IE 9 RC still not ready for prime time but Google Chrome is a blast!

Well, I installed the new Internet Explorer 9 release client and, although I loved the "pinning to the taskbar" capability, the ability to designate an entire list of pages to open as default pages and the clean interface that lets you see so much more of each web page you are browsing, I ran into some significant problems using it on my new 64-bit Windows 7 workstation.

Image via WikipediaFirst, I tried to install Zemanta, a blogging assistant extension, for use with my Blogger accounts under this new browser and, even though Zemanta said it was installed, when I opened one of my Blogs to begin editing, the Z
emanta extension interface would not open.  I tried reinstalling, made sure I had "allowed" Zemanta to make changes on my computer, etc. but no joy.

Then I was up on Amazon looking at the new educational game "Roman Town".  I added it to my cart, went through logging in to my account and setting the shipping address but when it came to loading the screen where I would select my payment options, I got nothing but a white screen with a location bar at the top.  I retried the purchase several times but finally had to give up and use a different browser to complete the transaction.

Next I was reading my Google news alerts and went to "share" an article I had read on one of the web pages I pulled up to read and when IE 9 tried to open the Twitter interface I again got a plain white screen with just a URL and my Twitter icon.  Obviously, it recognized that I was already logged in to Twitter but could not draw up my status page.  Again, multiple attempts to successfully tweet from the web page failed.  I ended up shortening the URL myself with bit.ly and posting it manually to Twitter.

Then I went to read an article on Stacy Johnson's Money Talks News (http://www.moneytalksnews.com) that included a video and saw that the video had a question mark on it.  When I clicked the video I got an error message that the video contained a third party component that I would need to install but it didn't tell me which one.  I had never had a problem with any of Stacy's videos before.  So, I sent an email to Stacy's tech support people and they suggested I contact the tech support for Blip.TV which is the video host they use.  So I emailed Blip.TV and they suggested I install the latest version of Quicktime and try again.  I checked my Quicktime version and compared it with the latest one available and I saw that I already had the latest version.  I told Blip. TV that videos on YouTube seemed to play properly.  They were baffled.

So today I reluctantly gave up using IE and set my browser default to the new version of Google Chrome that I had recently installed.  Like IE 9, I was able to define a list of pages to open by default.  I found that I could still drag a page to my taskbar and "pin" it - apparently a default action allowed by Windows 7, and the interface was as clean as IE 9.

Then I went to Blogger and installed Zemanta and it came up without a hitch.  I went back to Money Talks News and the video I could not view under IE 9 played perfectly in Google Chrome.  Then, I held my breath and logged into my online bank.  I had used an earlier version of Google Chrome at one point but it turned out to be incompatible with my secure banking logins at two different banks.  This time, however, it worked wonderfully.

Then, I remembered a friend of mine had sent me a news article about Google Chrome's new web store so I went up there and found extensions for my Evernote account, bit.ly, Google Translate, Webpage screenshot, Web of Trust search advisor (WOT - a handy tool to avoid websites known for malware, scams, etc), an Internet Movie Database access tool to quickly access the movie database by clicking on a movie title mentioned on a webpage or in a blogpost, my good old "blog this" helper, a Share tool for those websites that  don't have it already built in (like many foreign news websites), and even Chrome for a Cause that records my search clicks and donates to a charity of my choice (from a small but adequate list).  Since I do a lot of research I like the idea that my productivity also serves another worthy purpose.  All of these very useful extensions were found on just the first twenty pages of the Extensions listed on the Chrome Web Store site and there are a total of over 10,000 available.  So, I have been able to regain all the features I liked in IE 9 without all of the technical problems and added some great functionality from the Chrome Web Store too!

Now if I could just get Samsung to add more useful apps to my TV's app store!!

Related articles

• 7 Chrome Annoyances and How to Fix Them (mt-soft.com.ar)
• Have Firefox Add-Ons Caused You Problems? (lockergnome.com)

Star Trek vs. Star Wars Fake Movie Trailer Points The Way to Online Remix Service

This morning I received a link to a fake movie trailer where the Starship Enterprise and her crew (circa Star Trek: The Next Generation) race to save planet earth from Emperor Palpatine, Darth Vader and their evil minions.



The YouTube producer 2SunsNoWomen did an excellent job of integrating scenes from:

Star Trek (2009)
Star Trek First Contact
Star Trek Generations
Star Trek Nemesis
Star Wars A New Hope
Star Wars The Empire Strikes Back
Star Wars Return of the Jedi
Star Wars Revenge of the Sith

Yes, I was an original Trekker and seeing scenes from Star Trek is like savoring a mouthful of my favorite dessert.  Star Trek must still be the favorite dessert for a lot of other people as I see the video has almost 40,000 views in less than a week!

My dream would be to easily have the ability to create a similar mashup of movie clips and share online with an online movie subscription and an enhanced remote control.  I have read that some Blue Ray DVDs include a mashup feature but I'm told its pretty primitive compared to a clip like this one .  I can only speculate as, alas, my husband says I can't get HD until our big screen bites the dust (which could be quite a while since we just replaced the convergence component last year).  I must admit even I want to wait until the dust settles around 3D integration but my resolve weakens everytime I walk into Best Buy or the entertainment department of Sears.

Of course there is also the problem of accessing clips from films produced by different studios.  I noticed after working in higher ed for over 20 years that a lot of people used to talk about the synergy that could be achieved with interdisciplinary courses but very few professors actually tried developing them.  Perhaps when we finally get enough critical mass of streaming customers to motivate the studios to move all movies to online delivery maybe they'll introduce a movie remix service that will let us add multiple movies to a project space much like Microsoft MovieMaker does, mark start and stop points on a movie to isolate desired scenes, edit, then save to Youtube and share via email, Twitter and Facebook.

I'd love to take a crack at a remix of Oliver Stone's "Alexander".  The introduction of the theatrical release was so slow and drawn out that even I was tapping my foot impatiently on the theater floor waiting for something to happen!  I purchased the director's cut when it was released on DVD and it was an improvement but still too low key for a tale about such a dynamic conqueror.  I think I would have started with the scenes of young Alexander (Connor Paolo) and King Philip II (Val Kilmer) in the dank cave below their palace in Pella looking at paintings of legendary heroes on the cave walls.



I would intersperse live battle scenes at points where the camera shows a closeup of  drawings of the eagle pecking out Prometheus' liver, the helmeted warrior with an arrow protruding from his eye and Herakles thrusting up the body of one of his children, then cut away to Alexander looking over the aftermath of the battle of Gaugamela followed by the camera pulling back and up to encompass the whole battlefield.  Then I would proceed from that point on. 

Sorry Sir Anthony Hopkins, you're a heck of an actor but listening to an old character ramble on for twenty minutes is not the way to open an historical epic IMHO.

Creating a Holiday Tribute to my Dad for a unique Christmas gift

About a month ago, I was asked by an editor to see if I could find a slide from 1978 that I took of helicopter logging in the Cascade Mountains. While I was looking for that slide I stumbled across a slide of my late father calling a square dance in the living room of their home.

Dad always enjoyed calling square dances and over the holidays we would push all the furniture back after dinner and he would give us a dance lesson. Dad loved music and even after he had to give up square dancing he would play his keyboard for hours. We lost him three years ago after a long battle with Parkinson's disease and miss him a lot especially this time of year. So, I decided to try to give my family the gift of seeing him call one more time.

All I had was a still image but I knew I could animate his face and synchronize his mouth to an audio file of a square dance call using a product called CrazyTalk.

First, I digitized the slide with a Nikon Coolscan slide scanner. Then I discovered his eyes were closed. Dad often called singing calls with his eyes closed. But I knew the CrazyTalk software animated the eyes so I had to give him open eyes. So, I went up on the internet and looked for a suitable pair of hazel eyes that I inserted with Photoshop Elements (I have the full version of Photoshop but find the interface in Elements to be much more intuitive and it performs almost all of the functions I use on a regular basis).

Next I tried to find the Square Dance cue sheet for Jingle Bells out on the web. I found a bunch of them but none with the words I remembered Dad called. So I wrote down the words I remembered as best I could from 30 years ago.

Then I started hunting for an instrumental version of Jingle Bells that would be suitable. I stumbled across a website called Soundsnap that had a database of music loops and sound effects. A free account got me 5 downloads a month. I downloaded the version of Jingle Bells I liked then went up to Audacity.com to customize the song to fit my storyboard. The song started right where Dad would need to start his call but I wanted to a little intro. I selected a few measures of one of the chorus sections for an intro and copied and pasted that to the beginning of the song.

Since I didn't have an audio file of Dad's voice, I decided to use a product called MorphVOXPro to morph my own voice into something more male sounding. So, I hooked up my USB headset and proceeded to experiment with the different male voices that you can download from MorphVOX Pro's website. At first I thought I liked the "old man" voice that was a little higher pitched than the standard male voice. But after making a number of recordings I decided to go with the deeper standard male voice. I must have recorded that audio track 20 times but I still couldn't make it sound quite right. It's hard to carry a tune when your voice is being morphed in real time! (I hope you'll forgive me for that Dad.)

Then I made my first attempt at tying everything together with Microsoft MovieMaker. I did not want to combine the music track and voice during the recording phase because I wanted the music track to play during the introductory graphics & the credits I would add later. But trying to synch the calling and the music separately was not working out. So I downloaded the music to my iPod because I couldn't get my computer to play the song while I attempted to use a mic at the same time. I suppose I could have recorded a karaoke session then split the music track off afterwards but I was in "get-it-done" mode and figured I could get it done faster with my somewhat low tech approach.

So I listened to the song on the iPod through one headset while I recorded the voice through MorphVox Pro with my other headset. Of course then I discovered the morphing software sort of wreaks havoc with someone trying to carry a tune (I really can sing better than that!)

But, after even more recording sessions I finally decided just to go with one of them. I figured Dad would forgive me!

So I launched CrazyTalk and imported the image I had edited and the .wav file I had created with MorphVox pro and it synched everything up. You can go into CrazyTalk and actually tweak the mouth shapes for different words if you don't like the automatic result. But, As the image I was using was not a tight closeup, I figured the automatic result was good enough.

Then I started experimenting with the different video compression schemes to get the best output. I finally settled on Indeo 5.1 with compression filter and a 320X280 frame size since I was using a portrait orientation picture.

Finally, I was ready for MovieMaker. I imported the still image first to serve as the intro and a beginning key frame. Then I added the CrazyTalk video file and the Jingle Bells music track. Then I went up on the web and found a suitable "Happy Holidays" ending graphic. I love puppies so I found one with a little Dalmation. I couldn't find any copyright references so I hope whoever produced it doesn't mind a personal noncommercial use. I added the puppy graphic to the end of the storyboard then used the timeline and playback window to synch up the visuals with the music.

The tempo was right with the voiceover but I had to keep adjusting the duration of the intro graphic to get Dad's calling to match up with the appropriate point in the melody. Then I created a title graphic and ending credits. I liked the animated shadowed Title style best and selected a red background for Xmas. Then I went in and added right wipe transitions between the title and the opening graphic, a heart-shaped transition to the puppy graphic and a fade before the ending credits. That's when I discovered the transitions threw off the music track again so had to go back and readjust Dad's video to the music track again.

I was just about to call it a wrap when I noticed that the background fill default in MovieMaker was black while in CrazyTalk it was white. The switch from black background around the intro graphic to white background around the video frames was distracting so I went into CrazyTalk and found I could change the background there to black too. Which meant I had to reexport the CrazyTalk video, remove the other video from my Moviemaker project and reimport the new video. Which also meant I had to resynch the music track AGAIN! Finally, after over 8 hours of editing, I produced my little 1 minute video and uploaded it to YouTube.

YouTube had a nice way to embed the video into a greeting card and send it to all my family members. So this is how my family received a gift that couldn't be purchased in any store. I hope they enjoyed the memories. I took a day and went to the local mall and did a little "normal" Christmas shopping just to unwind!

Making Serious Money With YouTube

I found this article particularly interesting. Maybe I should look into it further to supplement my retirement income!

One year after YouTube, the online video powerhouse, invited members to become “partners” and added advertising to their videos, the most successful users are earning six-figure incomes from the Web site. For some, like Michael Buckley, the self-taught host of a celebrity chatter show, filming funny videos is now a full-time job.

Mr. Buckley quit his day job in September after his online profits had greatly surpassed his salary as an administrative assistant for a music promotion company. His thrice-a-week online show “is silly,” he said, but it has helped him escape his credit-card debt.

Mr. Buckley, 33, was the part-time host of a weekly show on a Connecticut public access channel in the summer of 2006 when his cousin started posting snippets of the show on YouTube. The comical rants about celebrities attracted online viewers, and before long Mr. Buckley was tailoring his segments, called “What the Buck?” for the Web. Mr. Buckley knew that the show was “only going to go so far on public access.”

Technorati Tags: YouTube, revenue, advertising, media, content development,

Finding a Gold Mine in Digital Ditties

I found the following article to be another interesting way people are using YouTube and amateur digital camera skills to launch a totally new career that didn't exist before Web 2.0.

Joel Moss Levinson always knew he had a calling in life. But it took cheap video cameras, YouTube and some desperate corporations to show him what it was.

Mr. Levinson’s skill is turning out homemade corporate commercials — what advertisers call a form of “user-generated content.” Companies, frantic to connect with younger consumers, sponsor contests seeking these commercials to find new ways to advertise their products, often attracting hundreds of entries and lots of attention.

So far, Mr. Levinson, a college dropout with dozens of failed jobs on his résumé, has won 11 contests — earning more than $200,000 in money and prizes. His success has made him into the digital age version of Evelyn Ryan, the woman from Defiance, Ohio, who supported her family by winning commercial jingle contests in the 1950s and ’60s.

While Mrs. Ryan’s talent was in writing, Mr. Levinson’s is in performing. He won $100,000 from Klondike after filming himself in the Arctic singing about Klondike bars. He won four months worth of free hotel stays from Best Western for a song he performed about his water cooler. When Little Penguin wine asked customers to film their best pickup line, Mr. Levinson submitted a video of his efforts to pick up a toy penguin, and won a trip to Australia.

He has won trips to Budapest, Buenos Aires and Copenhagen from Delta Air Lines; an iPod from the American National CattleWomen; and $6,000 from the Israel Project, an advocacy group, after honors in three separate categories — English, German and Russian — and he barely speaks German or Russian.

“It’s so great to have license to be an idiot,” he said.

It is especially great when idiocy is sponsored by corporations. Companies began soliciting these commercials a few years ago after noticing YouTube’s popularity, and wagered that campaigns created by customers might resonate with customers and turn into viral hits.

The initial commercials ran online only, but the fad has grown, and they now regularly run on television. Prizes have grown, too: this year, Doritos intends to run a user-generated commercial during the next Super Bowl, and offering $1 million to the winner.

Mr. Levinson’s gregariousness is an asset in the user-generated content world, as many of these contests are determined by voting. Mr. Levinson has a Facebook group entitled “Yes, Joel, I’ll vote for your newest stupid contest” and he uses Twitter, blogs, e-mail and text messages, asking acquaintances to vote. He even calls 24-hour customer service lines at night, when he thinks the representatives are bored, and asks them to vote for him.

Mr. Levinson is working on his Doritos entry for the Super Bowl but he has not forgotten his roots. He says he will enter any user-generated contest, no matter how small, and is at work on videos for Bush Brothers & Company beans, Home Depot, Contiki vacations, Krazy Glue and a telecommunications company in Kansas. But as a point of professional pride, he refuses to enter sweepstakes or any other game that depends on luck.

“A sweepstakes is like a lottery, right? Everyone’s equal,” he said. “With contests, I feel like I’m able to bring whatever skills I have to the table.” - More

From the corporate side of the contest I found this interesting post up at Click-Z about how to design an effective user-generated contest:

..."

Understand What Motivates Participation

Participants
typically fall into three categories: they want to win something, they
want to be recognized for their behavior or efforts, or they truly care
about something. "The more you can tap into those three things, the
more effective any online effort will be," Ghanem says.

Recognize People's Passions

People
tend to be more passionate about politics, sports, and fashions than
consumer brands and goods. "If I were to run a campaign to get
user-generated content about the war, lots of people would enter that
even if there wasn't a prize," Ghanem says. It's far more difficult to
get people excited about consumer brands, such as dishwashing
detergent. That's where prizes become an incentive for participation.

Pick the Best Format for the Demographic

Video
is better suited for a campaign targeting Gen Y skateboarding men. When
the History Channel targets baby boomer men, a contest that uses text
makes more sense, says Ghanem. A young man is more likely to pick up a
video camera and shoot a friend skateboarding, and a middle-aged
history buff is more likely watching television, reading books, or
writing a blog..."

I found the last observation very insightful. Although I have shot a few videos, I have done so with a still camera and don't even own a camcorder. I related much more to the history buff who reads and writes blogs (I have 15 other blogs besides this one!) If I was going to spend time creating a video I'd rather use shots from favorite films and put together a movie trailer remix to make a point!

Technorati Tags: YouTube, user-generated content, video, commercials, contest, revenue, income

Sharing creativity key to innovation

I found this article about Mr. Lee's spectacular creativity using the Wiimote extremely interesting. What impressed me most was his willingness to share his ideas. I hope his current employer (Microsoft) does not rein in this enthusiasm.

"IN December, Johnny Chung Lee, then a Ph.D. candidate, posted a five-minute video on YouTube that became an Internet sensation.

To share his innovation, Johnny Chung Lee posted a video on YouTube. In it, he uses a Wii remote controller and “head tracking” glasses to make a screen image come alive.

The video showed how, in a few easy steps, the Nintendo Wii remote controller — or “Wiimote” — could transform a normal video screen into a virtual reality display, with graphics that seemed to pop through the screen and into the living room. So far, the video has been seen more than six million times.

Contrast this with what might have followed from other options Mr. Lee considered for communicating his ideas. He might have published a paper that only a few dozen specialists would have read. A talk at a conference would have brought a slightly larger audience. In either case, it would have taken months for his ideas to reach others.

Small wonder, then, that he maintains that posting to YouTube has been an essential part of his success as an inventor. “Sharing an idea the right way is just as important as doing the work itself,” he says. “If you create something but nobody knows, it’s as if it never happened.” - More

Although I have much more affinity for software applications than hardware applications, I couldn't help but admire the Wiimote VR project and hope Nintendo (or Microsoft) moves forward with its development. Some years ago at Comdex I evaluated several different VR headsets and most of them depended on manipulating the color spectrum in a way similar to the classic 3D glasses of the 50s did. Mr. Lee's approach is quite revolutionary. I wonder if the wearer experiences headaches or nausea like the old-style approach?

I also visited Mr. Lee's Wiimote Project discussion forum and watched a fascinating video about a guitarist using a Wiimote strapped to a guitar to create an instrument that uses the player's movement to modulate the frequency of the notes generated when the strings are plucked. If amateurs are coming up with these kinds of applications, I wonder what the pros at Nintendo have in store for all of us?

Berkeley Offers Full Lectures on YouTube

UC Berkeley must have worked out an "iTunes-U" type of agreement with Google and is now featuring their lectures on YouTube. They must have been granted special provider status, though, to get around the current 10-minute video size limit. Anyone can upload larger videos to Google Video, but YouTube really has the name awareness and high traffic volume that is needed to ensure widespread exposure. What is particularly nice about having the lectures on YouTube as opposed to iTunes-U is that you can directly link the video files to other web resources or embed the video inside webpages. With iTunes, you can provide only a link to the Apple introductory site to iTunes-U where visitors click on a link to launch the iTunes Store to browse and find the videos.

"YouTube is now an important teaching tool at UC Berkeley.

The school announced on Wednesday that it has begun posting entire course lectures on the Web's No.1 video-sharing site.

Berkeley officials claimed in a statement that the university is the first to make full course lectures available on YouTube. The school said that over 300 hours of videotaped courses will be available at youtube.com/ucberkeley.

Berkeley said it will continue to expand the offering. The topics of study found on YouTube included chemistry, physics, biology and even a lecture on search-engine technology given in 2005 by Google cofounder Sergey Brin.

"UC Berkeley on YouTube will provide a public window into university life, academics, events and athletics, which will build on our rich tradition of open educational content for the larger community," said Christina Maslach, UC Berkeley's vice provost for undergraduate education in a statement."

Crazy Talk promising animation tool for web apps

I’ve been having great fun with a new tool called Crazy Talk. It lets you create talking heads for your website that include automatic lip synching by just importing a .wav audio file. I have one on my web page. It does require installing a plugin but I read there is a way to automatically embed the player in the web page so installing a plugin is not necessary. I’m checking into it.:

http://uoregon.edu/~mharrsch

Here are some others I created:

http://uoregon.edu/~mharrsch/CrazyTalk/CrazyCleo.htm

http://uoregon.edu/~mharrsch/CrazyTalk/CrazyAntony.htm

A Talking Character can be created quite quickly. You simply import the image. Crop it. Then place indicators at the outside corner of each eye and outside corners of the lips. If you want to tweak the mouth shapes during lip synch there is a phoneme editor. You can also apply emotional animations. On the Marc Antony image, I applied an “angry” emotion.

The website where I got it is http://www.reallusion.com

I’ve also been working with their machinma software IClone. It’s quite impressive as well. I’ve created a couple of characters so far:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/44124324682@N01/sets/72157601884615693/

I created the Roman character in iClone using Ciaran Hind’s face (He played Caesar in HBO’s Rome). I used pictures of lorica segmentata I got from a reenactors’ supply website to create the armor using the costume design addin called “Clone Cloth”. The product not only lets you easily create figures with your own imported faces but can import motion capture files from other programs as well. I found a treasure trove of free motion capture files up on a website named bvh.com. iClone includes a BVH motion capture editor so you can match up the joints to the IClone avatars properly. Like Crazy Talk, the product also has a built-in automatic lip synch function so you just have to import a .Wav file and it automatically syncs the characters mouth and teeth to the words. It’s digital studio features are also quite impressive.

Here’s an iClone version of Act 2 scene 1 from Macbeth:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6K7PXf4nRI

You have complete control of the avatars and their movements, lighting, camera angle, atmospheric effects, etc. There is even a particle generator for fog, lightning, etc.

There’s over 100 iClone films on YouTube that you can find by simply searching for IClone.

Google turns to overlay advertising to gain ROI on YouTube

I realize nothing in life is really ever free so it was just a matter of time before Google wanted ROI on it's $1.35 billion investment in YouTube. At least these new ad overlays are much less exasperating than "preroll" ads. Preroll ads have gotten totally out of control at movie theaters. This past weekend when I went to "The Last Legion" I had to sit through almost a half hour of ads before finally seeing the feature film (In fact I use the term "feature film" loosely - the film itself was so short it seemed like a made-for-TV movie). At least on a DVD you can fast forward through them. The worst part is I suspect that film editors are apparently slashing content to the point of making the plot seem choppy and disjointed just to accommodate this crass consumerism.

Ever since Google bought YouTube last November, it has avoided cluttering the site and the video clips themselves with ads, for fear of alienating its audience.

A demonstration of an ad for a movie on the bottom of a YouTube video. Real ads would not reflect the content of a video.

Multimedia

Sample Ad Spot Video (youtube.com)

The strategy helped cement YouTube’s position as the largest video Web site but didn’t do much to justify YouTube’s $1.65 billion price tag.

Now Google believes it finally has found the formula to cash in on YouTube’s potential as a magnet for online video advertising and keep its audience loyal at the same time.

The company said late Tuesday that after months of testing various video advertising models, it was ready to introduce a new type of video ad, which it said was unobtrusive and kept users in control of what they saw.

The ads, which appear 15 seconds after a user begins watching a video clip, take the form of an overlay on the bottom fifth of the screen, not unlike the tickers that display headlines during television news programs.

A user can ignore the overlay, which will disappear after about 10 seconds, or close it. But if the user clicks on it, the video they were watching will stop and a video ad will begin playing. Once the ad is over, or if a user clicks on a box to close it, the original video will resume playing from the point where it was stopped.

Music Publisher Association joins copyright suit against Google

Why am I not surprised???

English soccer's Premier League and music publisher Bourne & Co said Monday that eight more parties have joined their lawsuit charging Google and its YouTube online service with deliberately encouraging copyright infringement.

The new parties include the National Music Publishers' Association, which is the largest U.S. music publishing trade association, the Rugby Football League, the Finnish Football League Association and author Daniel Quinn.

Video programming owners have teamed up against YouTube, charging the top online video service with encouraging copyright infringement to generate public attention and boost traffic to its site.

Google has said it is abiding by existing law that protect Internet services from being liable for what is on their networks so long as they respond promptly to complaints.

Casio creates camera for YouTube video enthusiasts and Ebay sellers

I think these product offerings are particularly interesting because they address a particular market usage of the output rather than just output in standard formats. However, I am a little skeptical of the higher-end output that a semi-pro would demaind. I couldn't find any reviews yet for this particular model camera that included actual image evaluation but other Casio cameras released this year have customer comments that complain of noise and distortion using the zoom. Not a good trade-off. But, maybe Casio made improvements with these models. I'll have to keep an eye out for a comprehensive review up at http://dpreview.com - sort of my gold standard for camera reviews.

"Posting a note on an Internet forum is simple. Uploading a video to YouTube isn’t. Matching a video you have shot to YouTube’s requirements for file size, running time, resolution and file format often takes some fiddling with video editing software. And loading most camcorder videos into that computer takes as long as playing them.

Two still cameras from Casio may help change that. The Exilim EX-S880 and EX-Z77 shoot YouTube-compatible videos that can be uploaded quickly, without even pausing to load them onto your computer’s hard drive. This is accomplished by using the included YouTube Uploader software, which also lets you add tags and other information to each video.

Both cameras also have an eBay mode that shoots 2-megapixel stills, just the right size for eBay sellers. Maximum resolution is 8.1 megapixels for the EX-S880 ($299.95) and 7.2 megapixels for the EX-Z77 ($229.95).

Both models have 3X zoom lenses, face detection and electronic antishake systems that work even in video mode."