We are trying to fix these problems and hopefully have things flow smoothly. Thanks to everyone who wrote in and we are very glad for your support.

harijay

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.

I personally have always used IShowU  for capture and  Quicktime-Pro for all my editing, but with the entry of all these options maybe I will check some of  these out.

-hari

Update: we have fixed the issue as of May 21st 16hrs US Eastern time. So as the saying goes ” If you see something say something”

Of course, we’d hope that if you are interested in sharing your screencasts with the life science community bioscreencast would be right on top of the list

Technorati Tags: screencasting, videoblog

Watch away (best way to watch is to expand the video to full size)

Technorati Tags: screencast, equations

Through Frank Gibson’s screencasts on Bioscreencast, I found out about the CARMEN, a neuroinformatics project that aims to “create an e-science infrastructure in which data on neuronal activity (electrical and optical measures) can be shared, stored, manipulated and modelled”.

Neuroinformatics is data intensive and is fed by heteregenous data types. Unfortunately a lot of the data is confined to a single lab, i.e. the broader community is not being tapped properly (something that was forced onto biology by the sheer breadth of the human genome project). But the CARMEN project leapfrogs some of the trajectory of bioinformatics, by providing a virtual laboratory that incorporates knowledge about experimental conditions and extensive amounts of meta-data. It took biofinformaticians a long time to realize that capturing experimental information as meta-data was important.

CARMEN is an ambitious project, and to be truly successful will need to last a lot longer than the current 4 year pilot.

This presentation tells you about the CARMEN project, and some of the challenges the project hopes to address.

Bronwen’s screencasts are another excellent example of the power of screencasting

In the first screencast, Bronwen shows you how to prepare tables that meet the requirements for journals like Nature Protocols, and in the second she shows you how to resize images. Both are practical examples. They also show how publishers can interact with people to highlight some best practices.

We are moving the bioscreencast blog to it’s own domain which is why these posts are not happening there, plus everyone subscribed to that blog probably reads this one too

Technorati Tags: Bioscreencast, Screencasting, Nature Protocols

Technorati Tags: Illiad, Library, Papers