MSDN Wiki Projects - #3 - A Huge Responsibility
Description
This is the final video in the MSDN Wiki interview series. In this segment, I talked with Fabrice and Molly about
the MSDN Internationalization Wiki.
I love language - the living ones, the dead ones, the spoken ones, the ones nobody speaks anymore, C# - and I had a lot of questions in my head about how The MSDN Wiki people were going to accomplish the insanely difficult task of translating select bits of the MSDN library into Portuguese.
English, unless you're a native speaker, will probably never make total sense to you (and doesn't even make total sense to those of us born speaking it), while Portuguese, although not the sloppy mashup of languages English is, is still very complicated.
So, how do you take a bunch of English and translate it into a bunch of Portuguese?
Fabrice and team are accomplishing this mountainous task with a combination of some awesome MSR produced software and an army of contributors from around the world.
This video also marks the end of my first real attempt at splitting up one long video into a few smaller parts. Did you like it? Did it work for you? Aside from the sloppy edit points (something I know to look for now), is there anything about this approach that bothers you? I was thinking it would have been nice to have posted the parts over a longer period of time, hopping between a couple other "chunked" videos - there'd be more variety that way.
What do you think? We're listening, yo......
The Series:
- Video #1: Saying Hello
- Video #2: How and Why
- Video #3: A Huge Responsibility
I love language - the living ones, the dead ones, the spoken ones, the ones nobody speaks anymore, C# - and I had a lot of questions in my head about how The MSDN Wiki people were going to accomplish the insanely difficult task of translating select bits of the MSDN library into Portuguese.
English, unless you're a native speaker, will probably never make total sense to you (and doesn't even make total sense to those of us born speaking it), while Portuguese, although not the sloppy mashup of languages English is, is still very complicated.
So, how do you take a bunch of English and translate it into a bunch of Portuguese?
Fabrice and team are accomplishing this mountainous task with a combination of some awesome MSR produced software and an army of contributors from around the world.
This video also marks the end of my first real attempt at splitting up one long video into a few smaller parts. Did you like it? Did it work for you? Aside from the sloppy edit points (something I know to look for now), is there anything about this approach that bothers you? I was thinking it would have been nice to have posted the parts over a longer period of time, hopping between a couple other "chunked" videos - there'd be more variety that way.
What do you think? We're listening, yo......
The Series:
- Video #1: Saying Hello
- Video #2: How and Why
- Video #3: A Huge Responsibility
- Video #4 (last): Internationalization
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The Discussion
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Homeboy Hi Rory. Personally I prefer the longer formatted videos. I'm a channel 9 junkie
and as such become frustrated by the drip fed smaller segments.
Just my two cents worth...
Keep up the good work though, content as usual is top notch. -
earnshaw One man's meat is another man's poison. That's on old English saying derived from the French "Chacun a son gout." Some like short videos. Others like long videos. Personally, I like both long and short. With production resources, a long video can be edited down to a short video. Hence once interview could beget two videos.
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Bas Rory wrote:
This video also marks the end of my first real attempt at splitting up one long video into a few smaller parts. Did you like it? Did it work for you?
I like the shorter videos, but this didn't work for me for two reasons. The first being that the first two episodes were too short. Something around 15 minutes, like these last two episodes, is more along the lines of I'm thinking of.
The second reason is that this wasn't actually a short video. It was actually a 45 minute video that was cut into fours. When you saw one part you hadn't actually seen a complete video, it just paused and you had to wait until it would continue in a couple of days. I would prefer to have a rounded-off 'story' in a single, 15 minute video. The first Hanselminutes video is a great example of this.
For the more in-depth stuff, half an hour or 45 minutes is fine, and who knows, maybe that does work split up in twos. I would post them quite soon after each other, because for those that do want the whole thing in one go, it'd be pretty frustrating to have to wait a week or so. -
Chadk Its a huge anti-climax when theres some interresting stuff, and then the video stops, and likely the next video isnt up yet.
No good. -
prencher Don't like the splitting. It's awkward, and it's just not channel 9.
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TommyCarlier I like short videos (like the ones with Scott Hanselman) but I have to agree with the posters above: the splitting is a bit awkward. This video wasn't fit for splitting up. It's good that you experiment with styles, but IMHO this experiment didn't turn out to be very successful. To be clear, the content was great. -
Massif What Bas said.
The video length should be appropriate to the content. If it's a 45 minute conversation, then a 45 minute video is fine. If you can squeeze the same content into a shorter video then do it short.
Of course if it's a two hour conversation then it could probably do with being broken up a bit.
Now here's an idea which just occurred, and would probably be way too hard to do, but: Could you structure the interviews so that the first 10 minutes or so were a whirlwind tour, and after that it goes into depth - and then release it in a 10 minute video, and a longer partner? That would be cool as it'd let people vaguely interested watch the quick tour, and if that gets their curiousity they can dive deep in the longer vid.
I know that would be a huge pain, as you'd either have to carefully edit the shorter video out of the long one, or think very carefully about the interview questions.
On the content side I was really interested in this video, impressive stuff, opening the MSDN docs up a bit. -
Bas Massif wrote:The video length should be appropriate to the content. If it's a 45 minute conversation, then a 45 minute video is fine. If you can squeeze the same content into a shorter video then do it short.
Adding to that, I think the recent call for "Shorter videos" should be interpreted as a call for "more 15-minute conversations," not necessarily shorter videos.