ScreenCasts

I've been busy with the start of a new semester at CSF and this term's course is being offered 100% online. After all, 5 of 7 students live over 60 miles from campus. So I've been screencasting to augment the existing audio podcasts.

I had an opportunity to revisit Sean Kelley's excellent screencast on J2EE and JBoss (at my day-job they're getting ready to switch from Oracle to JBoss). That has led me to look at Plone multimedia from a statistical point of view.

At least with plone.tv, its easy to get stats on Plone video (228), screencasts (29), and podcasts (7). Interestingly, YouTube lists only 85 videos for Plone (including a few for the band!). For other CMS its not so straightforward.

Google for "drupal video screencast podcast" and various permutations and you find many, many sites offering collections of multimedia material, but it would take a brutal amount of manual investigation to filter out the duplicates. YouTube lists 370 videos; Lullabot has a sizeable collection as well.

Looking for SharePoint multimedia material has the same difficulty. Here I found SharePointPedia with only 29 instructional screencasts, although YouTube links to 297.

The bottom line is that a central repository for multimedia tutorials, how-to's, advocacy, and community-building materials is an excellent strategy. Nate Aune's efforts on behalf of the community in establishing Plone.tv are paying significant dividends.

Meanwhile, I continue to track a couple of Plone videos via TubeMogul. Eben Moglen's keynote from Plone World 2006 had 100 viewers on March 7 and continues to average 39 views per day(!). Alas, Jon Stahl's "Online Social Networks: Can They Power Social Change?" hasn't seen more than 5 views per day in the last month. True its not a video work of art, but the audio carries an excellent message. Maybe this weekend I'll stip off the audio channel and break it up into individual podcasts. Look for them on Plone.tv if I do.