Last month Google announced the addition of automatic captioning to YouTube videos.

The captions are generated by machine translation, so don't expect perfection. Based on the automatically captioned videos I've seen so far, it may be too much to expect comprehension.

Spoken English generally runs at about 120 words per minute, so it's not surprising that even human-captioned live events are often marred by mistakes. Machine translation from speech to text is still a developing art, but it's coming along well enough to make this worth trying.

Google posted an announcement to their blog about this feature here:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/automatic-captions-in-youtube.html

And their help files provide instructions on how to use autocaps, as they call them, and autotiming to transform a simple transcript to captions:

http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=100077

So now there are tools in place to help make captioning videos easy and widespread. If you videoblog and play with this, let me know how it well it works for you.

In Union County, Georgia, there's a 3.5 mile piece of the Appalachian Trail that leads to Woody Gap. On Thanksgiving day last week, Debi, Dylan, his friend Charlie and I set out on the trail for a pleasant morning's hike.

We lucked out that day - the previous three days had been mostly rain. We saw no sun, but a lot of water, all the way from I-75 in central Florida to northern Georgia. Debi and I swapped off driving up, and I kept a wary eye on the creatures sitting behind us..



One of the beady-eyed beasts stared back...



The sun peeked out on the morning before Thanksgiving, and dried things out enough that the trail was dry when we planted our boots on it the next day.

We hiked a bit of the trail last year too, where it begins in Amicola park. We didn't cover too much of it there, maybe a mile and a half before turning back. Our estimated total mileage on the trail now is 5.

That only leaves another 2,162 more miles to complete the whole trail. At our current annual average, we would finish up in about 865 years. Clearly we'll need to go longer and faster if we want to do it in our lifetimes.

Hiking wasn't all we did on this trip - we also spent time in Atlanta touring a Coca-Cola attraction. One highlight was the international fountain area where we tried sodas that Coca-Cola sells all over the world.

Debi wasn't too sure about one she tried...



And I had a mixed reaction too...



We also checked out the Atlanta Dome football stadium, and escorted Dylan along the way...





The boys raked leaves for Debi's mother, and we played a little football outside.





Visited a former gold mine...



...and sampled some good chow!



But eventually our band of intrepid explorers hit the trail.





Dylan was promptly dazed and overwhelmed by the mountain looming ahead.



But with a little encouragement from Mama...



...he was soon moving along.



Eventually we got into a rhythm and starting making good progress.





We arrived a bit too late for the fall colors, but what we lost in color, we gained in expansive views of the mountains and valleys around us.





By and by, we stopped for lunch.



We really could not have asked for better weather - it was cool out, which is exactly what you want when slogging up a steep trail. We took time out to pose in the sunlight, too.









There was a pretty lady in the woods...



...and a handsome young man...



About three hours after we set out, the end of the trail - for us, for now - hove into view.



So the hike ends, but the memories will last.