cyang08

Hi all. Tried my hand at creating an infographic for ReelSEO and ReelSurfer. Would love to hear your feedback - on metrics you think I should have included, the design, or anything else. Thanks!

Hi guys, co-founder of ReelSurfer here. Would love to hear your feedback on our new design and tools!

I'm especially excited that you can clip ESPN now (among a ton of other providers). For example, ever wanted to know what Dennis Rodman thinks about... Kim Jong Un? Well now you can! http://reelsurfer.com/watch/share/29794

Excellence: "Forbes Top 10 Under 10: Dropped out of elementary school to found a startup in the crayon space. Just got a pre-Thiel Fellowship".

Great clip from Harj in the post

Agreed. For me, it was a big shift at first transitioning from a more vocational mindset (learning the language/framework of the day) to the theoretical (design patterns, paradigms, architecture).

As an aside, just got through Martin Fowler's musing on architecture (http://martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/). Highly recommended!

I guess was looking at it more like of those that dropped out, how many ended up not succeeding, with the correlation implying that dropping out wasn't the right choice.

Agreed that there are quite a few confounding variables though. Any stats majors out there that know how to adjust for socioeconomic status + other biases?

Great insight about autodidacticism - sometimes it's just really hard to (1) even know what to do in the first place and (2) do it without structure or extrinsic motivation.

I think in an ideal world, self-study and maintaining an ongoing education while out in the field are great. Unfortunately in a practical world, finding that motivation intrinsically is pretty difficult. There's actually a great video by Dan Pink delving into the specific components of motivation: http://reelsurfer.com/watch/share/22832

(credit a forum post on improving at StarCraft for this actually, haha: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=374...)

YES! This was exactly what I was looking for while writing the post. A decent portion of this information is even available publicly for certain demographic slices (like the education for the 30 Under 30s).

Startup idea? One that you could drop out of school for? wink wink

Fair point about a single number not painting the whole picture. Any thoughts on what stats might show a better correlation?

Another datapoint was an informal one-year follow-up to the first wave of Thiel's 20 under 20 (http://qr.ae/14o5S). Of the select few that were chosen based on their skills/ideas/potential and given access to Thiel's network, quite a few ended up actually going back to school.

That is a great counterpoint. School definitely isn't for everyone, and there are definitely flaws in the system (rising tuition, teaching the wrong things, etc but that is almost a whole other article).

Do your colleagues have any recommendations on gaining the proper skills and experience outside of college for those that want to try a different path?

I couldn't agree more. Steve Jobs is an interesting example in this case - although he dropped out, he credited a random calligraphy class as the inspiration for some of the Mac's beautiful typography:

"Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

"None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography."

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/steve-jobs-designer...

Hi all. What sparked this post was the release of this year's Forbes 30 Under 30 for Tech. Turns out almost everyone on the list (92.5%, check article for more stats) did NOT drop out, so thought the numbers + anecdotal + personal experience would make a good case for sticking to school.

Great point, definitely an oversight on our part. We just added a link to the main http://reelsurfer.com site to the top-level horizontal nav. Thanks!

Thanks for the feedback! You raise some very valid points that we actually went back and forth on a bit during the design process.

1) Regarding the inline popups, the overall goal was to educate first time users on how the site works (that ReelSurfer lets you cut highlights out of any video on the web). I agree that they are a little obtrusive though. Are you more opposed to the contents/frequency of those particular popups, vs popups in general, or both? We considered some other options like a help button or progressive UI disclosure - do you have a preferred means of surfacing this kind of info? Hopefully a small consolation now is that once dismissed, you should no longer see the popups on your next visit.

2) Regarding original URLs, that is a great idea. Currently there is one way to get to the original video - the "See More" button that displays on hover will take you to the original video's page (in this case, YouTube). We'll try to make it a little more prominent, or perhaps even add a link to the metadata below the player.

3) Regarding the branding strip for embeds, totally makes sense and you hit the nail on the head about wanting to capture users. It's definitely a challenging problem for us as we want to balance demonstrating the additional value of ReelSurfer (which is that you can cut and watch highlights + mashups from all videos across the web, not just YouTube) without getting super annoying. In this particular scenario, if the branding strip only appeared on hover (and disappeared during playback), would that be a better/tolerable experience?

Thanks again!

Hi everyone! Christian from ReelSurfer here. Would love to hear your feedback on the latest set of updates, along with any ideas or questions you might have!

Christian from ReelSurfer here. We're proud to announce a partnership with the Counting Crows and the launch of a fan reel competition to kick off their new tour! Lot of cool artists already on ReelSurfer too (fun FM profile: http://reelsurfer.com/user/reels/fmonyourdial)

Great seeing the music industry embracing new technology and social media. Now if only other mediums (cough movies/film cough) would be as open...

Thanks for taking a look! Interesting point on the click-to-play setting. Does it wok for you without that settings? As for IE9, do you have Flash installed? If not, HTML5 support is coming soon!

Great idea! Yes, it has been a long time. You should make a reel chronicling your adventures since the JM days!