ResearchBuzz

Technology Review has an interesting article on a new offering from MIT — a tool that allows users to search over 200 academic lectures by keyword. The Lecture Browser is available at http://web.sls.csail.mit.edu/lectures/ .

I think this site is supposed to work in Firefox but I had no luck. I would get the “searching” window and no actual results. It worked fine in IE. Choose some keywords and a category for your search. What you’ll get is a lecture name, date, and a list of the times the searched-for keyword appears in the transcript. There’s also a timeline with play controls; click on a play icon and the lecture will show up in the RealPlayer on the right side of the screen.

As the video plays, a transcript follows along underneath. It doesn’t appear that the transcripts are perfect — I was watching a 2002 lecture from Jeff Bezos that had some really weird transcript. But I can’t find the example. Something about Bulgarians paying for their order in cats. I found it:

“i even know they had internet access in eighteen ninety five in bulgaria but they’d and this person did not pay with a credit card they paid with cats”

… so don’t trust the transcription completely. It’s accurate enough that it’s useful to follow along while watching the video, but that’s it. Watch the video.

It’s a little disorienting, jumping all over a video instead of watching it beginning to end. On the other hand it is MUCH faster — and I was able to do a depth of content exploration I wouldn’t have bothered with otherwise. Now if it would just work in Firefox…!

Vanilla wafers to Google Blogoscoped, which tipped me to Google’s new alert services for its Google Videos property.

Google Alerts are available at http://www.google.com/alerts . If I recall correctly, Google Alerts started out with News, but now you can track News, Blogs, Web, Google Video, and Google Groups. (And, of course, there’s “Comprehensive”, if you want to search everything.)

My first thought about this was, “This is nice, but not narrow enough.” Say I wanted to search for Carol Burnett Show episodes on Google Video. I want them to be at least four minutes long but less than 20, because if I laugh at Tim Conway for more than 20 minutes I might run out of air. I can do that with Google Video’s advanced search by specifying a duration. But I’m not sure that the duration will carry over to the Google Alert, should I choose the link at the bottom of the search results.

So the solution is to find the syntax for doing the advanced searches without using the advanced search page. As you might expect, the syntax for duration is duration: (duration can be short, medium, or long.) Site restriction is site:, of course. So this search, given to Google Alerts, should do what I want:

Carol Burnett Show duration:medium

We’ll see. Make sure when you’re using the video syntax that you’re only getting alerts for video!

I am spending a lot of time with the Amazon ECS service — it’s the good twin, I’ve decided, and the Amazon search engine on the Web site is the evil twin. (Kidding. The frustrating twin, perhaps.) While I was going through the documentation and doing experiments on the site I noticed a couple of things of interest.

First: Jeff Bezos has reviews on the site. Not many, but some. Apparently he hates The 13th Warrior and loves milk. He prefers very expensive cheese straws, very expensive binoculars, and Cory Doctorow.

If you’re not into Jeff Bezos, you might want to check out Amazon’s new video review features. Yup, Amazon is now inviting customers to post video reviews of products. You can browse around looking for the reviews, or you can try searching inurl:videopreplay site:amazon.com on Google to see the half-dozen it has indexed.

The videos varied a lot. I liked Aaron Wilson spinning around on his Heelies. Other videos I looked at covered cell phones, cameras, and watches. One video actually showed a musician handmaking her CD labeling and packing, with the CD for sale at Amazon. (You can watch the packaging getting made and listen to the 4th track on the CD.) Maybe I can find some vacuum cleaner reviews…