On Monday, October 10th, four of the Xylem Partners assembled to explore and discover the features and opportunities of using Firetalk. Here are the results of our deliberations.
One of our challenges has been to make it possible for a viewer to find the nuggets that occur during these events. The above video is exported from Firetalk to Robert’s desktop. In a video editor he adjusted the lip-sync and then exported the file to Youtube. By allowing closed captions and including the tag yt:cc=on Google added captions automatically. It is possible (but not at all obvious) to export the captions. The captions can be observed in the above video. Below is the text of the captions for the beginning of the event. The edited transcript of the first eight minutes is below (this was an experiment, so the whole event was not transcribed).
Transcript
Robert Ballantyne starts the event
well is the top of the hour and I see the event has begun and at the moment I am the only one here
so i’m going to wait for a few people to show up
you can see there’s a clock behind me.
here on the pacific west coast of North America it is just nine o’clock in the morning [PDT, 2016 Oct 10] and i know that i have a few people subscribed I hope they find their way in here pretty soon
Caroline Oliver, CEO of IPGA, Sherry Jennings and Linda Stier arrive
no I don’t hear you – IPGA wants to be a guest. good. so invite guests… sherry Jennings wants to be a guest… invite guests
oh my goodness how are you! and Linda stier wants to join but you haven’t pushed whatever is the right button. maybe Caroline, you can tell Linda what button she pushes because I don’t see it.
uh yeah well I had to push the video camera at the bottom. it’s very clear… it takes a little bit just a bit of a delay i think.
okay yes you’ve done it now. would somebody take a screenshot of that whatever it is? It’s not clear to the host
here comes Linda. good heavens! this is working!
It was the very first step that I was struggling with. and what was the first step? how did I actually get to be with you? well I don’t know what I was trying various things. i think i went to firetalk website and then I think I clicked on this event.
so we can have up to 50 people – I could have made it larger. but we can’t have 50 people on camera, I can only have four at a time, so we can bicycle people in and out.
your images are good. i’m hearing a little bit of a echo. I’m turning down my speaker. It seems that it’s my fault. does that make it any better? yeah oh yeah i think so. it’s my fault.
how are you Linda? yeah a long time no see. and sherry i love your photo
00:04:43:78 well, let me talk a little bit about this experience. as you see what I did was set up an event which was supposed to be something that people would pay for. and what they’ve given me the right to do, at least for a little while, is to offer events to us and we don’t have to charge, so I made this one for free. and I guess one of the things we need to explore whether or not this is something we can continue to use. i must say that as a host the beginning of this was – I wouldn’t say terrifying – but somebody who’s accustomed to doing a bit of broadcasting, if I’m gonna be going on air, I like to be in the green room and then in the studio and talk to people a little bit about before the beginning. I scheduled this for nine o’clock and at nine o’clock… a little after nine o’clock, the event page turned into to what we’re watching right now. and it gives me no preparation time. if my microphone were wrong i have no way to set it at this point. so it’s not as though i have any time to to get my act together. i need to have that all done in advance. and I think that’s kind of dumb of firetalk. by the way they really ought to give it give us a green room to get to get our act together; because, for instance, if I wanted to change my speaker so that it was using my earpiece, I can’t do that here. I’ve got to do that in Chrome. which means I’ve got to restart my chrome session. so i can’t do that now, i need to have that all done in advance. any other comments about your getting in here and how it looks to you… the interface and all of that?