We completed our rolling update this morning and I'm happy to report that everything went as planned. The improvements I spoke of in my last post are live and we're looking for feedback on what everyone thinks. Next week we will be starting the planning process for our next series of development sprints which will focus on online analytics packages and one of the most requested enhancements to date: Subfolders.

In the meantime, I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on public vs. private content. Screencast.com has always kept your content exactly where you wanted it - secured by a password or in an authenticated folder or playlist, or in your publicly-visible Library, folder or playlist. While it's possible for someone to "stumble" onto your public content, we don't do anything to promote your public content with search engines. In fact, we do everything we can to prevent search engines from crawling through the system and indexing content. This is partly by design since Pro account users pay for the bandwidth that's used when their content is consumed. It seemed disingenuous to us to openly promote content only to then ask you to pay for the cost of popularity. However, many of you are asking for help in getting your content "found", and it would be relatively easy for us to assist content owners in the process of exposing their public content to the myriad of search engines that are out there these days.

So, what do you think? A lot of you have indicated that you want your content to be found and consumed. Why else would you have created it in the first place? However, increased exposure of your content could have consequences depending on how popular it becomes. I'd like to hear from you all on the subject. Feel free to post comments or send me your feedback.

Happy Screencasting!

Dirk Frazier
Product Manager
Screencast.com

Lately I've been remiss updating this blog with news and my views. It's been a pretty cold summer up here in the Great Lakes, maybe that's affected my ability to type. It certainly hasn't been because of a lack of anything to write about. Back in June I mentioned that we were beginning to focus on improving the scalability of Screencast.com. I'm happy to report that our efforts have been successful and we're just about finished with some of the more significant aspects of that process. This means that we'll be turning our attention back to the fun stuff that you all have been asking for - features!

At the end of this month, we're releasing an updated version of the MediaRoll which will let everyone customize the look to match their own preferences. Here's an example of a MediaRoll in action on the Jing Blog. If you have an existing MediaRoll embedded on a Web page or blog, and you want to take advantage of the new capabilities, you'll need to re-embed the new object. Of course existing MediaRolls will continue to work just fine. At release time, we'll have tutorials available in the Screencast.com Help Center to walk you through the steps to customize your own. After our release at the end of this month, we will start work on allowing users to customize other aspects like the Library and Folder views.

We will also be releasing an updated Flash Player that will let viewers seek to a point in a video that has not yet been downloaded. This will enhance viewing experience by not having to wait until the entire video is downloaded before viewers can jump to a section that's later in the production. By itself, this is a pretty neat idea that gives the playback of MP4 content streaming media-like capabilities. However, TSC products will be able to take advantage of this feature in unique and valuable ways in the future. Imagine when lengthy Camtasia Relay (TechSmith's lecture capture software) and Camtasia Studio videos will contain tables of contents with headings that relate to points in the video that have yet to be downloaded. Jumping to those points will be faster, especially for those viewers with slow Internet connections.

We're still working on redesigning the playlist. I know that it's taking a lot of time - I wish I could just wave a wand and fix everything. What it has done is cause us to rethink how people today share their playlists, folders, and individual pieces of content. We want to make sure we're making the new playlist the best it can be while ensuring existing playlists and other shared content remain viewable. Our team has completed several brainstorming and work-flow design sessions and we are planning to test some ideas that we've developed, with help from recruited volunteers of course.

Like I said, we haven't been wasting time playing golf all summer...well...I shouldn't speak for everyone. I have a lot more to share, but I don't want to spill all the beans just yet. Besides, I need something to write about next month. Happy Screencasting!

Dirk Frazier
Screencast.com Product Manager
TechSmith Corporation