Inside the Little Plastic Castle

I've recently seen calls for volunteers to provide subtitling and captioning, e.g.,
http://blog.universalsubtitles.org/volunteer/

Volunteering is a wonderful thing.

Warning: rant ahead.

Would PBS rely on volunteers to provide audio for their news? Or handling the studio lighting? Perhaps the reporters should work out of the goodness of their hearts?

Subtitling and captioning require skill and time. Why should subtitlers/captioners not be compensated for their work? Why should professional TV production consciously exclude viewers for whom audio isn't the appropriate channel? In addition to people who can't understand audio due to deafness or hearing impairment, there's foreign language learners, people in bars, folks running on their treadmills at the gym, and (perhaps most important in this age) Google and other spiders who index and archive video via the caption info.

While some of the Amara projects are non-profit NGOs, others are HUGE corporations, e.g., Google. Yes Google, which has been displaying mostly inaccurate machine-translated captions (some video has been stripped of the professionally prepared captions).

There's been some loud stuff happening.

ThomasMonopoly put all his eggs in the Google basket. When Google arbitrarily suspended his account, he was screwed.

skud, a dynamo of open source goodness who worked at Google for a while, has just been suspended from her Google+ "field trial". Her crime? Having one name. As she explained in her customary clear, insightful and funny manner in the Geek Feminism Wiki, any entity demanding "real names" from its users is counterproductive.

I have a shining example of how Skud is successfully known by that one name. Two WisCons ago, Skud submitted a panel description. The program chair asked me, "This sounds like a cool idea, but I don't know the person who suggested it--proceeded to mispronounce the name that's on Skud's charge card. "Oh, don't worry, that's skud!" I replied, and all was well.

Which is why I am happy to say, along with hundreds of other people around the world: I Know Skud!

July 22, 2011 Jesse the K holds an "I know skud" button