Nansen on Fear Itself

“Never stop because you are
afraid – you are never so likely to
be wrong.”

–Fridtjof Nansen (1861–1930)

Norwegian explorer

Nobel Peace Prize winner

What you expect to happen – what you believe in your mind – can have a tremendous impact on what actually does happen.

If you’re going to try to accomplish something – if you make the decision to make the attempt – the best thing you can do for yourself is to expect a positive outcome. Anything else can only inhibit your efforts.

Worst-case: If you fail, you get an education for your future efforts.

Minimize your doubts, be positively expectant, and Cross The Line.

Remember…

We earn more challenges by dealing with and overcoming more challenges.

Embrace your experience. Enjoy the weather.

weathered: (adjective) seasoned by exposure to the weather

seasoned: (adjective) made fit by experience

__________

YouTube Captions Uploader Web App

Captions can greatly enhance the experience of viewing a YouTube video, and the YouTube API has offered developers ways to upload and retrieve caption data in authorized requests for a while now. However, the various YouTube API client libraries don’t natively support interacting with captions at this time, and writing your own code for uploading or retrieving captions can be challenging.

With that in mind, we’re happy to announce the YouTube Captions Uploader open source project on Google Code, which provides real-world code for uploading captions to YouTube. The code is written for the Java App Engine environment, and it uses some nifty new App Engine features like the Channel API, the Blobstore Service, and Task Queues. And even if you’re not an App Engine developer, we hope that the code that interacts with the YouTube API’s captions service will provide a good starting point for writing your own code.

In addition to open sourcing the code for this project, we’re also running the code itself on a public App Engine instance, http://yt-captions-uploader.appspot.com/. So, even if you’re not a developer, you can still use the application to upload captions for videos in your YouTube account.

Please share your comments or feedback via the project’s issue tracker. We hope that you find it useful both as a standalone web application and as a starting point for writing your own code!

TripAdvisor Continuing to Limit Reviews in Google Places

Over the weekend, we reported that TripAdvisor reviews, while not showing up in UK, were returning to US listings. Apparently, it is just a fluke as TNooz reports that TripAdvisor is continuing their restrictions on Google using Reviews in Places. From TNooz and TA:

“Despite the rumours, we are continuing to restrict TripAdvisor content on Google Places as we don’t think it benefits users at this time with the experience of selecting the right hotel.”

The company adds that it is in “constant discussions” with Google – details of which are not disclosed.

TripAdvisor has also responded directly to my query; “There are reports of reviews showing in the US but NOT in the UK….Has there been any change in position? Are you still not allowing your reviews back into Google?”

Mike,

There has been no change in position. We are continuing to limit the TripAdvisor content on Google Places at this time, as we don’t think it benefits users with the experience of selecting the right hotel.