Thank God Kevin made notes of his presentation because he covered a ton of stuff. They basically revolve around the following:

• The emerging popularity of video as a medium of communication
• The paradigm shift from protectionism of content to a culture of knowledge and experience sharing
• Tools for the editing and distribution of digital video

Probably the best thing I’ve learned from the presentation is that you can add closed captioning in Google Video. As someone obsessed with information, this is huge, not just from an accessibility standpoint. Now it makes sense for producers to add closed captioning to their videos because the captions make their video content indexable by search engines. Rather than having to go through hours of footage to find that 2 minute clip you thought you saw, channels like C-Span are now made searchable.

So where once you religiously tagged your videos hoping people would land on the keywords you entered, there is now a natural alignment of interests. It is in your best interest to provide closed captioning because it helps with the findability of your video content. This greatly benefits people with disabilities as well. “Google is the world’s largest blind user” is a statement many of us standards evangelists use to promote web accessibility. It is amazing that the statement transcends to a rich medium like video as well.