Many years ago I worked for MAGI (Mathematical Applications Group, Inc) in Elmsford, NY. The company was a pioneer in computer generated imagery and 3D modeling technology. In 1966 they started developing software based on the concept of tracing radiation from its source to its surroundings. Eventually, the software was adapted for use in computer generated imaging by tracing light instead of radiation, making it one of the first systems to implement the concept of ray tracing.
The software was a solids modeling system, in that the geometry was a series of solid primitives (boxes, cylinders, extrusions, etc.) along with combinatorial (Boolean) operations. The combination of the solids modeling and ray tracing made it a powerful system for generating high quality images like those seen in the movie “Tron”. The graphics and engineering application side of MAGI, called MAGI/SynthaVision was started in 1972 and finally sold to Lockheed in 1985 to be integrated with CADAM.
At the time, CADAM was one of the most widely used CAD/CAM systems on the planet, but considered by most to be just a computer aided drafting system. I remember traveling around the world speaking on the subject of solids modeling. I often used the expression “if a picture is worth a thousand words then a solids model is worth a thousand pictures” since we could make an infinite number of pictures from a single 3D model.
I did a little research on the saying and found that Fred R. Barnard originally created it when he coined the phrase “One look is worth a thousand words.” Printers’ Ink, 8 December 1921, p. 96. He changed it to “One picture is worth a thousand words” in Printers’ Ink, 10 March 1927, p. 114, and called it “a Chinese proverb, so that people would take it seriously.” It was immediately credited to Confucius.
This got me thinking about how search engines have a hard time building context from web videos. Unfortunately, spiders can’t watch a web video and extract the relevant information like humans can. Metadata can provide an overview, but is fairly limited in size. Well, this lead me to the video subtitle and the possibility of using an XML document to feed the subtitle to the video, as well as the search engine.
There are several methods for identifying spiders visiting your website. Once you’ve identified your visitor as a spider crawling for keywords and phases, you can replace the video on the page with the exact “word-for-word” account contained in your video subtitles. Clearly, you would NOT want to abuse this technique since search engines have been known to verify user agent delivery implementations and there are a variety of tools to view your website as the search engines do to validate your results.
This method seems to be particularly powerful for localized content since video subtitles are commonplace in foreign countries, but you’ll want to translate your page title and Meta description too. The cost to translate a video script usually comes out to be somewhere between $0.25 and $0.35 per word so providing the context of your video in multiple languages is very reasonable today.
So this brings me back to the old saying “One picture is worth a thousand words”. I wondered if Mr. Barnard were alive today if he would agree with me to reprint it for Internet users as “One picture is worth a thousand words, but a video subtitle is worth a thousand pictures”.
Many years ago I worked for MAGI (Mathematical Applications Group, Inc) in Elmsford, NY. The company was a pioneer in computer generated imagery and 3D modeling technology. In 1966 they started developing software based on the concept of tracing radiation from its source to its surroundings. Eventually, the software was adapted for use in computer generated imaging by tracing light instead of radiation, making it one of the first systems to implement the concept of ray tracing.
The software was a solids modeling system, in that the geometry was a series of solid primitives (boxes, cylinders, extrusions, etc.) along with combinatorial (Boolean) operations. The combination of the solids modeling and ray tracing made it a powerful system for generating high quality images like those seen in the movie “Tron”. The graphics and engineering application side of MAGI, called MAGI/SynthaVision was started in 1972 and finally sold to Lockheed in 1985 to be integrated with CADAM.
At the time, CADAM was one of the most widely used CAD/CAM systems on the planet, but considered by most to be just a computer aided drafting system. I remember traveling around the world speaking on the subject of solids modeling. I often used the expression “if a picture is worth a thousand words then a solids model is worth a thousand pictures” since we could make an infinite number of pictures from a single 3D model.
I did a little research on the saying and found that Fred R. Barnard originally created it when he coined the phrase “One look is worth a thousand words.” Printers’ Ink, 8 December 1921, p. 96. He changed it to “One picture is worth a thousand words” in Printers’ Ink, 10 March 1927, p. 114, and called it “a Chinese proverb, so that people would take it seriously.” It was immediately credited to Confucius.
This got me thinking about how search engines have a hard time building context from web videos. Unfortunately, spiders can’t watch a web video and extract the relevant information like humans can. Metadata can provide an overview, but is fairly limited in size. Well, this lead me to the video subtitle and the possibility of using an XML document to feed the subtitle to the video, as well as the search engine.
There are several methods for identifying spiders visiting your website. Once you’ve identified your visitor as a spider crawling for keywords and phases, you can replace the video on the page with the exact “word-for-word” account contained in your video subtitles. Clearly, you would NOT want to abuse this technique since search engines have been known to verify user agent delivery implementations and there are a variety of tools to view your website as the search engines do to validate your results.
This method seems to be particularly powerful for localized content since video subtitles are commonplace in foreign countries, but you’ll want to translate your page title and Meta description too. The cost to translate a video script usually comes out to be somewhere between $0.25 and $0.35 per word so providing the context of your video in multiple languages is very reasonable today.
So this brings me back to the old saying “One picture is worth a thousand words”. I wondered if Mr. Barnard were alive today if he would agree with me to reprint it for Internet users as “One picture is worth a thousand words, but a video subtitle is worth a thousand pictures”.
