Today there’s a lot of buzz on Twitter about Steven Wolfram’s new (and very cool) tool called Wolfram Alpha.  This is a web-app, somewhat like Google, but aimed at making “the world’s knowledge computable”.  As an A.I. researcher I have a keen interest in this area and this screencast shows much of interest.

The screencast itself however has some flaws, here I’ll give a critique.

The Good:

1. Wow – lots of interesting information is covered and the tool looks really interesting
2. Nice charts, clear visuals
3. Clear, well-paced voice (Steven’s own)
4. Nice summary in the last minute to tell me what to expect in the future

The Bad:

1. No story – lots of examples but they jump between many subjects so I don’t have a narrative to hang-on to
2. Too long!  13 minutes in total, generally we keep our introductory/tour videos to 2-3 minutes for maximum retention
3. Too many subjects covered – this is of interest to biologists, fact-seekers, cross-word puzzlers, engineers and, well, everyone
4. No way I can embed a copy in my site for viral distribution

The Ugly:

1. Video dimensions are way too big, rather than widescreen or 4:3 it is closer to a square so on my MacBook I can’t see the top and the bottom of the video at the same time.  Since the queries are typed at the top and the results fill the whole screen this meant I had to keep scrolling up and down to view everything.  UPDATE on my 1680×1050 Ubuntu Desktop inside Firefox I still can’t see all of the video, a thin section is still lost.  Was this recorded using an upright display (with the thin edge at the top) rather than a conventional display?
2. The file is an SWF rather than FLV or MP4 video, this meant that when the download stalled (and it had to – it was so large) I had to reload it from the start rather than having a progressive download resume from the cache

Thoughts for improvement:

1. Fix the video size – make it 640×480 (this fits 99% of viewer’s screens) so we can see it all at once and use FLV rather than SWF
2. Tell a story – rather than show many facts instead think about building up an interesting story that shows the power of Alpha
3. Make several screencasts focused on appropriate disciplines so the stories are really relevant to me and my tribe

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