Grant Laird, Jr. Blog

In 1997, my wife and I went to Deaf Expo in California for first time and we had good times. (Too bad they closed for good) This is where we discovered Deaf-related magazine / newspaper such as Deaf Life, Newswaves, Deaf Nation, Silent News and others.

We signed up and paid with them all except Deaf Life Magazine. I signed up with Deaf Life Magazine eventually.

Next few years, it was fine – always enjoyed reading them. Of course, it was all before Internet become popular during dot-com-boom in 2000-2001. (Best Guess) If I recall correctly, Newswaves and DeafNation were first to closed down. Silent News eventually closed down, too.

Deaf Life Magazine put themselves “On hold” for few years. I am pretty sure I paid two years subscription with them. I’ve only gotten like at least six magazines over times. Now, they are supposed to back in business starting this month. (January 2007) I am looking forward to it. Click here.

Past few years, we now have new faces in the market (sort of) like NADMag and SigNews – these are all we got right now in the deaf community. I noticed that both are starting to struggle every month/quarterly. I went ahead and contact their customer service last week. They acknowledged they are way behind.

• SigNews = did not get new since last edition in September 2006.
• NADMag = did not get new since last edition in Summer 2006.

Do you really think Internet such as DeafRead and another deaf-related news online impact hard-copy version these days? I wonder…

Anyway, I can’t wait to get new magazine so I can read it in my bathroom….

This is my vlog response to Oh I See Blog - RE: Self Expression via Vblog - click here

Basically, I mentioned that I like both formal and non-formal vblog. I really love Amy’s vblog – she’s simply amazing. Not just special effects… but she has beautiful smile, too.

All vlogger should make every effort to improve their own vblog but of course it is not required. One of the biggest challenge to keep video maintain high quality is keep your room well-lighted. If you doesn’t have many light in your room, consider invest $10 lamp or something better. Believe it or not, it will make the difference.

In my case, it is non-formal but maybe it is between non-formal and formal because I do included title, URL address and date. If you notice in some of my older videos, I didn’t look really nice like t-shirt, etc. So, I try to make it little better every time.

Sometime, my dog bothered me while I am talking to webcam. He thinks I am weird or something. Hehe… Other things look like my glasses doesn’t have anti-reflect in it which cause reflect horribly front of monitor. I have no choice but remove it while I am talking to webcam.

Note: In case you wonder what software I primarily use for my vblog — I use Logitech ImageStudio which can be found at Logitech website. Click here to download ImageStudio 7.3 - Enjoy!

Rocketboom.com now offers subtitle for English and several another language starting right now. How cool is that? I know that Rocketboom.com have been doing podcast video for few years – of course I never bother to check it out because it doesn’t offers captions till now.

In case you are not familiar with Rocketboom, you can look it up at Wikipedia.com for its little history: Click here.

I watched several rocketboom videos with subtitle and it works great. Too bad it’s not widescreen and high quality video like their original video but its start. I hope other companies like Scoble Show will follow Rocketboom step.

According to announcement, dotSUB CEO Michael Smolens, they want to offers subtitle options even before it ever become mandatory by law. Smart move, Michael!

P.S. I tried to embedded one of the Rocketboom video thru dotSUB into my blog but it didn’t work. I guess it’s still beta like he mentioned.

Rocketboom’s announcement:

One of the most popular video podcasts is having all its episodes captioned

Beginning January 4th with its first daily episode for 2007, Rocketboom announced, in its video podcast, that all future episodes would be captioned and then available for subtitling in any language using dotSUB technology. You can see this announcement at this link. Click here.

There are still some bugs being worked out, but you can watch the captioned episodes each day by clicking the ‘translate’ link which appears first under the control buttons on the video player, and then to the right of the screen shot which appears, click on the pull down menu next to "WATCH" - and choose ‘English-100%’

Michael L. Smolens
Founder & CEO
dotSUB llc - Any Film Any Language
360 East 72nd St. #C3104
New York, NY 10021 USA
1-917-742-0158 - tel
1-646-403-9944 - fax
mlsmolens - Skype