Another day, definitely at an earlier time of day, I may go into my history of examining the “cloud” related to the storage of photos for sharing and secondary backup. For now, I just want to express my pleasant surprise at a Google announcement that came nearly two weeks ago. In a post at their official blog and cross-posted on the Picasa team’s blog, Google announced that they were providing “twice as much storage for a quarter of the old price.” So, from $20/year for 6GB to $5/year for 20GB or under a full utilization standpoint, from just under 28¢/GB/month to to just barely over 2¢/GB/month. This change dramatically shifts Picasa Web Albums rank in my internal cloud storage rankings. I haven’t yet decided how it’ll impact my workflow but it does require me to reach out to a number of friends and update my recommendations. I wonder how I missed this news initially. I may need to revisit my feed reader practices.

In my end-of-day RSS reader catch-up, I stumbled across an article outlining some new YouTube services. Essentially, YouTube/Google is now applying automatic speech recognition technology they’ve been perfecting withing Google Voice, to close-caption YouTube videos. They’re also a providing mechanisms for “auto-timing” self-provided captions uploaded as simple text files. These are exciting new features that will greatly enhance the ability to find appropriate video content as well as become more accessible in general. I hope to see some of these technologies made reasonably available for implementation outside of YouTube. I know in the school systems, YouTube is often entirely blocked. It would be fantastic to see sites such as TeacherTube able to leverage the technology to increase their reach. Be sure to read the full post at Google as there are a few other tidbits such as caption translation that are demonstrated.