Cross-platform feedback widgets maker JS-Kit just added a feature that enables users to enhance comments with pictures, on any of the 600,000+ websites using its custom commenting system. I’ve always been curious to know why major blogging platforms don’t simply add such a functionality to their commenting systems, while there are already companies like Seesmic, Viddler and Blipback focussing on taking a step further by adding video commenting features to websites.
There are custom picture commenting plugins for Wordpress and Movable Type available, but we should note JS-Kit is not only meant for blogs, as it can be installed on any Javascript-enabled website. According to the blog post announcing the new features, JS-Kit users can now attach multiple images to each of their comments on sites running its commenting systems. Images will be auto-thumbnailed and can be clicked on for full-size viewing. → Read More
YouTube has been criticized in the past for not offering the experience already being offered on services like Viddler or Vimeo where users can upload large file sizes and input video information while it’s being uploaded. But in an announcement that should make its users happy, YouTube has finally seen the light and has started offering a new Upload process redesign that will more effectively compete with other services in the space.
According to the company, the new video uploader, which has been in private beta for some time, is now available to any users who wish to opt-in. Once users opt-in to the new uploader, they will quickly find that they can input metadata like the clip’s name, description, and tags while it’s uploading, as well as upload multiple videos at once to streamline the uploading process. More importantly, the new YouTube uploader will allow users to upload files up to 1GB in size, instead of its previous 100MB limit. → Read More
This past Thursday, Viddler launched an advertising system that lets companies and individuals overlay advertisements at variously tagged points within the videos it hosts. The system is very similar to Google Adwords, except advertisements are within videos instead of search results, and advertisers sponsor tags instead of search terms. Viddler’s embeddable player has always been unique in providing content producers and viewers with the ability to place comments and tags at various points within a video. If something is funny at the 1:39 mark, you can submit the comment “lol” and it will show up as a discreet overlay at that particular time during playback. Similarly, you can tag a video during playback with “bicycle” at a point where there’s someone riding a bike. As with other video services, you can also submit tags that describe videos as a whole, rather than just particular points within a video. While CEO Robert Sandie says that these metadata features were not developed with monetization in mind, Viddler now provides a way for advertisers to run campaigns that take advantage of both global and timed tags (the former being tags that describe videos as a whole, and the latter being tags that describe points within a video). Anyone can advertise through this system by participating in a bidding process akin to Google Adwords. Viddler has also partnered up with Amazon, and is talking with the likes of Buy.com and Shopping.com, to serve up ads for products sold by those online retailers. The bidding process involves the choice of particular keywords through which you want to advertise. It also involves the highest CPC (cost per click) that you are willing to pay for each keyword. If you are willing to pay more per click than anyone else who wants a particular keyword, you practically own that keyword, and your advertisement will show up as an overlay in any video hosted by Viddler that has been tagged with it. This will remain the case until someone else outbids your maximum bid threshold. Viddler will email you if this happens so you can up the ante if desired. As for Amazon, its advertisements will automatically show up as overlays for tags that have not already been claimed by bidders. A note on so-called global tags: while the placement of advertisements for timed tags naturally occur at their respective spots during playback, advertisements for global tags show → Read More
The popularity of rich media publishing (such as podcasting and videocasting, the YouTube phenomenon, etc.) is a problem for search engines and people trying to use search engines to find this content. The problem is that the traditional ways search engines index and rank content don’t apply to rich media because, well, it’s not easily indexable. A few startups are focusing on creating transcriptions of podcasts and video content (see Pluggd and Podzinger, for example), which search engines can then index. And many people are tagging audio, video and photo content. YouTube, Flickr and others allow this (and see Google’s efforts to tag photos using humans). Tags help describe the content and are usable by search engines as well as humans. But highest level tags, when they are present, don’t capture all of the content, so a lot is missed. Figuring out how to search the meta data around rich content (tags and lots of other descriptive data) is big business. Truveo, a video search startup that launched in 2005 and was subsequently acquired by AOL for at least $50 million, helped solve this problem (but still falls woefully short of perfect). A new unlaunched startup, CastTV, takes rich media searching another few steps forward (much more on them in a later post). But even these new search companies can’t find all of the content in a video or audio file, and certainly can’t take you right to where that content is presented. That’s why I like the idea of deep tagging. It requires human labor but for many publishers it’s worth it. Instead of simply being associated with a file, a deep tag is associated with a clip from the file. Click on the tag and jump right to that part of the clip. We’ve covered a few companies that are facilitating deep tagging, such as MotionBox, JumpCut (acquired by Yahoo last week), Viddler and Click.tv. Also, Google recently added a captioning feature to video, as well as the ability to permanently link to any time spot in a clip. Veotag is doing this as well (we haven’t covered them yet but a few commenters have pointed them out in the past). Today I received an email from Howard Seibel, Veotag’s VP Marketing. He pointed me to this page which is a better version of a TalkCrunch podcast I recorded last week with Om Malik and Robert Scoble. He’s → Read More
I just got a sneak peek at a video sharing site due to launch in September, called Viddler. The company has focused on making the video publishing experience compelling and enabling discussion, tagging and sharing tied to particular moments in time. It’s a good looking system with smart features and a viable business model. Company lead Robert Sandie lives today in Bethlehem, PA but has a background managing Adobe flash servers for enterprise clients. The distributed team is made up of designers Andrew Smith and Chris Tingom in Arizona and developers Lukasz Hankus and Kasper Cecek in Poland. The vision for the product is deeply inspired by Flickr and it shows. The business model, for one thing, will be driven not by pageviews and advertising but by subscription for premium features. I think that’s smart. The premium features will be announced later, but they look good. The keystone feature here is the ability to add tags and comments tied to particular points in a video. Those tags are then searchable, so if I want to find the particular point in one of my videos that I tagged “touchdown,” that’s easy to do. I can also have a conversation with other users regarding a particular moment in a video and choose to embed the video on another site in it’s entirety or only from a particular point I select. While users can link to particular points in a Google Video as of last month, that’s easier and is just the beginning in Viddler. Multiple videos can be uploaded at once and upload doesn’t pause your work in the interface. Videos are served as streaming files, so they can’t be downloaded and will thus be preserved from copyright violation. Different services are trying different things to really harness the dialogue that video sharing makes possible; I think that Viddler’s focus on time specific interaction could prove both easy and enjoyable for a wide variety of video publishers and viewers. The interface is appealing and if the forthcoming premium features are as well put together as the preview of the basic service I saw today – Viddler’s future could look good. Online video sharing is obviously a very crowded space, but I think there is plenty of room and time for new players to establish themselves. While Viddler isn’t about downloading video, the fact that Pew estimated last year that only a quarter → Read More
