YouTube Annotations

When I signed on to YouTube this morning, I noticed a new feature called Annotations that allows you to add Speech Bubbles, Notes, and Spotlights to your videos. I realized right away that the first two of these types of annotations gave me a way to caption my videos. They don't allow for "closed" captioning; everyone who views the video sees them by default. There is a mechanism people can use, though, to turn them off while viewing them by clicking on the Menu button at the bottom of the player.

This morning, I captioned a video that I recorded on Mother's Day. At the time of this writing, it seems that you can only see the captions if you view the video on YouTube. YouTube says that, once they get this feature out of beta, they will support embeds, meaning that the annotations will show up when videos are shared in blogs, on Facebook, and the like.

Although it was time-consuming (it took me about 45 minutes to an hour to caption a one-minute-forty-five-second [1:45] video), the graphical user interface (GUI) was rather intuitive. From my first experience using YouTube's Annotations, I am certainly willing to use them again. Hooray for an easier way to caption videos!

Wouldn't it be nice to see a similar implementation on Flickr? (Assuming you like having video on Flickr in the first place, that is.)

P.S. I blogged this.