Brian over at the Ubiquitous Librarian has an excellent summary of a talk by Vinton Cerf given at Georgia Tech. A lot of bullet points there to stimulate your thinking about what might be ahead for this world when it comes to technology.

At one point there’s a mention of illegal downloading of movies that briefly hints at the supplementary, bonus material found on DVD. Cerf suggests rather than having the material sit on a DVD to place it on the Web.

The first thought that came to my mind - and nothing original here - was the relationship between archival materials and much of that DVD bonus material, which are essentially documentaries.

Again, it raises the question that I often ponder when it comes to digital libraries: how do our digital collections support the development, the remixing (if you will), into new digital content?

I’ve been experimenting with the new Adsense Video Units on a couple of my other blogs: Buenos Aires, City of Faded Elegance and El Sur: Travel Guide to South America.

The Adsense video units are very easy to setup:

1. Login to your adsense account
2. From the setup panel of your adsense account, authorize your YouTube account to be accessed by adsense. (You’ll need a YouTube account to place Adsense video units on your site. If you don’t have one, then you can sign up from within adsense).
3. Wait a while for adsense to authorize your account for video units.
4. Then it’s time to create the player. As with normal adsense units you can create several types of channels or, in this case, players.
5. Select the type of video content you want.
6. Then embed the code in your site.

Three sizes of video players are offered: 400 x 415, 500 x 515, 780 x 560

A particular challenge to bloggers and other web sites initially will be on deciding the best placement of the Adsense video player on the Web page. Even the smallest Adsense video unit player takes up a large chunk of real estate.

Bloggers solely interested in monetizing their sites likely will slap the adsense video unit player smack up at the top. But it seems like that approach might almost obliterate all the other content on the page.

For my sites I chose to place the smallest version of the player at the bottom of single post pages. You can see examples at 30 Things to do in Buenos Aires and Bus companies in Argentina.

You should be careful in placing the video player in the right file of your blog’s setup. In WordPress that will depend upon the structure of your theme. I placed my video link in the WordPress file single.php. Be careful that you don’t place the video player in the php file that will cause the player to be displayed below every post on your index page. I don’t think anyone wants to see 5 or so video players embedded in one page!

Another question is whether people even want to see a video player embedded on every page. It may depend upon how well YouTube/Google is able to target the content to your site. I’m going to have another posting on that topic. I will have to say that from my early viewing of the adsense video player that I am not pleased with the video content that is being targeted for my sties. It’s totally irrelevant even though I selected categories and keywords in the adsense player setup that should direct content to my sites’s topics. And there is a lot of content in YouTube on Buenos Aires, Argentina, South America travel, etc. But, I’m going to give it time. It also took the traditional Adsense ad units a while to start displaying relevant contextual ads. So, I assume the same is true with the video.

Update: After more than 24-hours, still no change of video content in the Adsense video unit. Still the same video, totally irrelevant to the category I chose. I’ve removed the Adsense video unit from my Buenos Aires blog. I’m keeping it on the El Sur blog, which has a different traffic pattern, for a few days to see if it changes.

Okay, so it has been what, 9 months since I last posted on this blog? Perhaps it’s time to return.

Here’s a topic that came across my mind today: Web-based incomes, global opportunities, & changing educational expectations. Some of you know that I left librarianship to be an expat in Buenos Aires.

What I’m really curious about are teenagers with Web-based incomes and global opportunities. If you’re 17 and making $1k a month from some type of online income (blogging revenue, affiliate marketing, SEO work, etc), then you can afford to move to many parts of the world, particularly Latin America or southeast Asia and live very comfortably. Presumably, you would continue investing your time and energy into more entrepreneurial Web activities in order to diversify your revenue streams. In this scenario, for these kids, what is the role of college?

Sure there’s that wonderful idea of being a learned person (and I fully support that) but, seriously, any of us who have worked in higher education knows sadly that most students are in college to prepare them for the workplace, to earn a living, that’s their motivation.

But if you’re a teenager with already a good income and bright prospect for more, all without that college degree, then what’s your incentive to spend four or more years at a university?

If you’re a parent, what would you say to your teenager who just informed you that he’s skipping college, taking his Web-based income and moving to Buenos Aires or Thailand?