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Intense, simple, active demonstrations
I'm starting to see more people catching on to the idea of embedding
small screencasts directly into web pages. In this
blog entry, for example, Pascal van Hecke uses the technique to
illustrate a nice recipe for organizing what he calls loose MP3s -- that is, MP3
files that are linked from web pages you visit. The first half of the recipe
involves a simple Greasemonkey script that rewrites the page you're on
to include
the same inline MP3 player that's used on del.icio.us pages like del.icio.us/tag/system:media:audio. To
see the player in action, click one of the
right-pointing blue arrows on that page.
The second
half of the recipe involves using the tag this option that
appears when you activate the player. As Pascal's screencast
illustrates, del.icio.us will generate a podcast-style feed (i.e, an
RSS feed with enclosures) for URLs that point to MP3s. His method,
which I'm now using as well, is to preview an MP3 file using the inline player
and, if it's interesting, bookmark it with the tag tolisten.
Then you can use a podcatcher to subscribe to the generated feed, e.g.:
del.icio.us/judell/system:media:audio+tolisten
By the way, although Pascal's screencast suggests that you have to assign tags like
system:media:audio or system:media:mp3 to make this work, it appears
that del.icio.us will just infer those tags if the URL ends with an
MP3 filename.
I found another nice example of embedded screencasting on the
CoComment start
page. It's just a little animated
GIF that shows Firefox users how to drag the button that
represents the bookmarklet to the toolbar. Here's one frame1 from the animation:
You can see the animated version here.
The more complex procedure
for IE users isn't illustrated in this way, but if it were, that would be
more focused and effective for this purpose than my standalone Bookmarklets
101 tutorial.
Edward Tufte's mission statement for sparklines
is: intense, simple, word-size graphics. In a similar vein,
there's an emerging species of embedded screencasts for which the
mission statement might be: intense, simple, active demonstrations.
1 Note to my future self, and others needing to learn (or remember) how to extract one frame from an animated GIF using ImageMagick:
convert animated.gif[0] frame0.gif
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