So a few hours ago, as part of the ever-phenomenal Thinking Digital conference, I took part in a demo presentation in which I was hooked up to a headset which allowed me to control things with my mind alone. It’s not every day you get to say that, and it seemed like a good idea to write down some thoughts.

We've been evangelising about the power of captions and subtitles for SEO for a long time now. A closed caption file is a form of text file, after all, and it stands to reason that storing what is effectively a text transcript of your video on your site is likely to make the video content more accessible to search engines. We've seen many of our clients' videos rise up the search listings substantially after being captioned, so we've been convinced of the theory, and our clients have been more than happy.

But it's been hard to turn up concrete evidence to prove that captions and subtitles affect SEO... until now. In the last few months it's become clear that YouTube's search results are visibly affected by the caption and subtitle tracks on certain videos, and if you don't believe us take a peek at this image.

We've been big fans of reCAPTCHA since we first saw it in 2009. By the time Luis von Ahn had finished speaking about it at Thinking Digital in 2010 - receiving a standing ovation from some of the awestruck crowd - we'd vowed to one day feature it on one of our sites. So we're pretty excited to finally be able to feature reCAPTCHA on our blog.

So, we finally got some downtime to sort out the long-promised overhaul of the internetsubtitling.com blog.

We're very worried about the Digital Economy Bill here at internetsubtitling.com. Aside from being based on almost entirely flawed and unjust principles, it also carries a lot of details with it which could seriously harm our business and others like it. With that in mind, and with parliament about to start a rushed and cursory debate on the bill this afternoon, I sent the following letter to my MP, David Clelland. You're welcome to use any or all of it in a similar letter to your own MP.