Given that 2008 ended well I’m going to give in to a bit of self-indulgence. The best ending for my ProCasts was helping Justin in the days running up to Christmas increase his sign-up rate for AppBeacon.com with a 3 minute front-page screencast. Being told “My bounce rate has decreased about 7 percent per day. Since having the screencast up, the site’s sign up rate has doubled” is just darn cool – all done in 48 hours and delivered on Christmas Eve.
I’m also having a crack at understanding the adoption rate for MP4-enabled Flash players, I blogged some statistics that suggest 90% penetration.
By itself this is fine, but given that TechSmith have removed the older and standard FLV format from CamTasia and only allow us to export MP4 videos, it seemed odd that we’re expected to lose 10% of our viewing audience. Apparently this was done because MP4 is the wave of the future…but that doesn’t help 1/10 viewers now, nor for the next 6 months. Raising it in the forums didn’t seem to cause much reaction which seemed odd. Hmph.
To provide some mitigation for the problem I wrote-up an entry on using the free ffmpeg to convert mp4 to flv, google seems to be sending me traffic for that off the bat so presumably I’m not really the only one who didn’t like the mp4-only option.
Oh yes, I also treated myself to a new mic – a lovely big sE 2200a. It comes with a bloomin’ great ‘flight case’ in case I need to take it on trips. Lovely.
And for 2009 I intend to grow ProCasts and to pull in more talent so we can deliver beautiful, informative screencasts that help sell more services for my clients. Onwards and upwards…
Ian is a Chief Interim Data Scientist via his Mor Consulting. Sign-up for Data Science tutorials in London and to hear about his data science thoughts and jobs. He lives in London, is walked by his high energy Springer Spaniel and is a consumer of fine coffees.