The SoapVox

I just found this article in NewsForge, and it talks about an interesting approach to Hell…err…Help Desk :)

Bram Biesbrouck decided to create software and a site that would make it a lot easier for himself to help people that ask him about computer problems:

“A lot of people come to me with their computer-related problems,” he says. “Most of the time, these question are quite straightforward. But when trying to explain the solution, people tend to get confused by difficult words or computer slang.”

And that’s how ScreenKast was born. ScreenKast is a screen capture program that allows you to create demonstration videos and add comment boxes and exports to many different formats. And then he decided that he needed a website where people could publish and access help videos, and called it captorials.com.

ScreenKast is KDE based, and it seems easy to use (I’m just downloading it), and the website is not an eyesore (which is always a good thing :) and seems simple to navigate. You just hit the browse link on top and select either a category or a platform and go through the list of available videos. Of course, you could also do a keyword search, and you may even find what you are looking for :)

The one thing I don’t like about this so far is that the videos in the website are converted to flash…and I really hate that thing. Hopefully Bram will some day (soon!) make it possible for users to download the videos in whatever the original format the submitter used…and hopefully said format will be a decent one :)

So…this looks promising, a very interesting idea that, if it takes off (there’s only 3 videos right now), could be very helpfull for a lot of people like me, who get asked by family and friends how to do X or Y all the time…getting it across without all the geeky terms is not always easy, but with a video like this, it should be a piece of cake.

Technorati Tags: instrudeo, instructional videos, screenkast, captorials.com, help desk, hell desk

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