Google has given users the ability to caption their YouTube videos for a while now. But that can be a cumbersome, time-intensive process and most of the millions of videos hosted on YouTube are uncaptioned. That could change soon, as Google is beginning to roll out a new automatic captioning system that will analyze speech in videos and create machine-generated captions.

This means that users who are hard of hearing will have an easier time using YouTube. And because Google can translate text into 51 different languages, it means that you'll have a much easier time understanding those German and Japanese videos you're so fond of watching.

The technology for the machine-based captions is the same as the tech that allows Google Voice to automatically transcribe your voicemail messages and send them to you as emails. That is to say, it's not perfect, and we can expect to see a fair number of mistakes in YouTube captions for the foreseeable future. But this is an excellent start at making web video significantly more accessible.

Automatic captions are only available on a handful of YouTube channels right now, including Google, YouTube, PBS, National Geographic, MIT, and UCLA. A wider release is scheduled soon, with auto-caps expected on English videos by the end of the week.

While YouTube, MTV, Vevo, MySpace, and other online video sites compete for the title of "Hulu for music videos," it looks like Hulu is hoping to get in on the action itself. Hulu has made a name for itself as a destination site for professionally produced TV shows and movies. Sure, it's only available in the US, and it doesn't have nearly as many TV episodes or movies as you can find from your friendly neighborhod BitTorrent tracker. But Hulu is 100% legal, the ads aren't that annoying, and the video quality is pretty good.

Today Hulu is announcing a deal with music label EMI. No, you won't find music videos from all of EMI's artists. Just one: Norah Jones. There's a new Norah Jones channel on Hulu with a few dozen videos including music videos and concert clips.

While this could certainly be the start of something big, right now it's pretty small. As much as I'd like to see Hulu become a one-stop shop for all-things web video, it seems like Vevo is much further along in working out partnerships to actually supply a fair amount of content. Now if only the site would go live.

Update: The folks at Vevo just annoucned that the service is set to launch on December 8th.

[via NY Times]

The Next Floor is an interesting blend of side-scrolling action game and tower defence game. In The Next Floor your goal is to defend against the incoming waves of bad guys. You start off on one floor of a building, and you have an elevator in an elevator shaft. You move using either the arrow keys or the A and D keys, and you point your mouse at the bad guys and click the mouse button to fire your gun.

Killing bad guys earns you money, and it's a good thing, since the waves of bad guys get increasingly fierce and you must buy weapons that you can station in your elevators to automatically fire at the bad guys. Wait, did I just say elevators with an 's'? Yep -- as the game progresses you will find additional floors of the building open up, and you have the option to buy additional elevators to defend those floors.

One thing that was not immediately obvious to me is the fact that you can move the elevators around by dragging them with your mouse, and they can move even if there are elevators occupying every floor. If you drag an elevator to a floor that already has an elevator on it, the two elevators will magically swap positions. You can use the elevators to move your man around from floor to floor, but fairly quickly your elevators will have more firepower than your poor little dude's pistol, and you'll find you're not really using him.

The 15 levels of The Next Floor provide just the right amount of gameplay; any more would have become tediously repetitive, and any less wouldn't have given enough time to build up your elevators to the incredible killing machines they can become.

The now-defunct Google Page Creator made it easy to create a reasonably attractive web site without an advanced degree in HTML or CSS. But Google has killed off Page Creator and replaced it with Google Sites, a service which has often been described as a tool for creating Wiki-like pages that are hosted for free by Google and which allow you to collaborate with other people on tasks such as planning a vacation or managing your office calendar and workflow.

You can also use Google Sites to create a public web site. But it's much trickier to make a page on Google Sites look, well... good. But this week Google rolled out an update that should make the service much more attractive, literally. There's now a template gallery allowing you to select and customize a template for any new page you create.

Currently there are templates arranged in categories such as business collaboration, activities & events, schools & eduction, and Personal & family. Google is also making it easy for users to submit their own templates to the gallery, so the number of available designs to choose from should climb pretty quickly.

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.

Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.

The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, and you need to move around the game board collecting yellow coins or keys, and make your way from the green starting area to the green end, without getting touched by the blue hazard balls. The only controls in the game are the arrow keys to control where your red square goes.

Like I said, it looks simple. But in practice, I gave up at level 4 after over 100 attempts. I wouldn't same I'm a video game expert, but I've certainly played my fair share of games in my time, and this one is certainly one of the most difficult.

How far can you get?

This morning Adobe is launching a beta version of Flash Player 10.1 with support for hardware decoding of H.264 Flash video. In other words, if you have a supported graphics card (PDF link), you should be able to watch high definition and high quality Flash video without killing your CPU.

This comes as particularly good news for people who have picked up small laptops and nettops based on the NVIDIA ION platform. While the graphics processor is powerful enough to decode Blu-Ray video and play many modern video games, the ION chipset uses a low power Intel Atom processor that seems to think that 1080p Flash video would look better as a slideshow than a video.

With Flash Player 10.1 beta installed, even these ION-based machines can handle 1080p Flash video from sites like YouTube, which is good because YouTube is getting ready to roll out a whole heck of a lot more 1080P video.

You can download Flash Player 10.1 beta from Adobe Labs.

NVIDIA loaned me an ASRock ION 330 nettop with NVIDIA ION graphics to test the new Flash Player, and it performed as advertised, easily handling 720p and 1080p HD video playback from Hulu and YouTube. The video at the top of this post shows the ASRock nettop playing video smoothly after installing the latest version of the software. To see what video playback looked like with the older version of Flash Player 10, check out the video after the break.

[Update] The folks from A Story Before Bed contacted us and have offered a coupon code that allows users to try the site including sharing a story for free. The code is good until the end of November. Just enter MT9C-WN6Y-TF6J at the point of checkout, when you're asked to pay for the story you recorded.

Having to be away from your young children at bedtime is probably the absolute worst part of having a job that requires travel. Worse, sometimes it's not practical to call and talk to them before bed. A Story Before Bed is a site that is looking to solve this problem for traveling parents.

The idea behind A Story Before Bed is that you choose one of the stories in their library, then you record yourself reading it using a webcam. You can then send a link to your child's caregiver, who can then open the book on their computer, and watch as you read the story to them. They see the full pages of the book with your face inset, and the experience even includes animated page turns. To make sure that what you are reading relates to the page being displayed, the video of you reading is actually split up on a page-by-page basis, so you can only ever be listening to the correct voiceover for a given page.

A Story Before Bed is not a free service, but recording a story is free. The service charges $6.95US if you want to keep your recording so that you can pass it along to the young people in your life.

The best time wasters are games that are intellectually challenging, but not necessarily frantic or anxiety-inducing. Too many puzzle games rely on a beat-the-clock scenario to make games more challenging instead of simply making the puzzles more challenging. Well, Sleepy is a time waster that doesn't do that.

In Sleepy, the goal is to remove all of the colored blocks from the screen without waking them up. If you wake them up, a wakefulness bar starts to drop, and if it reaches the bottom, you lose at that level. The more blocks that wake up, the faster the bar moves, until they settle into new positions and fall back asleep.

The challenge in the game comes from the fact that you can only remove blocks of the colors given on one of the two indicator cards at the bottom of the screen. When one of the colors is a block that is sitting on top of a pile, it's not a problem, but soon you'll run into a situation when the only block you can remove will dislodge a bunch of other blocks, waking them up.

Sleepy is a cleverly-designed game with lots of replay value, a perfect distraction for your coffee-break or lunch time. And the soundtrack is perfect if you've got insomnia - just play Sleepy for a little while and you'll be headed back to bed.

Keeping notes, todo lists, or just anything you are writing synchronized between computers can be a hassle. Some solutions, like using DropBox, require you to install software on computers that you regularly use. If your needs aren't that heavy, but you'd like a free way to keep your text available wherever you are, check out SimpleText.ws.

SimpleText.ws is an open-source, very light text editing environment that allows you to create and manage documents in a web service, and access them anywhere. It uses Google for authentication, so if you already have a Google account, signing in is as simple as clicking the Sign In link.

The fact that SimpleText.ws is open source means that if you're not comfortable hosting your text on someone else's server, you can grab the server code and host it yourself.

There is also a public API available for SimpleText.ws, which means that developers can write applications that synchronize with it. Currently there is only one, but it's a good one: Hog Bay Software's WriteRoom for iPhone.

How do you keep your text files available no matter what computer you're working on?

Google sure seems hung up on the speed of the web these days, and I have to say, I like it. After announcing the SPDY protocol they're working on to speed up page loading time, it has come out that Google is seriously considering using page loading time as a factor when returning search results. This isn't some unsubstantiated rumor, either; it comes from none other than Matt Cutts, the high-profile Google employee who works on Google's web spam team.

Cutts said that the directive to speed up searching comes right from the top, Google's co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. According to Search Engine Land he said they want searching to be as fast as flipping through a magazine.

At first blush it seems counter to Google's accuracy goals to favor fast pages over slow pages when a slow page might be more relevant to a user's search, but I know that I have often not even bothered letting a slow page finish loading when I was busy searching for something specific. If Google can shield me from the slow sites, it will help me find what I'm looking for more quickly.

Of course, now I have to do something about the slowness of my personal blog. But I probably should have long ago.

[Photo by chrisscott]

Apple may control one of the most popular digital music and video stores on earth. But that's really not saying much, since there are still millions of people who haven't installed iTunes on their PC or who can't install it on their Linux computer. And for all of those people, clicking on a web link that's supposed to take you to to the iTunes listing for a song, video, or iPhone app is an exercise in frustration, since what you end up looking at is a web page telling you to install iTunes.

But that's finally changing. Apple has launched a new service called iTunes Preview that lets you browse the iTunes catalog on the web. It also lets users copy a link from the iTunes client and paste it onto the web. When you click on that link, instead of going to a page telling you that you can't proceed without installing software, you'll be taken to a listing on Apple's web site.

This is especially useful for people who aren't using iTunes. But it could also come in handy for iTunes users that simply don't want to fire up the software just to look up a song or artist.

The iTunes Preview service is only available for music at the moment. There's no word on if or when Apple will roll it out for iPhone Apps and video content.

[via CNet]

Want to know what kind of apps are available for Windows Mobile 6.5, but don't have a phone running the operating system yet? Or just want to look for apps on a screen with a resolution higher than 640 x 480? Microsoft has launched a web version of the Windows Marketplace.

Users can browse the web store without an account. If you sign in you can also purchase programs that will be installed on your mobile device wirelessly the next time you run the Windows Marketplace client on your mobile device.

One interesting feature is the ability to use the drop-down menu near the bottom of our page to change your locatino. SO if you want to see applications that are available in the Windows Marketplace for UK, Russian, Swiss, or Taiwanese users, you can do that.

[via Windows Team Blog]

Facebook is under attack! Okay, maybe that's a little too dramatic.

Recently, however, hundreds of Facebook groups were exploited by a group of attackers known as "Control Your Info". The hackers promise they aren't doing this for any malicious purpose though. The purpose of the mass hacking is to point out a major problem with the way Facebook handles groups management.

So what's the problem? The guys that did this said the problem has to do with group admins. When someone decides they don't want to be an admin any longer, virtually anyone can take over the group and make changes to members, group information, and pictures.

Unlike completely malicious hackers, the group says it wants to raise awareness and make sure people think about security. The groups that were hacked had their names changed to "Control Your Info" and profile images modified. A message appeared on many of the groups that said "Hello, we hereby announce that we have officially hijacked your Facebook group. If we wanted, we could make you appear in a bad way which could damage your image severely."

The group promised not to "mess anything up" and will return the groups to their original state by the end of the week.

SeeHere is Fuji's photosharing site where you can create cards, photo books and gifts. They have a decent holiday selection and new account users can also get 100 free (4x6) prints for registering. (Shipping not included - promo code "prints").

To get the 50 holiday cards for free, be sure to use the promo code "freebies4mom-1109." Don't procrastinate! This offer is only good until 11/30.

There's been talk in journalistic circles for months about News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch's plan to start putting the company's web sites behind a paywall. In other words, you might not be able to access news content from FOX, Sky Network, and dozens of newspapers including The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, Marketwatch, and The Sun, without paying.

The move already strikes some as a bad idea since it could essentially drive potential readers to get their news elsewhere. After all, on the web, information is always just a click away. But theoretically if News Corp can offer readers exclusive content that they won't find anywhere else, loyal readers might be willing to pay up.

OK, so that could work... but Murdoch's latest idea sounds like business suicide: He wants to remove News Corp content from Google's index. In an interview with Sky News Australia, Murdoch said that search engines are essentially stealing News Corp content without paying for it -- and that he plans to remove the corporation's web sites from Google's index.

While Murdoch claims that he doesn't see much value in searchers who often come to web sites without becoming repeat visitors, he's pretty much just plain wrong. Search engines pretty much make the web go round. If Google wasn't the dominant force in search, another company would probably rise to the challenge.

Back when there were only a few hundred web sites worth visiting, it might have been easy to find what you were looking for through old fashioned bookmarks and links. But today users rely heavily on search engines to find information, and web sites rely even more heavily on search engines for traffic and for revenue. Because who's more likely to clickon an ad? Someone who bookmarks your page and comes to it every day and has a pretty good sense of where the ads are on the page and how to ignore them, or someone who was searching for information about cheap automobiles and then came to your auto web site that also happens to have ads for good deals on new and used cars?

Still, Murdoch says he'd rather have fewer people visit his sites, but pay for it. It's possible that Murdoch is bluffing. If not, it should be very interesting to see what happens to News Corp's revenue when the paywall goes up and the sites are removed from Google. If the company winds up making more money than it does today, I'd offer to eat my own hat... you know, if I wore a hat.

You can check out the Sky News interview with Murdoch after the break.

[via The Inquisitr]