose. This makes search and navigation especially important to help people. How does your site help your visitors get someplace? Are you setting up a clear hierarchy with your users' top tasks up front?

3. Engage. This is a corollary to doing something. One of the somethings that Internet uses want to do is to participate. Many Top Sites, for example, Yelp and Amazon, let users have a say--rating movies, music, restaurants, services and products. Others, like Facebook and social networking sites, encourage friends to take silly polls and forward links. Once people have engaged, they are more likely to come back. Does your site allow feedback? Voting? Tagging? Can people see what others' have said? Do you make it easy for someone to send a link from your site? Do you talk back to them?

4. Share. Different from engaging, sharing lets site visitors collaborate in content creation. This can be Flickr (#1 on the List) which lets users upload photos for people to view, comment and reuse. Or Wikipedia, where you can share your expertise in a wildly popular public encyclopedia. Or buy joining a microfinance group via Kiva to invest in developing countries. Are you inviting people to share in their government? Are you inviting their creativity and smarts?

Whether you think Time's criteria is fair, the traffic behind many of these sites show that Internet users value them, too. Might be time to review what makes e-gov tick. Maybe we'll make the 2010 list.

See Time's entire list here.

If You Build It, NOT: 4 Pointers for Search Optimization

It's a MYTH! A MYTH! A MYTH I TELL YOU!

Just because you build it, nobody will come. Sure, you announce to your friends and stakeholders, but then what? There will be no miles long trail of cars snaking through cornfields to experience your vision. It's a movie. And a myth.

Yes, viral is important, but you can't manufacture true viral. It just happens.

I have been calling out this myth for 12 years. And, in this time of fractured media and spliced attentions, it is critical to be level-headed and recognize that there is effort involved in driving traffic. Launching your website or application is not the end. You need to help folks find it.

Eighty percent of all online sessions begin with search. Google alone has a 63.7 percent share of all searches. Some quick math tells me that this means that just over half of the time someone starts an online session, they open to Google and begin to search. Bottom line: Most of the time people go online, they start with a search -- and don't type in your URL.

Instead of typing in your URL and ending up on your site, people are using search engines to find what they are looking for. The question is: Will they find you? You might not like the answer.

It turns out that the top three listings on a search engine results page account for approximately 63 percent of all clicks. That is, about two-thirds of the time, people look no further than the first three listings before clicking. So, clearly that's the place to be. --See more from Jonathan Richman at I Media Connection

There are many books, blogs, websites and experts on helping people find you (also known as search engine optimization). My purpose today is to start you thinking about making your content more accessible to search engines. Here are four starting pointers.

1. Don't be cute. Search engines look for clues on your pages to let them know what the page is about. They usually think that titles and headings provide pointers to what is important. So, every time you create a cute name for your page and use teaser language for your headers instead of clearly telling and leading readers (and search engines) about your purpose, you are turning them away.

2. Use normal words. Speaking of not knowing, search engines can't translate your arcane, governmentese into something findable. Especially when you are using your own special language. You may love your acronyms, but the uninitiated will not have a clue. No clue means they can't find you.

3. Seek out resources. You can learn about words people use to describe your services. Your site search should report the words that people are searching on. If they are looking for "green card" and you only use the official name "LPR," you are turning them away. And away means to another source. Also, visit the Google Keyword Tool to learn related words and phrases. Incorporate these words into your pages.

4. Select some pages and make changes. Identify a few terms and their pages you want to drive people to. Update the page title, headers and copy with the normal words. Check your progress by searching on these terms on Google, Bing, YAHOO, Ask. The results are easy to see. Also see MarketLeap.com for quick keyword verification across multiple search engines.

Now go do some more research, you might want to start with Search Engine Watch. And feel free to share your own resources and tips in the comments below.

7 Listening Tools: Getting from Asking to Listening

P&G and Nielsen are trying to understand how learning gleaned from “listening” to online consumer conversations compares to survey-based findings (”asking”).

What we learned was surprising and important. Findings from “listening” and “asking” were largely consistent. Most importantly, in every case, “listening” added to our understanding in important ways, meaningfully enhancing insights, and sometimes suggesting a different course of action. For example, a survey on cloth diapering identified cost savings and sustainability as key reasons for using cloth diapers. Listening took this further, revealing the passion cloth-diapering moms have for “CD’ing,” and connecting it to core values around parenting. This led to a fundamentally different, more holistic understanding of cloth diapering than was available from survey results alone.

Listening consistently provided valuable depth and context … adding listening to the picture was a little like going from an X-ray to a CAT scan. Furthermore, listening revealed the level of consumer passion or intensity associated with a specific topic. Understanding “intensity” can be just as important to winning in the marketplace as understanding size or “magnitude,” suggesting the need to pursue survey-based and listening-based approaches (or hybrid methods) going forward.--More on the Nielsen Online Analyst Blog

It's clear that asking is important. But, information from listening added to information from surveys (asking) gives a more nuanced and more complete picture of what's going on.

For government, it means looking for ways to listen. Here are 7 easy--and available--listening tools.

1. If you survey, be sure to leave space for free response. Yes, it's harder to quantify, but it's the best way to get to what your users/visitors really mean.
2. Regularly review the emails sent to the generic webmaster address. You will learn what people are looking for, what makes them unhappy, and potential gaps in content or services.
3. Review weblogs for search terms. These are the words and phrases that people are using to get to your site. Take the most popular terms and run the search yourself. What are the results? Is it what a user might expect?
4. Review your internal search logs to find out what people are looking for once they're on your site. Quarterly, look at all the search terms and group them by "like." When you group them you might see a different trend. Also, your users will tell you what they call your content (you say "lawful permanent residence" and they say "green card").
5. Check out what people are looking for on Google. There is a suite of free query tools that can give you insights into the people who may or may not visit your site. Start at What is the Google zeitgeist? and work your way through the search and comparison tools.
6. Take the terms people relate to you (in 3 and 4) and use twitter search. You will get folks' raw opinion. Some good, some bad. Save the search as an RSS feed for regular access. Look for other twitter monitoring tools.
7. Sign up for Google Alerts. Enter the terms to track and find out what bloggers, news sources and others are saying.

Got a good tool that you use? Put it in the comments and help a guy out.

BTW, Nielsen and P+G are doing a webinar to discuss their findings on Friday at 2 pm. You can register here.

New Utah Website Graded on Tasks

The State of Utah launched a new, visually stunning web portal. Ari Herzog gives a great overview on his blog. 

Suffice to say, Utah and its portalized front page is at the forefront of the digital revolution among the 50 states. The new layout blows the other states out of the water.

From the press release on the new site, Utah CIO Steve Fletcher: "The new Utah.gov incorporates cutting edge technologies to enhance the user experience and the usability of the site. This site is ground-breaking in the effort to help citizens find information regardless of the level of government.”--Read and see more on AriWriter.

The sophisticated design offers a number of attractive animations that lead visitors down various navigation paths. Have a look.



Definitely sweet. So who wouldn't want to take it out on a test drive?

For my test, I decided to take it on a dot-gov tour to complete three tasks: get a new drivers license, find out what I needed to do to start a business in Utah, and find eldercare information, specifically I was looking for evaluations of senior living options.

New Drivers License. This is a common task so I figured it would be easy. I clicked the very nice top navigation item "Residents." It brilliantly and very usefully then exposed a series of options, "Citizens & Community" and right below that "Cars & Transportation." BINGO! 

Nope, had to hit the breaks hard. From here I could RENEW my drivers license, but not get a new one. Okay, to the search. It featured a smart search that provided options as I typed new drivers license.  Again, I got the option to renew, but not to get a new license. Back to the top navigation and I found the option "Moving to Utah." Here I could get a new drivers' license. Task was completed, but convoluted. I have a new driver and a new-driver-to-be in residence, so I would expect to find getting a new license as easy as renewing--but these are two different websites/applications.  Grade C-

Starting a new business in Utah. I imagined that I wanted to open a nail salon in Utah. I was in luck because prominently on the site, under "Popular Searches This Week" was a link to "start a business." Now here was the motherload of salient and helpful information. There was the "One Stop Business Registration"  which stepped me through the process. It was great because I could check it out without having to give up a lot of information about my "business." I easily found Government Requirements that led me to registration and licensing requirements. This was an easy to complete task. Grade A+

Finding eldercare resources. People with aging parents know the challenges of accessing eldercare services--especially across state lines. I pretended my mom lived in Utah and went through the exercise of finding senior assisted living options in the state and learning about consumer and regulatory ratings of facilities. I went back to the main navigation at the top and clicked on Residents. My first scans missed the option "Seniors.utah.gov." It would have been easier to find if it said simply "Seniors." It was the only option in URL-speak. Every other navigation option was a clear heading. 

I clicked on the Seniors.utah.gov page and turned to the Quick Links where I immediately saw "Housing & Living Arrangements."  At the top of that page is Licensed Utah Nursing and Assisted Living Facilities which includes NO resources for assisted living. So I backed out to the Housing Page and tried "Senior Community Housing," which led me to a page helping me understand "congregate housing," but that wasn't what I wanted. Back again to the Housing Page to "Guide for Retirement Communities." This, however, was not a Utah resource but a nationwide, commercial "finder." Of the eleven links on the housing page, only one went to a specific Utah resource. Either Utah does not have services for eldercare OR the state and local organizations that support seniors don't have web content. Grade D-

There is a reason that I don't like portals. They allow for silos and competing and overlapping content. There really is alot to like about the new Utah site, and I think it's a model for other state web sites. But, to be citizen-centric, it needs better integration and coordination of content.

Utah has been a leader in morphing services into dot-gov, and I expect that they will be at the forefront in helping to resolve the "problem of the portal." Because as challenging as the completion of these tasks were on utah-dot-gov, they are harder and even impossible on other state sites. It's clear that they are focusing on top tasks, just need more work under the hood. Good job Utah, help lead the way.

Twist on Citizen-Jounalist: The Fed-Journalist

Sheila Campbell, former Peace Corps intranet manager and currently on staff at GSA as Manager of Webcontent.gov and Web Manager University AND co-chair of the Federal Web Managers Council, somehow has squeezed out some time to join the blogging team at Tech President.

She said

In full disclosure, you’ll see from my bio that I’m no professional writer or journalist like many of the other bloggers. I doubt you’ll be reading my posts because of my brilliant prose. But what I’m hoping I can offer—as co-chair of the Federal Web Managers Council—is an insider’s view of the government web manager community and the challenges and issues we face every day in trying to transform government websites to better serve the public. I want to share some observations from inside the trenches. And I want to get a dialogue going about how we can work together to effect meaningful, lasting change. Over the past year, I’ve seen too many conversations in the echo chamber, where government people just talk to government people or the “we-want-to-reform-government” folks only talk to other government reform folks. This blog is a small attempt to try to address that. --Read Sheila's entire inaugural post.

Sheila is among many in government who are working to bridge the gap between government and the rest-of-the-world. But she had some reservations that her bosses at the General Services Administration--the agency that oversees buildings and buying for the federal government--would not want her to blog.

But, in fact, they embraced it, as they have with other new media efforts. It was refreshing to hear them say, “it’s no different than other forms of public speaking or representation you would normally do. Just follow the same guidelines as you would otherwise. Then go for it.”

Lessons I am taking from the making of a new Fed-Journalist are, first, don't be afraid to ask permission. Times are changing and if you make a good case the answer may be "Yes!" Second, don't be afraid to be turned down. There is a growing number of examples throughout government. Use models that exist. And if someone says, "No!" you have at least tilled the soil for the next time.

Looking forward to Sheila's blog posts in the future. Go to Tech President and tell her, "hi!"

Shorts: Online POTUS Town Hall, Search & Better Websites

White House Using Google Moderator For Town Hall Meeting. And AppEngine. And YouTube. The White House is using Moderator, hosted on AppEngine, to determine which questions President Obama should answer at an online Town Hall meeting on Thursday. In just a few hours 6,932 people have submitted 7,037 questions and cast 236,048 votes on the site. Read more on TechCrunch.

And, Holy Cow, The White House Has a Digg Clone. The White House has launched a new web site where anyone can submit and vote up their most important questions for President Obama about the economy. That's right - the White House has a Digg clone! At least for the next two days. Activity on the site will culminate in Obama addressing the top questions on Thursday, March 26. Read more on ReadWriteWeb.

Transforming the Relationship Between Citizens and Government: Making Content Findable Online. [T]o truly make content available, it has to appear on the first page of search results for relevant queries on major search engines. What can government web sites do to be more findable? Findability is an in-depth process that involves both technical site architecture (ensuring search engines can crawl the pages) and content (ensuring the text is in the language of the searcher). As Kundra acknowledged, "“A two-way interaction between the government and its citizens,” he said, “will require a massive transformation by the government, on the back end, to ensure the government can deal with this new reality.”. But while a long-term plan to make government content findable in search engines is necessary, there are some basic steps that government sites can take to make content more visible in the short term. Read more from Vanessa Fox on O'Rielly blog.

Fed Web Managers Featured on Radio. Did you hear Fed 100 Winner Sheila Campbell on Federal News Radio? Sheila talks about helping citizens complete their top tasks and the Federal Web Managers Council. Also, the April Government Web Managers Conference. Listen here. Get information about the Conference in D.C., here.

10 Harsh Truths About Large Websites

From Smashing Magazine, a very good article to help large organizations--like governments--focus on how to build and maintain a good web site.

The 10 Harsh Truths About Corporate Websites from Paul Boag (my comments in parentheses) are:

1. You need a separate Web division. (not IT, not marketing)
2. Managing your website is a full-time job. (if it is a collateral duty, it will be treated like collateral)
3. Periodic redesign is not enough. (maintenance is more important than starting again)
4. You website cannot appeal to everyone. (man who chases two rabbits catches none!)
5. You are wasting money on social networking. (remember how I said Twitter is not a strategy?)
6. Your website is not all about you. (if users need a secret handshake, they will go where they are more welcome)
7. You're not getting value from your web team. (let the professionals do their jobs)
8. Design by committee brings death. ('nuff said)
9. A CMS is not a silver bullet. (bad content that is easier to publish is still bad content)
10. You have too much content. (prune, don't let the jungle choke out the information people actually seek) More from 10 Harsh Truths About Corporate Websites.
    

Boag's post is very complimentary to the Federal Web Managers white paper, Putting Citizens First: Transforming Online Government. [full disclosure, I participated in the development of this paper]

This is an article that you might want to clip and pass around.

[note: more on the Collaboration Project paper later this week]