The Bioscreencast Blog

One of our motivations for starting bioscreencast.com was the rather poor resolution of screencasts hosted on youtube. Most screencasts on youtube suffer due to the high degree of compression youtube puts its videos through. Screencasts generally convey a lot more when you can actually read and see whats going on on the screen.The fine text, the snazzy antialiased icons , all suffer at the hands of most compression settings , making it rather painful to follow along.

However , youtube recently added a feature that may offer a small way out of this, especially for screencasts. Youtube annotations. What this basically allows you to do is add small text pop-ups on the videos you author ( kinda like VH1s popup video) .

The popups can be finely controlled down to the tenths of a second for appearance and dissaperance and come in three flavors , text box , speech bubble and spotlights. I first heard about this feature on Jon Udells blog where he talks about how this really adds value to screencasts and couldnt wait to try the feature out . I went all out and edited one of my bioscreencast screencasts which explain how to use the “links popup” and “History option” to combine searches on the NCBI for biomedical search and put it up on youtube. Since the youtube embed player still does not support these annotations , check out the video on the youtube site itself by clicking on this link.

How often have you heard someone say ” I dont know how you look for something in there” . Database querying and search has become an essential skill to possess in this genomic age.  Be it PUBMED , FlyBase or the PDB, we all rely on these databases to find our everyday information.

As Jon Udell commented in  his article on search strategies, database querying is definitely a skill , and good searchers tend to have deep and hidden reservoirs of tacit skill that they can harness . And, as he says , like many other skills effective search can be learned.

We at Bioscreencast.com believe that screencasts are a good way to capture user-database interactions . It was for this reason that we decided to have a category in our library called “Databases and Biosearch”.  Thanks to uploads like the recent one from the PDB , we have user uploaded screencasts that show you how to search databases, ranging from the new Uniprot database , the gaggle proteomics workbench to the Membrane Protein databank .

We hope that the next time you hit on a clever querying strategy  or put together a public database, you screencast it for us all to benefit from.