I happened across Jonathan Feinberg’s Wordle (”Beautiful Word Clouds”) visualization recently.  Pretty fun, but I instantly wanted a way to create one from an RSS feed. I didn’t see a way to do it, so I checked the FAQ confirmed there wasn’t one available:

How about a field to enter a blog/web page/wikipedia article’s URL?

If you know of an interesting text source that exposes a JSON interface, then I’d be happy to add a field for it on the “create” page. Unfortunately, a web site that doesn’t expose its data via JSON is not useful to Wordle, because Wordle does all of its text processing on your computer, in the browser. A JSON URL can be dynamically retrieved without hitting the Wordle server.

Yahoo Pipes immediately came to mind. I noodled around with the Term Extractor module in Pipes, a handy way to pull significant words from the items in an RSS feed. Thanks to the permissive Creative Commons license used by Wordle, I copied the necessary resources to my server, added a new JavaScript function to Wordle’s code to call the new Pipe, get a JSONP callback, and push the resulting feed terms to the Wordle Applet.

Voila: http://labs.techbrew.net/wordle/

The CC license on the mod stands, so if Mr. Feinberg finds the mod useful, he’s free to grab it, clone the Pipe, and put it back into Wordle proper.

A video demonstration of software is often far better than static screenshots, and is often more convenient to distribute than arranging for a live demo. This tutorial will show you how easy it is to record a video “screencast” of most applications with the free (as in lunch) Windows Media Encoder software.

Caveats and Installation

• WME won’t work with applications which draw directly to the screen. If the application has to run full screen or requires a decent video card, it probably draws directly to the screen.
• Check the System Requirements  page to understand what your computer’s hardware will be capable of doing with the software.
• If you want to record audio (like a voice over), you’ll need a microphone. If you’re using a laptop with a built-in microphone, it probably sucks. Try to get something that you can get closer to your mouth and that has a windscreen.
• Download Windows Media Encoder and install it. Other than picking an directory, the installer is basically hands-free.

Setting Up a Screen Capture

Getting the screen capture going is really easy once you’re familiar with the settings to use. (You’ll find the hard part is “performing for the camera” once the capture has started.)

Feeling a bit recursive, I used WME to demo a copy of itself, showing a quick walkthrough of the setup. You can watch it on YouTube or download the original techbrew.net_wme_walkthrough.wmv generated by WME itself. YouTube’s transcoding is unfortunately pretty fuzzy, so I recommend taking a look at the original to see what was actually captured.

Here are the basics of setting up a screencast, with some advice about settings along the way:

1. Run the software via Start->Programs->Windows Media->Windows Media Encoder.

2. Select the “Capture Screen” option in the New Session dialog and press the “OK” button.

3. Choose your capture settings. The new session wizard will show you options for doing a screen capture:

• Specific Window - Select this if the software you want to screencast is in only one window with minimal dialogs or popups. Dialogs and popups will only show up if they are in front of and smaller than the main window. Anything which extends outside of the boundary of the main window will be cut off in your video. If you choose this, you’ll need to start up your application and have it running before you go to the next step. Also keep in mind that the size and aspect ratio (length vs. width) of the video display will be the same as your application window. If your screencast is destined to be played in a video player like YouTube, for example, the aspect ratio can matter a great deal. If you can’t resize the window to be what you need, you might want to pick one of the next two options.
• Region of the Screen - Select this if you want to section off a portion of your desktop for capture. Any window, cursor, menu, tooltip in that region will be recorded. This is an easy way to make sure that the aspect ration of your video is exactly right. Getting everything you want to show to happen inside that region can take some careful planning and thought, however.
• Entire Screen - If you want to simply record your entire screen and everything that happens, this is the option to choose. Keep in mind, however, that if you have a really high resolution monitor, you’re going to be capturing a ton of data. You probably don’t want to create a video file that has to be played back at the same resolution in order to make out the fine details. If possible, drop down to a lower resolution before you do the screencast. Something else to keep in mind: If you only have one display, the WME window will be on your taskbar while you are recording. If your computer is capable of using two displays, you can use your secondary display as the capture screen to avoid seeing the taskbar.

4. Check (or don’t check) the Capture Audio option. If you want to record a voice-over at the same time you’re running your application, then check it. Be forewarned: doing a smooth voice-over while running the software can be pretty tough and takes a ton of practice runs. If you have access to video editing software, you may want to re-do the voice-over when you don’t have to concentrate on operating the software.

5. Click the Next Button.

• If you chose “Specific Window” or “Region of the Screen”, the wizard will prompt you to choose the window or specify the region. Do so and click the Next button again.
• If you chose “Entire Screen”, go to Step 6.

6. Name an output file - The wizard will prompt you for an output file name and location. The video file it creates will be a .wmv video file.

7. Choose the capture quality - The wizard lets you choose a capture quality setting of Low/Medium/High. You have to weigh the trade-off between file size and video clarity. If you have access to video editing software or the means to convert the file format later on, choose High so that you have the best-possible source to start with.

8. Enter the Display Information - You can enter some video file metadata like title and author if you like. The metadata will only show up if the video file is played in Windows Media Encoder, however. If you’re going to edit or convert the file, you don’t need to bother with this metadata.

9. Press the Finish button.

The wizard will close. Now you’re actually in the Windows Media Encoder proper, set up and ready to go according to the wizard settings you chose. (The Properties button on the toolbar will show you the myriad of settings available for a whole slew of use cases. After you’ve used WME for awhile, you’ll may want to dig in here and start experimenting.)

If you’re in Europe or a region that displays video in the PAL format, you can change that setting via the Tools->Options menu. The General Options tab has a “Default Format” setting which lets you switch between PAL and NTSC.

10. Press the Start Encoding button.

WME will record your cursor movement and screen activity, whether in a window, region, or full screen. If you chose to capture audio, it will record that as well.

The default behavior of WME is to minimize to the taskbar when you are recording. Restoring the WME window will pause recording. If you don’t want the minimizing behavior, perhaps because you aren’t doing a full-screen capture, you can turn it off via the Tools->Options menu under General Options.

11. Press the Stop button.

WME will stop recording and show you a summary screen of the screencast content. You can close the dialog or use the “Play Output File” button to view your handiwork.

12. Save your session settings. Use File -> Save to save all your settings to a file that can be reused for another screen capture. As you use WME more, you’ll probably start fine-tuning the settings for your particular needs. Saving those settings for repeatable screencasts will become increasingly more important.

13. Experiment, lather, rinse, and repeat. There is a lot under the hood in WME, including the ability to push a live video stream to a Windows Media Server. Play around and see what it can do, and don’t forget [F1] - the help files for WME explain the various concepts and settings in the tool.

Happy screencasting!

The RSS Advisory Board has had a checkered past and its share of run-ins with Dave Winer over RSS 2.0. There have been times where it was right to question how relevant it had become.

This announcement by Netscape lends a great deal of credibility to the Board-sans-Winer, and hopefully will increase the adoption of their RSS Profile work.

The RSS specification documents, DTDs, and help files for the first versions of RSS (v0.9, v0.91) are being moved to RSSBoard.org, where they will be hosted by the RSS Advisory Board in perpetuity. Netscape will continue to host these files (via redirect) on the My Netscape domain (my.netscape.com) until August 1st, 2008.

…

All websites that produce RSS 0.9 or RSS 0.91 feeds will need to either convert to using the current standard (RSS v2.0), or if desired, convert their v0.9/v0.91 feeds properly using this guide, provided by the RSS Advisory Board, by August 1st.

Syndication historians will note that although Winer’s RSS 2.0 is the undisputed winner of the Syndication format race to date, Netscape actually invented RSS by name. (Winer’s “scriptingNews” format did precede that by 2 years, of course, but it was a home-grown spec intended solely for Scripting News itself.)

It is interesting that Netscape chose to hand over the keys to the RSS Advisory Board, but not to Winer or Harvard Law.