I had lunch with my father the other day, and I explained this series as well as I could to someone who didn’t start programming when he was 11. His immediate reaction was, “Why are there so many different formats? Why can’t everybody just agree on a single format? It is political, or technical, or both?” The short answer is, it’s both. The history of video in any medium — and especially since the explosion of amateur digital video — has been marred by a string of companies who wanted to use container formats and video codecs as tools to lock content producers and content consumers into their little fiefdoms. Own the format, own the future. And when I say “history” — well, it’s still going on. Tried to play a Windows Media Video on Mac OS X lately? The codec and container support is out there, but it’s not baked in. Want to watch movie trailers on Apple.com? Please install QuickTime. And so forth and so on. The only thing that was pre-installed on both platforms was Flash, so when a few startups dipped their toes into the Internet video waters, the ones that used Flash Video won despite it being an objectively inferior codec. (Some revision of Flash 9 added support for H.264 video, AAC audio, and the MP4 container, which is what YouTube HD uses.)

So that’s the politics. But there are also technical barriers. As with all engineering, video encoding is primarily about constraints. I can think of 10 just off the top of my head:

1. CPU capacity for decoding and playing in real time. This is one of the most important constraints, since video is meant to be watched in real time. That sounds simple, but it’s incredibly complex. Every video you’ve ever watched in your entire life had to be decoded and played in real time. Otherwise it stutters and the viewing experience sucks. And we’re talking about video here; if the viewing experience sucks, there’s nothing left. Some codecs are just more complex than others, and that translates into higher system requirements to decode videos in real time. As I’ve mentioned before, some codecs are now decoded by specialized hardware. iPhones have a little chip inside them that understands H.264 Baseline Profile; without that, the iPhone would need a Core 2 Duo processor to play movies, and it would have a battery life of 10 minutes.
2. Codec compatibility. Normal people won’t download codecs or plug-ins just to watch a dog on a skateboard, or even to watch a trailer for a $100 million blockbuster. (Sadly, they will download plug-ins for porn, but those are invariably trojan horses. Or so I’ve read. Moving on…) The phone in your pocket can probably play AMR ringtones, maybe MP3 ringtones, but probably not Vorbis ringtones (unless you have an Android phone) — and you probably couldn’t download new codecs even if you wanted to (which, I must reiterate, nobody wants to). Apple and Real Networks tried for years to corner the web video market, but 99% of schmucks with a browser have Flash, so Flash video won on the web. Meanwhile, Firefox 3.1 will ship with support for the <video> element but will only support Theora and Vorbis in an Ogg container — even if your underlying operating system ships with other codecs.
3. CPU capacity for encoding. Encoding takes a long time. Taking my home movie from iMovie to a DVD used to take 8 hours on a Powerbook G4 laptop. These days you can rip a DVD movie with Xvid in 30 minutes, or you can rip it with a more complex codec with all optional features turned on, and maybe it’ll still take 8 hours. It’ll look better, but will it look 16 times better? If you’re only doing it once, maybe you don’t care. If you’re running YouTube and people are uploading 13 hours of video every minute, maybe you do. CPU cycles aren’t free; at that scale, they’re not even cheap. (That’s a real statistic, by the way; I got it from the page on the Google intranet entitled “What can we tell non-Googlers?” and it’s accurate as of September 2008.)
4. Acceptable delay between recording and delivery. In my own experience, videos I’ve uploaded on YouTube are available within minutes, which is just mind-boggling when you consider the volume. If you’re re-encoding a live stream, even a few minutes delay is probably unacceptable. That means you’ll need a faster encoder, a less complex codec, or lower quality settings.
5. Audience size. It’s not a big secret that lots of video on the Internet looks like crap. Partly that’s because the video uploader uploaded crappy video, but it’s also because most Internet videos are only watched by a few people, and it’s just not a worthwhile tradeoff to spend 8 hours re-encoding it. On the other hand, if you’re mastering a DVD that’ll get sold to 10 million people, you’ll probably use higher quality settings.
6. Screen dimensions. DVDs can’t store high-def 1920 x 1080 video because the standard doesn’t allow for it, which makes perfect sense because it was designed around the screen resolution of standard-def TVs. Blu-Ray ups the limit, but there’s still a limit. Screen sizes vary more for PC video, but there will always be practical upper limits depending on your audience.
7. My bandwidth. If you’re streaming or downloading video, some percentage of your audience is probably living in a third-world country like the United States, with limited broadband access, slow speeds, and monthly bandwidth caps. Larger file size = longer wait to play = fewer videos watched overall.
8. Your bandwidth. Obviously every bit I download is a bit that you upload, and bandwidth ain’t free either. “When I get a little money I buy bandwidth; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.” Or something like that.
9. Hard limits on storage size. As I mentioned before, physical media has upper limits on total size. Commercial DVDs can hold upwards of 9 GB, which seems like a lot but really isn’t. Blu-Ray maxes out at 50 GB, which seems like a lot but really isn’t.
10. Patents / licensing costs. Did I mention that most popular video codecs are patent-encumbered? This is why Wikimedia uses Theora exclusively, and why Firefox can ship a native Theora decoder and but won’t ever ship H.264.

…and that’s the short list.

All of which leads me to the Zen of video encoding, which is this:

There is no right or wrong. There is only what works and what doesn’t.

If you can find even one combination of tools, delivery devices, and target platforms that satisfies your constraints and still accomplishes your goals, congratulations. You’re ahead of 99% of the people who’ve tried.

The first thing you need to know about captions and subtitles is that captions and subtitles are different. The second thing you need to know about captions and subtitles is that you can safely ignore the differences unless you’re creating your own from scratch. I’m going to use the terms interchangeably throughout this article, which will probably drive you crazy if you happen to know and care about the difference.

Historically, captioning has been driven by the needs of deaf and hearing impaired consumers, and captioning technology has been designed around the technical quirks of broadcast television. In the United States, so-called “closed captions” are embedded into a part of the NTSC video source (“Line 21″) that is normally outside the viewing area on televisions. In Europe, they use a completely different system that is embeddable in the PAL video source. Over time, each new medium (VHS, DVD, and now online digital video) has dealt a blow to the accessibility gains of the previous medium. For example:

• PAL VHS tapes did not have enough bandwidth to store closed captions at all.
• DVDs have the technical capability, but producers often manage to screw it up anyway; e.g. DVDs of low-budget television shows are often released without the closed captions that accompanied the original broadcast.
• HDMI cables drop “Line 21″ closed captions altogether. If you play an NTSC DVD on an HDTV over HDMI, you’ll never see the closed captions, even if the DVD has them.

And accessible online video is just fucking hopeless. (And no, it won’t change unless new regulation forces it to change. When it comes to captioning, Joe Clark has been right longer than many of you have been alive.)

So even in broadcast television, captioning technology was fractured by different broadcast technologies in different countries. Digital video had the capability of unifying the technologies and learning from their mistakes. Of course, exactly the opposite happened. Early caption formats split along company lines; each major video software platform (RealPlayer, QuickTime, Windows Media, Adobe Flash) implemented captioning in their own way, with levels of adoption ranging from nil to zilch. At the same time, an entire subculture developed around “fan-subbing,” i.e. using captioning technology to provide translations of foreign language videos. For example, non-Japanese-speaking consumers wanted to watch Japanese anime films, so amateur translators stepped up to publish their own English captions that could be overlaid onto the original film. In the 1980s, fansubbers would actually take VHS tapes and overlay the English captions onto a new tape, which they would then (illegally) distribute. Nowadays, translators can simply publish their work on the Internet as a standalone file. English-speaking consumers can have their DVDs shipped directly from Japan, and they use software players that can overlay standalone English caption files while playing their Japanese-only DVDs. The legality of distributing these unofficial translations (even separately, in the form of standalone caption files) has been disputed in recent years, but the fansubbing community persists.

Technically, there is a lot of variation in captioning formats. At their core, captions are a combination of text to display, start and end times to display it, information about where to position the text on a screen, fonts, styling, alignment, and so on. Some captions roll up from the bottom of the screen, others simply appear and disappear at the appropriate time. Some caption formats mandate where each caption should be placed and how it should be styled; others merely suggest position and styling; others leave all display attributes entirely up to the player. Almost every conceivable combination of these variables has been tried. Some forms of media try multiple combinations at once. DVDs, for example, can have two entirely distinct forms of captioning — closed captioning (as used in NTSC broadcast television) embedded in the video stream, and one or more subtitle tracks. DVD subtitle tracks are used for many different things, including subtitles (just the words being spoken, in the same language as the audio), captions for the hearing impaired (which include extra notations of background noises and such), translations into other languages, and director’s commentary. Oh, and they’re stored on the DVD as images, not text, so the end user has no control over fonts or font size.

Beyond DVDs, most caption formats store the captions as text, which inevitably raises the issue of character encoding. Some caption formats explicitly specify the character encoding, others only allow UTF-8, others don’t specify any encoding at all. On the player side, most players respect the character encoding if present (but may only support specific encodings); in its absence, some players assume UTF-8, some guess the encoding, and some allow the user to override the encoding. Obviously standalone caption files can be in any format, but if you want to embed your captions as a track within a video container, your choices are limited to the caption formats that the video container supports.

And remember when I said that there were a metric fuck-ton of audio codecs? Forget that. There are an imperial fuck-ton of caption formats (i.e. multiply by 9/5 and add 32). Here is a partial list of caption formats, taken from the list of formats supported by Subtitle Workshop, which I used to caption my short-lived video podcast series:

Adobe Encore DVD, Advanced SubStation Alpha, AQTitle, Captions 32, Captions DAT, Captions DAT Text, Captions Inc., Cheetah, CPC-600, DKS Subtitle Format, DVD Junior, DVD Studio Pro, DVD Subtitle System, DVDSubtitle, FAB Subtitler, IAuthor Script, Inscriber CG, JACOSub 2.7+, Karaoke Lyrics LRC, Karaoke Lyrics VKT, KoalaPlayer, MacSUB, MicroDVD, MPlayer, MPlayer2, MPSub, OVR Script, Panimator, Philips SVCD Designer, Phoenix Japanimation Society, Pinnacle Impression, PowerDivX, PowerPixel, QuickTime Text, RealTime, SAMI Captioning, Sasami Script, SBT, Sofni, Softitler RTF, SonicDVD Creator, Sonic Scenarist, Spruce DVDMaestro, Spruce Subtitle File, Stream SubText Player, Stream SubText Script, SubCreator 1.x, SubRip, SubSonic, SubStation Alpha, SubViewer 1.0, SubViewer 2.0, TMPlayer, Turbo Titler, Ulead DVD Workshop 2.0, ViPlay Subtitle File, ZeroG.

Which of these formats are important? The answer will depend on whom you ask, and more specifically, how you’re planning to distribute your video. This series is primarily focused on videos delivered as files to be played on PCs or other computing devices, so my choices here will reflect that. These are some of the most well-supported caption formats:

• SubRip
• SubStation Alpha
• MPEG-4 Timed Text
• SAMI
• SMIL

SubRip

SubRip is the AVI of caption formats, in the sense that its basic functionality is supported everywhere but various people have tried to extend it in mostly incompatible ways and the result is a huge mess. As a standalone file, SubRip captions are most commonly seen with a .srt extension. SubRip is a text-based format which can include font, size, and position information, as well as a limited set of HTML formatting tags, although most of these features are poorly supported. Its “official” specification is a doom9 forum post from 2004. Most players assume that .srt files are encoded in Windows-1252 (what Windows programs frequently call “ANSI”), although some can detect and switch to UTF-8 encoding automatically.

Because .srt files are so often published separately from the video files they describe, the most common use case is to put your .srt file in the same directory as your video file and give them the same name (up to the file extensions). But it is also possible to embed SubRip captions directly into AVI files with AVI-Mux GUI, into MKV files with mkvmerge, and into MP4 files with MP4Box.

You can play SubRip captions in Windows Media Player or other DirectShow-based video players after installing VSFilter; in QuickTime after installing Perian; on Linux, both mplayer and VLC support it natively.

SubStation Alpha

SubStation Alpha and its successor, Advanced SubStation Alpha, are the preferred caption formats of the fansubbing community. As standalone files, they are commonly seen with .ssa or .ass extensions. They have a spec longer than three paragraphs. They are actually miniature scripting languages. A .ass file contains a series of commands to control position, scrolling, animation, font, size, scaling, letter spacing, borders, text outline, text shadow, alignment, and so on; and a series of time-coded events for displaying text given the current styling parameters. It has support for multiple character encodings.

The playing requirements for SubStation Alpha captions are almost identical to SubRip. The same plugins are required for Windows and Mac OS X. On Linux, mplayer prides itself on having the most complete SSA/ASS implementation.

MPEG-4 Timed Text

a.k.a. “MPEG-4 Part 17,” a.k.a. ISO 14496-17, MPEG-4 Timed Text (hereafter “MP4TT”) is the one and only caption format for the MP4 container. It is not a file format; it is only defined in terms of a track within an MP4 container. As such, it can not be embedded in any other video container, and it can not exist as a separate file. (Note: the last sentence was a lie; the MPEG-4 Timed Text format is really the 3GPP Timed Text format, and it can very much be embedded in a 3GPP container. What I meant to say is that the format can not be embedded in any of the other popular video container formats like AVI, MKV, or OGG. I could go on about the subtle differences between MPEG-4 Timed Text in an MP4 container and 3GPP Timed Text in a 3GPP container, but it would just make you cry, and besides, technical accuracy is for pussies.)

MP4TT defines detailed information on text positioning, fonts, styles, scrolling, and text justification. These details are encoded into the track at authoring time, and can not be changed by the end user’s video player. The most readable description of its features is actually the documentation for GPAC, an open source implementation of much of the MPEG-4 specification (including MP4TT). Since MP4TT doesn’t define a text-based serialization, GPAC invented one for their own use; since their format is designed to capture all the possible information in an MP4TT track, it turns out to be an easy way to read about all of MP4TT’s features.

MP4Box, part of the GPAC project, can take an .srt file and convert it into a MPEG-4 Timed Text track and embed it in an existing MP4 file. It can also reverse the process — extract a Timed Text track from an MP4 file and output a .srt file.

On Mac OS X, QuickTime supports MP4TT tracks within an MP4 container, but only if you rename the file from .mp4 to .3gp or .m4v. I shit you not. (On the plus side, changing the file extension will allow you to sync compatible video to an iPod or iPhone, which will actually display the captions. Still not kidding.) On Windows, any DirectShow-based video player (such as Windows Media Player or Media Player Classic) supports MP4TT tracks once you install Haali Media Splitter. On Linux, VLC has supported MP4TT tracks for several years.

SAMI

SAMI was Microsoft’s first attempt to create a captioning format for PC video files (as opposed to broadcast television or DVDs). As such, it is natively supported by Microsoft video players, including Windows Media Player, without the need for third-party plugins. It has a specification on MSDN. It is a text-based format that supports a large subset of HTML formatting tags. SAMI captions are almost always embedded in an ASF container, along with Windows Media video and Windows Media audio.

Don’t use SAMI for new projects; it has been superceded by SMIL. For historical purposes, you may enjoy reading about creating SAMI captions and embedding them in an ASF container, as long as you promise to never, ever try it at home.

SMIL

SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) is not actually a captioning format. It is “an XML-based language that allows authors to write interactive multimedia presentations.” It also happens to have a timing and synchronization module that can, in theory, be used to display text on a series of moving pictures. That is to say, if you think of SMIL as a way to provide captions for a video, you’re doing it wrong. You need to invert your thinking — your video and your captions are each merely components of a SMIL presentation. SMIL captions are not embedded into a video container; the video and its captions are referenced from a SMIL document.

SMIL is a W3C standard; the most recent revision, SMIL 3.0, was just published in December 2008. If you printed out the SMIL 3.0 specification on US-Letter-sized paper, it would weigh in at 395 pages. So don’t do that.

QuickTime supports a subset of SMIL 1.0. WebAIM provides a nice tutorial on using SMIL to add captions to a QuickTime movie.

Further reading

• Multimedia Accessibility (Joe Clark)
• Web Captioning Overview (WebAIM)
• Subtitle formats explained (AfterDawn)
• How to play subtitles (OpenSubtitles)
• Subtitle (captioning)
• Closed captioning
• MP4 FAQ (doom9)
• Adding/editing captions on YouTube videos

The most important consideration in video encoding is choosing a video codec. A future article will talk about how to pick the one that’s right for you, but for now I just want to introduce the concept and describe the playing field. (This information is likely to go out of date quickly; future readers, be aware that this was written in December 2008.)

When you talk about “watching a video,” you’re probably talking about a combination of one video stream, one audio stream, and possibly some subtitles or captions. But you probably don’t have two different files; you just have “the video.” Maybe it’s an AVI file, or an MP4 file. These are just container formats, like a ZIP file that contains multiple kinds of files within it. The container format defines how to store the video and audio streams in a single file (and subtitles too, if any).

When you “watch a video,” your video player is doing several things at once:

1. Interpreting the container format to find out which video and audio tracks are available, and how they are stored within the file so that it can find the data it needs to decode next
2. Decoding the video stream and displaying a series of images on the screen
3. Decoding the audio stream and sending the sound to your speakers
4. Possibly decoding the subtitle stream as well, and showing and hiding phrases at the appropriate times while playing the video

A video codec is an algorithm by which a video stream is encoded, i.e. it specifies how to do #2 above. Your video player decodes the video stream according to the video codec, then displays a series of images, or “frames,” on the screen. Most modern video codecs use all sorts of tricks to minimize the amount of information required to display one frame after the next. For example, instead of storing each individual frame (like a screenshot), they will only store the differences between frames. Most videos don’t actually change all that much from one frame to the next, so this allows for high compression rates, which results in smaller file sizes. (There are many, many other complicated tricks too, which I’ll dive into in a future article.)

There are lossy and lossless video codecs; today’s article will only deal with lossy codecs. A lossy video codec means that information is being irretrievably lost during encoding. Like copying an audio cassette tape, you’re losing information about the source video, and degrading the quality, every time you encode. Instead of the “hiss” of an audio cassette, a re-re-re-encoded video may look blocky, especially during scenes with a lot of motion. (Actually, this can happen even if you encode straight from the original source, if you choose a poor video codec or pass it the wrong set of parameters.) On the bright side, lossy video codecs can offer amazing compression rates, and many offer ways to “cheat” and smooth over that blockiness during playback, to make the loss less noticeable to the human eye.

There are tons of video codecs. Today I’ll discuss five modern lossy video codecs: MPEG-4 ASP, H.264, VC-1, Theora, and Dirac.

MPEG-4 ASP

a.k.a. “MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile.” MPEG-4 ASP was developed by the MPEG group and standardized in 2001. You may have heard of DivX, Xvid, or 3ivx; these are all competing implementations of the MPEG-4 ASP standard. Xvid is open source; DivX and 3ivx are closed source. The company behind DivX has had some mainstream success in branding “DivX” as synonymous with “MPEG-4 ASP.” For example, this “DivX-certified” DVD player can actually play most MPEG-4 ASP videos in an AVI container, even if they were created with a competing encoder. (To confuse things even further, the company behind DivX has now created their own container format.)

MPEG-4 ASP is patent-encumbered; licensing is brokered through the MPEG LA group. MPEG-4 ASP video can be embedded in most popular container formats, including AVI, MP4, and MKV.

H.264

a.k.a. “MPEG-4 part 10,” a.k.a. “MPEG-4 AVC,” a.k.a. “MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding.” H.264 was also developed by the MPEG group and standardized in 2003. It aims to provide a single codec for low-bandwidth, low-CPU devices (cell phones); high-bandwidth, high-CPU devices (modern desktop computers); and everything in between. To accomplish this, the H.264 standard is split into “profiles,” which each define a set of optional features that trade complexity for file size. Higher profiles use more optional features, offer better visual quality at smaller file sizes, take longer to encode, and require more CPU power to decode in real-time.

To give you a rough idea of the range of profiles, Apple’s iPhone supports Baseline profile, the AppleTV set-top box supports Baseline and Main profiles, and Adobe Flash on a desktop PC supports Baseline, Main, and High profiles. YouTube (owned by Google, my employer) now uses H.264 to encode high-definition videos, playable through Adobe Flash; YouTube also provides H.264-encoded video to mobile devices, including Apple’s iPhone and phones running Google’s Android mobile operating system. Also, H.264 is one of the video codecs mandated by the Blu-Ray specification; Blu-Ray discs that use it generally use the High profile.

Most non-PC devices that play H.264 video (including iPhones and standalone Blu-Ray players) actually do the decoding on a dedicated chip, since their main CPUs are nowhere near powerful enough to decode the video in real-time. Recent high-end desktop graphics cards also support decoding H.264 in hardware. There are a number of competing H.264 encoders, including the open source x264 library. The H.264 standard is patent-encumbered; licensing is brokered through the MPEG LA group. H.264 video can be embedded in most popular container formats, including MP4 (used primarily by Apple’s iTunes Store) and MKV (used primarily by video pirates).

VC-1

VC-1 evolved from Microsoft’s WMV9 codec and was standardized in 2006. It is primarily used and promoted by Microsoft for high-definition video, although, like H.264, it has a range of profiles to trade complexity for file size. Also like H.264, it is mandated by the Blu-Ray specification, and all Blu-Ray players are required to be able to decode it. The VC-1 codec is patent-encumbered, with licensing brokered through the MPEG LA group.

Wikipedia has a brief technical comparison of VC-1 and H.264; Microsoft has their own comparison; Multimedia.cx has a pretty Venn diagram outlining the similarities and differences. Multimedia.cx also discusses the technical features of VC-1. I also found this history of VC-1 and H.264 to be interesting (as well as this rebuttal).

VC-1 is designed to be container-independent, although it is most often embedded in an ASF container. An open source decoder for VC-1 video was a 2006 Google Summer of Code project, and the resulting code was added to the multi-faceted ffmpeg library.

Theora

Theora evolved from the VP3 codec and has subsequently been developed by the Xiph.org Foundation. Theora is a royalty-free codec and is not encumbered by any known patents other than the original VP3 patents, which have been irrevocably licensed royalty-free. Although the standard has been “frozen” since 2004, the Theora project (which includes an open source reference encoder and decoder) only hit 1.0 in November 2008.

Theora video can be embedded in any container format, although it is most often seen in an Ogg container. All major Linux distributions support Theora out-of-the-box, and Mozilla Firefox 3.1 will include native support for Theora video in an Ogg container. And by “native”, I mean “available on all platforms without platform-specific plugins.” You can also play Theora video on Windows or on Mac OS X after installing Xiph.org’s open source decoder software.

The reference encoder included in Theora 1.0 is widely criticized for being slow and poor quality, but Theora 1.1 will include a new encoder that takes better advantage of Theora’s features, while staying backward-compatible with current decoders. (Info: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, source code.)

Dirac

Dirac was developed by the BBC to provide a royalty-free alternative to H.264 and VC-1 that the BBC could use to stream high-definition television content in Great Britain. Like H.264, Dirac aims to provide a single codec for the full spectrum of very low- and very high-bandwidth streaming. Dirac is not encumbered by any known patents, and there are two open source implementations, dirac-research (the BBC’s reference implementation) and Schroedinger (optimized for speed).

The Dirac standard was only finalized in 2008, so there is very little mainstream use yet, although the BBC did use it internally during the 2008 Olympics. Dirac-encoded video tracks can be embedded in several popular container formats, including MP4, Ogg, MKV, and AVI. VLC 0.9.2 (released in September 2008) can play Dirac-encoded video within an Ogg or MP4 container.

And on and on…
Of course, this is only scratching the surface of all the available video codecs. Video encoding goes way back, but my focus in this series is on the present and near-future, not the past. If you like, you can read about MPEG-2 (used in DVDs), MPEG-1 (used in Video CDs), older versions of Microsoft’s WMV family, Sorenson, Indeo, and Cinepak.

According to Facebook, 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news blogs etc) are shared each month on the social network, with no sign of slowing.

But how can you manage the flood of information? Here’s is a list of tools and services available, which help you manage your websites and blogs. If I’ve missed any obvious ones, or indeed obscure ones, please feel free to leave a comment.

• Blog Grader shows you how effective your blog is at marketing your brand and see how you stack up against other blogs out there.
• Blogtronix is an advanced social networking tool and micro-blogging site, which helps people in a community, company or group exchange short multimedia messages across the web. Blogtronix is best suited for internal communities, such as companies who are looking to help their employees connect, ask and answer questions, and share work and content.
• Disqus is a social-commenting tool. Disqus allows your readers to include media such as YouTube videos in their comments, receive alerts when their posts have been responded to, and reply directly from their email.
• FeedBurner is a popular analytics package, now owned by Google, which allows you to analyse, optimise, publicise and monetise your RSS feeds.
• Google Analytics, although not specifically for social media, it can provide invaluable insight into which social media channels are driving traffic to your site. In the latest version Google now provide scripts and reports to track Facebook Likes, Twitter “tweet this” and Google +1.
• IntelBuilder Social Media Platform is a service that allows you to manage your website or blog by automatically updating your social networks when you update your website content, distributing to RSS feeds, submitting to bookmarking sites and tracking your readership.
• IntenseDebate, much like Disqus, is a comment system that enhances and encourages conversation on your blog or website.
• Janrain is a tool that allows visitors to your site to easily share your content across their social networks. Janrain also lets visitors sign in to your site with their Facebook, Twitter or other social accounts and tracks their behaviour to help you provide a personalised experience for each visitor.
• Sharetronix is run on the same platform to Blogtronix but is more suited to external communities. In addition to being a micro-blogging site, Sharetronix integrates with Twitter, Facebook and RSS feeds, allows for one-click publishing and is SEO optimised so that your content will be easily found by interested parties.
• Twitterfeed is a tool that monitors your RSS feed and updates your Facebook and Twitter accounts when you have a new blog post.

Commandments 1. Thou Shalt Blog (like crazy)

Blogging, although possibly now considered old school is a first priority. Set up a blog, a personal blog, a business blog, says Safko, It’s easier than you think. There are a multitude of Blog providers and software for self-hosting. My clear favourite is WordPress, which provides a hosted solution much like Blogger.com or GoingOn.com, or in my case, the software to setup and manage your own blog.

Commandments 2. Thou Shalt Create Profiles (everywhere)

Create profiles on the websites that interest you; do it now before someone else takes them. Once they are gone, they are gone forever. That’s commonly called cyber squatting. So get out there. If you have a personal brand, set up all the profiles you can against that brand, alternatively just use your name. For example, You can see my Google and Facebook profiles, the later of which has allowed me my own distinct URL. You can see more of my profiles via the links in the footer of my website. For the technically-minded, you can use Open Social to make filling in your profiles as easy as a click of a button.

Commandments 3. Thou Shalt Upload Photos (lots of them)

Upload photographs. You’ve got them, afterall you probably own the latest and greatest digital SLR from Canon or Nikon. Don’t upload the one with you with a lampshade on your head, that’s somewhat counter-productive; but other photographs? Absolutely; show your creativity and interests. Customers want to see and participate. You want to give people a face to go with your company. Sites such as Flickr, known for hosting some stunning photographs, are regularly used as a private area through which not only photographs, but product designs can be discussed and developed with clients. Photobucket is another example, albeit more consumer orientated.

Commandments 4. Thou Shalt Upload Videos (all you can find)

Safko, like many others, sees videos becoming an important part of business interactions: You all have got videos. I don’t care whether it’s training videos or customer videos, grab your video camera and go interview some of your customers. What’s better than seeing your customer’s smiley face on your Web site? And it doesn’t cost anything. Fortunately, much like the plethora of photo sites, there are some really great video websites out there. My favourite is Vimeo, but you could also use the more familiar and popular YouTube.

Commandments 5. Thou Shalt Podcast (often)

In my opinion this is a tricky one, much like video. Safko suggest if you’re too cheap to get a camera, use the free audio software that’s in your computer. That’s what I did. I created 48 audio podcasts. If you take the podcasts I did for my book and played them back-to-back, they run 24 continuous hours of interviews. You can do that. It’s free. It just takes time. But like video, people don’t necessarily have the time, budget or talent to produce relatively decent Podcasts. If you’re going to create decent Podcast, however, put them on iTunes where they can easily be found. If you have a smart phone, you could also try the AudioBoo and Qik, they are simply awesome at recording and publishing Podcasts and Videocasts respectively.

Commandments 6. Thou Shalt Set Alerts (immediately)

Set alerts. People are talking about you. You probably need to know what they are saying and you want to participate. A simple approach would be to use Google Alerts or Technorati and the soon-to-be-released Twitterati. If you have a greater concern, companies like Brandwatch dedicate their lives to spidering the web and garnering what they call company sentiment based upon conversations.

Commandments 7. Thou Shalt Comment (on a multitude of blogs)

Commenting is like going to a cocktail party says Safko, You wouldn’t walk into a networking event, walk up to a group of people talking, and tell them your name and what you do in your business. That would be rude and unacceptable. Listen first. Read the blogs and add comments. You can be controversial, that’s okay. But participate. Get involved. Many blogs allow comments and there is also a 3rd-party services, such as Disqus, that help you keep track of all your comments.

Commandments 8. Thou Shalt Get Connected (with everyone)

Get LinkedIn. Put it in your email that you have a LinkedIn account, you have a Facebook account, and that you have a Twitter account. Make it a part of your heading on your letterhead, because that’s how you propagate. That’s how you sell it.

Commandments 9. Thou Shalt Explore Social Media (30 minutes per week)

Explore social media. Safko suggests give it thirty minutes a week, that’s all I’m asking. Friday morning grab your coffee, lock yourself in your office, and give it thirty minutes. Just Google something. I promise you within the first 30 days you will be excited. You’ll be as excited as I am. You will get excited because of the ROI. I would contend that 30 minutes per week isn’t enough. Spend 30 minutes per day, exploring and keeping up-to-date with what is happening out there in the big-bad-world.

There are tools that make this a lot easier; they’re called social media aggregation or lifestreaming. FriendFeed is one of the best social media aggregation and discussion tools available, with numerous widgets and 3rd-party applications. It currently supports more than 40 social media websites. SocialThing allows you to see everything that’s going on with your friends on all of your social networks and allows you to interact with multiple sites at one time. Importantly, SocialThing interacts with the 3rd-party APIs, so data is sent to the source service, unlike FriendFeed. Alternatively, Flock is a web browser with a built in social aggregator, which allows you to interact with sites such as Facebook and Twitter. It is not as wide reaching as its online rivals, but does boast a blog editor, drag-and-drop image uploading and an RSS aggregator.

Commandments 10. Thou Shalt Be Creative (go forth and create creatively)

Safko’s final commandment is all about creativity; And the most important commandment is creativity. That’s all. It’s just creativity and having fun. But you know what, that’s what your customers want. They want to see transparency. They want to see authenticity. They want to see you having fun. They want to be able to relate and communicate.

But what makes up a web community; what makes them successful? Below I discuss the four C’s of community: Content, Context, Connectivity and Community.

Content

A current meme when organising or building a website is the catchphrase Content is King. A big shift in the web in recent years has been the way websites are constructed. Today it’s a necessity, and indeed best practice, to separate form from content. In one hand you have the compelling content, whilst in the other you have the presentation, be it in the form of HTML and CSS, Flash or RSS, amongst others.

Quality content is one way in which you can make your website stand out. It is also a great way to attract the people who are needed to form the elusive community that your brand is hoping build. When considering community initiatives, there are three questions to ask: Where will the content come from; for example community driven or syndication? Does it provide indisputable value; does it have a unique selling point (USP)? Can a regular flow of quality content be maintained? Even pre-Web 2.0 initiatives have to focus on keeping the content itself fresh and relevant.

Web accessibility and search engine optimisation are also vital, so having content completely separated from presentation means a number of assistive technologies can make better use of the content, whilst the web robots can also readily consume the information.

Context

Context means understanding how people use your website, where they are in the user-journey and serving them the right experience at the right time. Well-designed applications and functionality have great opportunities to deliver on context.

For example, FriendFeed‘s iPhone version, which is simply a re-worked web interface, is perfectly designed for contextual usage on the go. Similarly, Remember The Milk updates the interface explicitly for mobile and iPhone users, whilst also syndicating the content to applications such as Google Calendar. (It is questionable whether user-agent switching is good practice, but that is a whole new blog post.) Conversely, Delicious makes no attempt at changing the user interface for iPhone or Nokia N95 users since the iPhone and N95 have full web-capabilities through their respective web browsers.

In some instances the context in which the content is displayed will require reduced functionality. For example, the Last.fm mobile site does not allow you to play music, but simply search music listings, view recommendations, events and friend listings, and edit settings. However, through its API, Last.fm is able to offer its data and platform to third party developers to aid the building of new applications and communities, thus changing its context.

Connectivity

Connectivity is the ability of a system, whether that is a web-based community or a device like the iPhone, to connect with little or no modification. In the realm of communities, the ability to easily connect to your peers is the Holy Grail of the application.

Successful communities thrive on fluid, hard-to-measure activities that are, in the purest sense, relationship-based. It’s not all about mass communications — although Twitter and YouTube are both bucking this trend — but more about the micro-interactions. Designing experiences that support thousands of micro-interactions means that the community is able to function, unhindered, almost indefinitely. Facebook lends itself expertly to micro-interactions through the user’s ‘wall’.

Companies are turning to communities as the new customer relationship management (CRM), but this requires people to mind them. Organisations such as 37Signals and WildBit very effectively use Twitter to broadcast service updates and sometimes apologies, whilst the BBC and The Guardian online use it to broadcast links to new content.

Continuity

People often don’t like change, but communities that thrive often do so though evolution to meet the needs of users. Communities need to be flexible to evolve while still providing a valuable and consistent user experience which can be sustained. Too much of a radical change will almost certainly have a detrimental impact upon visits, at least initially.

Building communities is the new marketing for a brand, whether that is through wholely-owned properties or 3rd party social media services such as Twitter, WordPress or Ning. The starting point to any community is finding a niche that is currently underserved and serving that community better than anyone else. But Brands need to know a few things before they head down the community path. The web is saturated with communities. Some are thriving, while others have come and gone. Creating a community is not like your average marketing campaign that you can ditch it is a failure. If the community is successful the four C’s of content, contect, connectivity and continuity will have to be maintained and indeed, developed.

If you’re already working with video on the web, an online editor is fast, easy and free. In theory, these services could bring video editing to people who would otherwise never engage in it. People already engaging in video editing can benefit from automatic software updates and the sharing made possible by online communities.

Here’s a brief look at some of the services out there in the ether.

JumpCut

Jumpcut, acquired by Yahoo in 2006, lets you upload video, photos, and audio, or import from Flickr or Facebook, and edit using a Flash interface. Jumpcut is the most developed of the editors, allowing you to add a long list of effects, transitions, and captions to the videos. It also incorporates fine grained control of trimming and audio levels (uploaded background audio and voice). The complexity of the interface makes it great for detailed edits and mashups, but borders on being too heavy an application for the internet.

Checkout the Jumpcut website.

Eyespot

Eyespot is a fully featured editor like Jumpcut. It has a drag-and-drop interface that lets you upload video, photos, and audio and then add transitions, effects, titles, and music. The editor isn’t as attractive and easy to use as Jumpcut’s, but Eyespot offers a good deal of free media sets from partners like The Colbert Report, Public Enemy, and Dreamworks Pictures. Eyespot’s white label editor is becoming available on more and more sites, with the NBA being a prime example.

Checkout the Eyespot website.

Cuts

Taking a slightly different tack, Cuts is a great example of a Web 2.0 “mash-up”, where two online applications are merged. In this case a video is taken from YouTube, MySpace or Google and you cut, loop, add preloaded sound effects, and insert captions to enhance the original. Editing is straightforward, consisting of changes to the sound, caption, and navigation levels for the video. Every edit can be re-cut, embedded, and emailed. In the future, Cuts will be expanding into simple editing for digital movies and TV shows.

Checkout the Cuts website.

Motionbox

Motionbox is best known for deep tagging videos, but they also have an editor that is ideal for trimming your Motionbox content and joining the videos together.

Checkout the Motionbox website.

Photobucket

Photobucket leverages the most recent Adobe Flash tools. Unlike other services, users can “mash up” video clips with audio files and photos, and add effects and transitions.

Checkout the Photobucket website.

Effective web content management requires the capability for business leaders to take full control of the web as an interactive platform, rather than just treating it as another publishing medium. Keeping website visitors satisfied is a tough job. Currently, few corporate websites succeed with static, lifeless pages that lack interactivity. In contrast, pioneering websites, such as Amazon, Google and eBay set user’s expectations high with their compelling and dynamic content.

Because of these pioneering websites, the average visitor now expects targeted and personalised interactions with each and every company with which they come into contact on the web. In recent years the web content management franchise has expanded significantly beyond the 1990s paradigm of creation, management and publishing of content and other ‘resources’. As a result the tools are changing.

Ismael Chang Ghalimi has created an interesting list entitled Office 2.0 at IT|Redux. On this list, Ismael details a wide variety of web based business tools from bookmarking to business intelligence, calendars to contacts, databases to development tools, and beyond. What this list demonstrates is a shift towards new ways of data management, personalisation and targeting. New ways to interact with each and every interaction.

A recent survey from the Economist Intelligence Unit found that, despite early scepticism, “serious businesses” are starting to see that social networking technologies are not just for consumer sites such as YouTube and Facebook, but may also provide a major way for other brands to attract new customers and boost revenue.

 A compelling web experience is no longer based around simple web interactions, but around interactive tools.  The uptake of these tools, however, has been limited and we are only just seeing applications, such as wikis and blogs, join the corporate fold and become a generally accepted business tool.

The following list provides examples of sites which include some form of user-based tagging:

Blogs

Technorati: http://technorati.com

Bookmarks

Delicious: http://del.icio.us

Books

Librarything: http://www.librarything.com

Emails

Gmail: http://mail.google.com

Events

GoingToMeet: http://www.goingtomeet.com

People

Tagalag: http://www.tagalag.com

Pictures

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com

Podcasts

Odeo: http://odeo.com

Videos

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com

Tagging of course is not a new concept, especially to librarians, indexers and classification professionals. What is new is that the tagging is being done by everyone, no longer by only a small group of experts, and that the tags are being made public and shared. This is the concept of Folksonomy.

A folksonomy is a user-generated taxonomy used to categorize and retrieve web content such as Web pages, photographs and Web links, using open-ended labels called tags. Typically, folksonomies are Internet-based, but their use may occur in other contexts. The folksonomic tagging is intended to make a body of information increasingly easy to search, discover, and navigate over time. A well-developed folksonomy is ideally accessible as a shared vocabulary that is both originated by, and familiar to, its primary users.

In contrast, in the realm of the Web, taxonomy can be defined as:

the laws or principles of classification;

controlled vocabulary used primarily for the creation of navigation structures for websites

The development of the Internet and the Web, and of search engines, led to users doing their own searching. In the Web 2.0 environment users are now also doing their own content creation and information management.

Because folksonomies develop in Internet-mediated social environments, users can often discover who created a given folksonomy tag, and see the other tags that this person created. In this way, folksonomy users often discover the tag sets of another user who tends to interpret and tag content in a way that makes sense to them. The result is often an immediate and rewarding gain in the user’s capacity to find related content. Part of the appeal of folksonomy is its inherent subversiveness: when faced with the choice of the search tools that Web sites provide, folksonomies can be seen as a rejection of the search engine status quo in favour of tools that are created by the community.

Folksonomy creation and searching tools are not part of the underlying World Wide Web protocols. Folksonomies arise in Web-based communities where special provisions are made at the site level for creating and using tags. These communities are established to enable Web users to label and share user-generated content, such as photographs (e.g. Flickr), or to collaboratively label existing content, such as Web sites (e.g. Technorati), books (e.g. LibraryThing), works in the scientific and scholarly literatures, and blog entries (e.g. WordPress).

During the 1990s business leaders and venture capitalists grappled with how they would make money from the web. This was tipified by the two VCs, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, investing $25 million in Google in the late 1990s; they new the search engine created by Sergey Brin and Larry Page was a winning formula, even though the pair had not yet monetised search. Bricks and mortar compaines were deemed “old hat” as the dotcom bubble was expanding. Companies such as eBay, Amazon and Yahoo! were at the forefront of every investors’ chequebook. Every company needed a 21st Century “Blue Sky” web strategy; every company needed to do e-commerce. However, the bubble burst and everyone was brought down with a bang. Boo.com is a classic example of the fallout from the over speculation.

Today, the reality has shifted from solely bricks and mortar or dotcom, to a balance between the real world and cyberspace, of traditional business operations complemented by the unversality provided by web-based technologies. The web has given businesses a greater understanding of their customers. With Web 2.0 a new type of web is emerging, further enhancing the understanding of a user or customer through the creation of online communities, where information is shared and new ideas evolve.

There are numerous examples of web communities from the early FriendsReunited to MySpace and the more specific Islandoo for the Channel4 TV progamme Shipwrecked. Web 2.0 is all about collaborative networks tipified by Flickr, del.icio.us, Wikipedia and YouTube. However, Web 2.0 has primarily been used in the consumer arena, as identified by the examples, but the use of such technologies has far reaching implications based on understanding how people interact with the technologies and behave online. Linking people across countries, time-zones and company boundaries will enable people to work together without hierarchical boundaries, bringing people together as one team to collate the best input. This is emphasised with the concept of a wiki whereby any end-user can make changes to the shared resource without the need for specialist software and expensive training. This makes sharing knowledge extremely easy.

Other areas of Web 2.0 is the technology identified by the term “folksonomy”. Simply, a folksonomy is defined on Wikipedia as:

… an Internet-based information retrieval methodology consisting of collaboratively generated, open-ended labels that categorize content such as Web pages, online photographs, and Web links. A folksonomy is most notably contrasted from a taxonomy in that the authors of the labeling system are often the main users (and sometimes originators) of the content to which the labels are applied. The labels are commonly known as tags and the labeling process is called tagging.

While it takes time for an expert to create a taxonomy specific to a particular organisation in order to categorise or define data, folksonomies do not require fixed taxonomies. Instead, users define their own descriptions of the data to be described by applying tags to the data, whether it is a bookmark in terms of del.icio.us, an image on Flickr, a video on YouTube or a document in a company repository. Over time, these tags can be amended by other users resulting in a definition that is more specific. This enables users to find information with relative ease, without having to type the exact keyword.

Web 2.0 will bring a whole host of issues into the business arena. While there are clear benefits from establishing communities and social networks, people with different views, be it political or religious, can drive the agenda. Further complications arise through the necessity to audit changes to the data and ensuring the data is indeed accurate (Wikipedia has had cases where people have maliciously altered data to either enhance their own profile or devalue the significance of historical events).