by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2013/10/15 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2013/10/15/10456773.aspx
While I, in a blog like We have reached an inflection point in the world of Captions, can talk bravely about wanting to tackle the problems in Category Two (the "ads that do nothing to support captions at all") as being the smallest in number and not worthy of as much of anyone's concern as the other two categories, I had an exception come before me in a very visible way.
When I was watching The Daily Show last night, and one of those Microsoft commercials pointing out how much cooler (and how much less expensive) the Surface was than the iPad (this one, in fact) when I had my nose rubbed in the problem.
The commercial had no captions! 😒
Mere days after I told all my readers to turn on captions to catch the misbehaving ads, my own company turned out to be one of offenders!
Suddenly I realized I was not sure where to go to find out who to talk to!
When the guilty party is a program or a network, it's easy to know where to go.
But when it's a company?
Worse when it's my own company?
I suddenly realized I had many levels to be embarrassed about!
Beyond the obvious "Michael, get your own house in order" stuff, the fact that I had no idea who to talk to was, in my opinion, the most immediate problem.
The fact that five of my caption-watching friends and colleagues noticed the problem in the same show underlined the priority of tracking down the issue, but gave no hints about who I should talk to about it!
I mean yes it is One Microsoft but there are 100,000 people here. Who of the 100,000 or the many contractors or agency temps should I get in contact with?
The problem intensified when I saw it on another program and channel; clearly it was us, and I [unintentionally] set us up to get noticed this way! 😒
I'm going to give up, admit that Category Two is worse than Category Three when it's my own company, and ask any of my fellow Microsoft employees if they know who I should ask. Does anyone know? 😏">€
EGAN Medical on 15 Oct 2013 5:06 PM:
How exactly does one go about getting a blog here at MSDN? I've been trying to figure it out for hours to no avail.
Michael S. Kaplan on 15 Oct 2013 11:21 PM:
You have to be full time Microsoft employee, for starters... ;-)
Mike Dimmick on 16 Oct 2013 7:52 AM:
@michkap: Someone at MS has made an exception for Eric Lawrence, who is now posting again on his ieinternals blog despite having left for Telerik last year! He is an IE MVP, though.
Alan J. McFarlane on 16 Oct 2013 9:41 AM:
Thought this might be of to interest, from the UK. www.bbc.co.uk/.../entertainment-arts-24552190 "Ofcom to monitor quality of TV subtitling"