ResearchBuzz

The University of California, Berkeley has announced that it is making more than 250 hours of educational content free via Google Video. The collected materials have their own URL at http://video.google.com/ucberkeley.html. This page is divided into several categories including Courses, Arts & Humanities, and Science & Technology. Several videos are spotlighted on the front page, including a course called “Physics for Future Presidents” and the “China-U.S. Climate Change Forum.”

My eye was caught by “Information Systems 141 Search Engines: Technology, Society and Business” in the courses section, so I clicked on that title. I got a list of six videos for that course. Of course since it was, you know, an educational course that is presented in a prepared sequence, Google Video sorted the available videos by date. No, I tell a lie, Google sorted them by title. Argh. (You can sort content by date, title, and relevance.) Anyway, content here included a 40-minute talk from Sergey Brin, a discussion from Yahoo’s Dr. Daniel Rose about user interface challenges for search, and looks at Web spam and search advertising. Google Video apparently has the capacity for comments now. I was expecting to see zillions of comments for the Sergey video and there weren’t any. Surprising.

According to Berkeley’s press release, there will be more content added over time, so watch this collection. Now if we could only get the course contents default-sorted by date…

I don’t know too much about this software, but thought it might be interesting to pass along. MagneticTime, at http://www.magnetictime.com , is offering their MT-Podcast product free to hobbyist bloggers. (The name is a little unfortunate; glancing at it you might think the product is just for Movable Type. But actually MT stands for MagneticTime.)

MT-Podcast uses text-to-speech software to create podcasts from text files (or, I suppose, blog entries.) If you’re interested in trying it for your site, e-mail press@magnetictime.com . “Eligible bloggers” (words from the press release) will be sent instructions. If you want more information about MT-Podcast, you can check out an early 2006 press release, but I don’t see a specific page devoted to it on MagneticTime’s Web site. Did I miss it?

The Oxford English Dictionary last week announced their latest update, which includes entries like pod person, bling, scooch (they just got around to adding scooch?) and Wi-Fi. You can get a more extensive list of the words added at http://dictionary.oed.com/help/updates/pleb-Pomak.html#oos .

I must confess I was surprised at how quickly some were have been integrated (microbrowser) and how quickly some.. um, haven’t. (For example, bippy. Pardon me but weren’t we betting bippies on Laugh-In, oh, about 35 years ago?? Unless there’s some nefarious definition of bippy I don’t know about…)