Taking Vimeo for Spin

Deep Corals of Roatan from Peter Etnoyer on Vimeo.

Video is an incredibly useful educational tool, but hard to employ if you don't what kind of software to expect. Lately I've been turning to the cloud which is YouTube because videos are "always there" for nearly any browser.

More and more I like the Vimeo platform. The quality is excellent, and the design is clean. It has less functionality than YouTube, but that's OK.

Take a look at this sweet deep-sea coral video from Roatan, Honduras at Vimeo above and compare it to the Blogger upload and the YouTube videos below. This is a nice image. Great subjects, too!

Seamounts for your smartphone

Satellite based estimates of the number of seamounts in the world number fall somewhere between 33,000 and 45,000 features, and the combined area of these seamounts is larger than South America. However, unlike beaches or even coral reefs, most people will never see a seamount.

Unless you show it to them on your smartphone, that is! Help eliminate the 'never-seen-a-seamount' problem with a little eye-candy designed to help you spread the word about these submerged mountain peaks. Download the Phoenix Island Protected Area (PIPA) seamount video here and put it on your smartphone.

This way you can show it around at the dinner party, or keep it handy just in case you find yourself on the front porch this summer, trying to explain the wonders of the ocean universe to Uncle Al. Let me if it works for you.