Twitter.com Now With Less Common Craft

Well, it was a good run. Twitter recently redesigned their home page and the link to the Common Craft video "Twitter in Plain English" has been removed. Here's the story of how it got there:

Back in February of 2008, I shared the video with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. After making a handshake deal, the video appeared via a "watch a video" link from Twitter.com.

 

Twitter decided to use the dotSUB player for the displaying the video, which enabled the video to be watched with subtitles in many languages.  The video has since been translated into 69 languages.  As of today, about 1.5 years later, that video has been viewed over 8.7 million times via the dotSUB linked from Twitter.com. 

The Twitter folks put a link along with the video to CommonCraft.com, which sent a lot of people in our direction. 

Now that the page has been redesigned, the link to the video and to Common Craft are no more. But we're not sad. We're so honored to have been a part of helping educate people about Twitter - a simple idea that's very hard to explain. In the end, Twitter helped raise the visibility of our work and the work of explainers in general. We heard many, many times "We want a video like you did for Twitter." Thanks to Biz, Ev and the Twitter team for giving Common Craft the opportunity to a part of an amazing trajectory.  We'll never forget it.

While the video isn't linked via on Twitter.com, it's obviously alive and well on CommonCraft.com. We recently published Twitter Search in Plain English as a follow on. 

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How "Twitter in Plain English" Gained 2.6 Million Views

A year ago today, I was writing the script for the video "Twitter in Plain English."  A year later, the video has over 2.6 million views, thanks to a bit of collaboration between a handful of companies. Here's how:

We decided to make "Twitter in Plain English" for the same reason we made "RSS in Plain English " - it was a concept with huge potential that needed a better explanation. We wanted people to understand a resource that we value.

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Help Translate the Google Docs Video on DotSUB

We've been friends and fans of dotSUB since we first started making video for The Common Craft Show.  They make it easy for videos to be translated into multiple languages via subtitles. 

The RSS in Plain English video has been translated into 20+ languages on dotSUB. A truly useful and innovative service.

I've gotten permission from the Google Docs team to share the Google Docs video on dotSUB so it's acessible for the hearing impaired and our non-English speaking friends.

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Wiki Video in Multiple Languages via DotSub

Just after posting our first video on RSS , I learned a few valuable lessons:

1. Video is inaccessible for the hearing impaired

2. Video is not easy to translate into other languages

3. There is a new site that addresses both of these issues called DotSub .

DotSub makes it easy for me to transcribe the spoken words into text subtitles. Then, once the subtitles exist, it enables DotSub members to voluntarily translate the text into other languages and post the video to their blogs. This makes videos international and more accessible - for free.

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