SciVee: YouTube for Science

The San Diego Supercomputing Center and PLoS have created SciVee, a YouTube-like website for scientific presentations. It seems like a potentially great vehicle for disseminating and promoting research. Right now the content is mostly in bio, but I would love to see more CS up there. It would be great, for example, if the major CS conferences videotaped their proceedings — or at least the major talks — and published them on SciVee. Another great use would be for departments to use SciVee to publish their various invited lecture series like FAI or the CMU Machine Learning Seminar Series.

SciVee itself seems like it still has a few of bugs that need to be worked out, but it’s new and I’m sure they’ll get them worked out. One particularly annoying one: the interface provides a vehicle to allow the producer of the video to provide text notes that are synchronized with the video. The problem is, the notes pop up over the video frame, interrupting the flow of the video and obscuring the screen and it doesn’t have a close box (though it is possible to close the boxes, if you search hard enough). I’m not sure exactly how this feature is supposed to be used effectively, but every instance of it that I saw was annoying to the point of ruining the video completely. Not only does it cover the screen and ruin the flow of the video, but it’s impossible to read a box of text and listen to a speaker at the same time.

I hope these kinds of things will be worked out as more people use the site and give feedback, and overall this seems like a cool way of advertising your research.