Mefeedia subscriber stats in Feedburner.

Mefeedia subscriber stats are nowreported in Feedburner. It's all about making this ecology work.

Feedburner is a great service, a lot of videobloggers and podcasters use them to manage their RSS feeds. We've added subscriber reporting to Mefeedia so now you can see how many subscribers you have in Mefeedia in your Feedburner stats. The Feedburner people (Jessie) were great, they really helped us out setting this up.

Odeo's dirty little secret

Odeo is a great service, and they're improving all the time, but they have a dirty little secret.

They have not solved the findability problem of podcasts. Not even close.

It is very hard to find podcasts you like on Odeo. Peter Merholz noticed this, Donna noticed it too. Information architects!

Findability for audio and video is a HUGE issue. I'd say it's the number one problem waiting to be solved. It's just too damn hard to find good videoblogs and podcasts.

Even in Mefeedia, videoblogs are still too hard to find. The problem with video is that it is a black hole for attention. You can't do much else while watching video (although I've found you can actually take your attention away from the screen easily now and then and just listen).

It is very hard to decide whether a video is worth watching, worth spending all that attention on. On Mefeedia, I invest a lot in creating thumbnails, which serve the purpose of making the watch decision easier, of making videos more scannable.

And there are many other tricks coming up in the upcoming release this week. One of them is a BlogThis feature. You can blog a video from within Mefeedia, you can include thumbnails in your post (drag and drop!), it prefills the type (Quicktime), size and length of the movie and links to the original blog and such. The purpose of this is to encourage revlogging.

Revlogging is vlogging (videoblogging) about videos of other videobloggers. Videobloggers don't link enough to each other, and this is one tool that I hope will increase how much videobloggers talk about each other on their own blogs. All to increase findability - links from blogs to other videoblogs are one of the biggest findability tools out there.

So there you go: findability is the biggest problem for videoblogging right now. Who'da thunk it? A year ago, I thought bandwidth, hosting or creation tools would be our challenges. But now that the amount of videoblogs is exploding, and for the foreseeable future, it's findability. Which gives me a nice chunky challenge for next year with Mefeedia.

Building Mefeedia

I started talking about videoblogging with Jay in the spring of 2004. We were really excited: regular people could soon start their own television channels! We would have another way of connecting.

The most amazing thing is that this has actually happened, in only a year.

We started a mailing list together, in that spring of 2004, the videoblogging group, which has grown into one of the most active and supportive communities I know. Videobloggers organize conferences, barbeques, you name it. In 2005, we organized 2 conferences, vloggercon and vlogeurope. Podcasters take note. Videobloggers started node101, a nonprof dedicated to teaching videoblogging, and roadnode101, a roadtrip promoting videoblogging.

The amount of teaching that is going on is amazing for such a small community. We're much, much smaller than the podcasting community, but also much nicer, somehow. The community seems much less commercial. Of course, there is a lot of money in this space, but that's not what it's about, and that's not what most people seem to focus on.

Anyway, the title of this post is building Mefeedia.

I started hacking Mefeedia together as a video aggregator in December 2004, it took me a weekend to put it together. Ruby on Rails? Nope, PHP. I'll write more tomorrow, got some bugs to squash right now. The main thing I'd like to talk about is how the values you hold influence the features you decide to implement, and the whole design of the site. I was quite surprised by that. More tomorrow. No time. Bugs to squash. We're coming out with a new version of Mefeedia this week. Hot stuff.

Vlog Anarchy was an important post in videoblog history. Michael Verdi posted about how he felt about videoblogging, and it gave rise to a vlog anarchy tag, with lots of hearthfelt video responses.

Watch movie (Quicktime)

Original post, from MICHAEL VERDI:

Click here to view the video. I've been wanting to get this off my chest for a long time. Don't leave me any text comments - make a video instead and post the link. Also, go to Mefeedia and tag your video "vlog anarchy" and I'll post the RSS feed.

(Via Mefeedia)

What's really great about videoblogging?

• You can find people that you can really connect with.
• Stuff you can't find anywhere else.
  

Watch movie(Quicktime )

Original post, fromMICHAEL VERDI:

(Via Mefeedia)

Vlogging the revolution

Blogging4Business » Vlogging the revolution: "The number of vloggers (there are over 2,100 feeds on Mefeedia, a tally that seems to creep skyward hourly) out there is getting interesting enough to draw attention from fickle channel surfers. "

Watch movie ( 0.4 min 7.2 MB)

Original post, from gouldphishl's video blog:

Watch movie (Quicktime 10.8 min 45.6 MB)

Original post, from headsoff:

Marc Canter explains Ourmedia.

Watch movie (Quicktime 5.4 min 27 MB)

Original post, from Momentshowing:

What do you like?

Watch movie 2 min 3.9 MB (Original post, via scratch video)

So a few days after I notice Google advertising on Yahoo, I see, in the new rss thingie in Gmail, the following: "Ask Yahoo! - Exactly how fast is a knot and how did it get that name? - 5 days ago". I didn't subscribe to this, Google just added that in. Are the promoting a Yahoo service now?

For some reason, videobloggers seem to be really into Second Life.

Watch movie 0.9 min 3.5 MB (Original post, via MICHAEL VERDI)

Are you a winner? A looser? Wishbones sucks.

Vlogball is simple but because it's as part of a videoblog, anyone can join. Brilliant. This could go on for years.

Watch movie 0.7 min 3 MB (Original post, via Maura's Musings)

Google is advertising on Yahoo

This is cute, I am trying out Yahoo's adsense clone (in beta), and I get an ad for... Google adsense! The text reads:

"Free Google Search Script
Apply to Google AdSense - get free Google site search script and extra revenue. Learn more.
www.google.com"

Videoblogging history

So the podcasting guys are, clearly, being kids. Fighting over the history of podcasting. Jees. I documented a lot of stuff on the videoblogging wiki during 2004, which was the crucial year during which videoblogging started. Here's a copy, in case that resource goes down. For the future. As a disclaimer: this report probably misses a few important events, there might be a mistake or two in there as well.

1956

• AT&T builds the first Picturephone test system. Source

1966

• Douglas Engelbart demonstrates videoconferencing over a network. "Engelbart demonstrated NLS at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in 1968 in a presentation to several thousand conference participants. He demonstrated the mouse, the first working form of hypertext, and a form of video teleconferencing." Source

1970

• AT&T offers Picturephone for $160 per month. Source

1981

July

• Packet Video Protocol (PVP), by Randy Cole, USC/ISI Source

1992

• AT&T's $1,500 videophone for home market. Source

1998

• Adrian Miles publishes a paper called Cinematic Paradigms for Hypertext

2000

October

• Samsung releases the first MPEG-4 streaming 3G (CDMA2000-1x) video cell phone Source

November

• Adrian Miles posts his first (known) videoblog entry on November 27, 2000.

2001

January

• Dave Winer talks to Adam Curry and writes about Payloads For RSS, an article in which he presents the ENCLOSURE element for RSS which will lead to the Rss Enclosures technology.

July

• Human Dog begins regularly posting video. Not quite videoblogs, but it's a start. (Summer of Van Torre Series http://www.human-dog.com)

September

• World's first trans-atlantic tele gallbladder surgery. Source

October

• NTT Do Co Mo sells $570 3G (WCDMA) mobile videophone. Source
• TV reporters use $7,950 portable satellite videophone to broadcast live from Afghanistan. Source

2002

October

• Macro Media conducts videoblogging experiment using Flash. Jeremy Allaire writes Thoughts on Video Blog Experiment: "Over the past several days a number of us Macromedians conducted an experiment by using a simple Flash Com video communications applications to blog about the Macromedia Dev Con developer's conference."
• Chuck Olsen posts his first videoblog, a tribute to Paul Wellstone.

December

• Jeff Jarvis does a bunch of experiments with videoblogging.

2003

February

• BrowseTV begins airing as a live videoblog from a webcam and a laptop that simulcasts both online and on cable access television Audience members leave 'comments' by IM'ing the host and having their messages appear live on the show.

June

• BBC News: Will porn kick-start the video phone revolution?
• Nacho Duran set ups the first South American videoblog, posting the first time on 2003/06/15 http://www.feitoamouse.com.br/videoblog/junio/030615.htm

March

• Slashdot article Are Video Blogs Ready For Prime Time? (refering to an MSNBC article that's not really about videoblogging)

September

• Textamerica Introduces Camera Phone Video Moblogging (videomoblogging? movideoblogging? movoblogging?) (12/09/2003,Source)

December

• Justin Johnson blog starts experimenting with videoblogging.

2004

January

• Steve Garfield starts videoblogging with the post 2004 The Year Of The Videoblog
• Chris Weagel of Human Dog opens the Human Dog Laboratory. Weekly video posts begin January 13, 2004. (http://www.human-dog.com/exper/journal1.html)

April

• Time Magazine article makes videoblogging a hot topic (mentioning Steve Garfield): See Me, Blog Me
• This wiki is created.
• Peter Van Dijck posts his first videoblogging entry.

May

• Adam Curry announces the start of the development of a tool to make videoblogging easier, calling it Personal Tv Networks.

June

• Peter Van Dijck and Jay Dedman start the videoblogging mailing list, which will turn into an active community.
• A small group of people decide to experiment with posting one videoblogging post a day during Video Blogging Week.
• June 20 – Mica Scalin posts first video to Hello?http://publicaddress.typepad.com a videoblog studio.

July

• Vidblogs dot com officially launches, with over 30 active video bloggers.
• Charlene, a professional editor by day, starts her videoblog after talking to Mica.
• Lisa posted the first known personal videoblog entry using video from a cellphone — the VX7000 which uses the 3g2 format.

Aug

• The first known sign-video-blog entry (using sign language in video on a blog)
• The first known videoblog that allows video-comments.
• Aug 23 – The collaborative video project, Excuisite Corpse begins.

Oct

• First beta of Creative Commons Publisher is released, allowing videobloggers to easily upload large videos that the Internet Archive will host for free if they have a Creative Commons? license.
• Joshua Kinberg create's Vipodder, a videoblog aggregator based on the iPodder concept using Applescript, Perl, and Cellulo 2.0 – a quicktime playlist application for Mac OS X.

Nov

• Article in portuguese about videoblogging: Internautas incrementam blogues com vídeos digitais
• Steve Garfield sets up a test blog for the concept of videopodcasting http://stevegarfield.blogs.com/videopodcast/
• Steve Garfield uploads the first videoblogging entry to the internet archive here.
• The videoblogging mailing list has grown to 120 members and over 2000 messages, and spawned a sister mailing list called videoblogging_content

Dec

• Peter Van Dijck starts me-tv, the first vogbrowser (browser based videoblog aggregator), inspired by a prototype vogbrowser by Kenyatta.
• Jay Dedman and Josh Kinberg start ANT's not television, the first desktop based videoblog aggregator.
• Businessweek writes about videoblogging.
• ABC News names bloggers some of it's People Of The Year. The 3.5 minute piece features The Youngest Videoblogger In The World, Dylan Verdi. Michael Verdi made this post explaining how it all happened.

The new homepage of Odeo is beautiful, but they make a common mistake: with a signup form of 4 fields, why not put it on the homepage? How many new users do they miss like this? At least a certain percentage of users might have become interested users once signed up, and might have signed up if the form was right there.

This is a test of Yahoo's new RSS to SMS service. I should get this message on my cellphone. Let's see how it works. And how much text it actually transmits. Text messages are short, right. Well, this is a long test message. Loooooong. Keep testing. yey.

I think I found the absolute BEST way to report bugs and it's free too.

I have done quite a bit of testing of websites in my day, and reporting bugs is never a joy. But I think I have found what may be the absolute fastest way to report bugs. The approach consists of a few different parts:

1. Get a Flickr account and download Grabbr. Grabbr is great for taking screenshots and sending them to Flickr: you click shift F-12, and the app opens with a screenshot in it. Then you click the upload button. Then you open your Flickr window in the browser, click "my fotos" and the screenshot shows up.
2. Now you are looking at a screenshot of the bug. Click "add note", and add a few notes on areas of the screen describing the bug. I find this works really naturally, adding the notes forces you to describe what happens, and about half website bugs can be easily described in a screenshot.
3. Next, I add a bugreport to my bugtracking system. Often, it is just a title and a "see http://...." (the flickr link). That's all that's needed for the developers to reproduce and fix the bug.

Here's an example bugreport at Flickr. Hover over the photo to see the note. This is really the fastest bug reporting system I've ever used. It takes between 30 and 60 seconds to report most bugs. For real. And you need a lot less text to describe a problem with a screenshot and the notes feature. Of course it doesn't work for all bugs. Some bugs take more time. What do you think? Useful? I'm loving it!

MICHAEL VERDI » Lucky

Michael Verdi, Ryanne and others started videoblogging about a year ago, and the looking-back type videos are starting to come out.

Videoblogging has really been an amazing adventure so far. Here's to another year of this. Let's hope thousands, if not millions of people discover this as a hobby, as a way to connect, as a new art form. (Not as a business model, that's not what we're talking about here.) The videoblogging community has a real voice, and real values, and I hope those don't get dilluted too much in the coming year. I've always felt podcasters are more commercial. Maybe it's because they have Adam Curry and we have Jay Dedman. Leaders really set the values for a movement. Maybe it's because of that name - podcsting - that implies a particular, commercial player, who seems to have co-opted the movement. (Lightnet might provide some hope there.) Who knows.

In any case, here's to another year of videoblogging. May we not sell out, may we believe in the power of individual voices speaking truth and connecting. May we shave a few minutes of the average 4 hours the American watches television every day.

Lightnet

What is Lightnet
?

Blingtones

I was looking at a few popular websites that, how shall I say it, challenge my conceptions of what a good website is. Myspace continues to amaze by its ugliness. And sites like Blingtones generate, strangly enough, a *lot* of revenue.

PSP Update 2.6: Podcasting (RSS) and WMA Music Support!

Russell Beattie Notebook » PSP Update 2.6: Podcasting (RSS) and WMA Music Support!: Sony does the logical thing: they build in a podcatching client into the PSP. No synching via the computer needed, the audio files go straight to your PSP.

Of course they manage to fuck it up: the audio (no video??) streams, so you have to be connected to a wireless network for streaming.

This won't take off. It's almost there, so close, but misses a crucial part of podcasting: the caching locally and then listening whenever you want.

Sony will conclude people don't want podcasts on their PSP, and the opportunity will be lost. So close. I hope they'll improve it to the point of usefulness though. Even if it means I have to buy a memory stick. Sell cheap memory sticks, add video, and you have a killer app for the PSP.

Too bad they make their money on games, not hardware. Coz if they made money selling PSP's, they would do everything to make it a more useful platform and fix these problems.

I'm getting sick of the "Ooops! The system was unable to perform the operation. Try again in a few minutes." error messages at Gmail.

Don't be cute, guys. There's too much cuteness in these web apps these days. A useful message would be: "Couldn't send this email right now. Try again in a few seconds." The "system"? What is this, Big brother? (perhaps..)

What's Next :: Google vs. the Venture Capitalists

Business 2.0 :: Magazine Article :: What's Next :: Google vs. the Venture Capitalists: "Yet since it started the practice in 2003, Google has snatched up 12 companies, many of which had raised only small amounts of funding and sometimes no venture capital. And lately its pace of acquisitions has quickened. In the past six months, the company has purchased five microscopic startups."

Rodrigo A. Sepúlveda Schulz: The stuff I like about video publishing online. Rodrigo is slowly lifting the vail on his upcoming video publishing service.

PodGuide.tv: Mefeedia video podcast directory: "If, as I have, you've been discovering the wild and sometimes bizarre world of podcasts with your newly-acquired iPod, you may want to visit Mefeedia, a directory that lists thousands of video podcasts. It's the place I go to find some of the channels I feature here on the site. The depth of the directory is astounding."

Official Google Blog: Get News in Portuguese: "We've just launched two different editions of Google News: one for Brazil and one for Portugal."

Videoblogging growing faster than podcasting

Streamingmedia.com: Streaming Media West 2005 Wrap-Up, Part 2: "Podcasting is growing, but video blogging is growing faster."

Of course it is growing faster - it's younger :)

Yahoo! 360° - Home

The problem I have with Yahoo! 360° is that.. somehow, it seems to lack some kind of focus. I go there now and then, and as an IA, I can see the underlying structure, beautifully structured, it's like a work of art almost. But I look at the first page I land on, and I see.. nothing. Some people I've added.. but nothing to grab onto. Nothing of substance. Then I click on some things, and I just see more empty pages. Sure, there are blogs, My Page, you name it, but it all feels like a bit of a wasteland. It's just not satisfying, and I don't find myself returning there often. Whenever I go it's just professional curiosity.

I hope for God's sake that Mefeedia isn't web 2.0, whatever that means.

What's web2.0 about mefeedia? There are no rounded colors, few pastel colors, little AJAX (only when really necessary), ... Buzzword compliance no achieved! Yet it's implementing what I think is the future of online media strategy: centralized subscription management. It's not a new idea, Odeo gets it, Yahoo gets it.

But is it web 2.0? (God I hope not!)

XML Developer Center: Frequently Asked Questions for Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE). M$'s new RSS synchronisation system looks kind of hot. CC licensed and everything. I can think of a few revolutionary applications already.. synchronizing stuff without central service in between, in a simple and open way. That just rocks.

XTech 2006

I reviewed submitted papers for O'Reilly's XTech conference last year, the new call for papers for XTech 2006 is out. Enjoy!

Technorati tags and tag spamming

Sifry's Alerts: Technorati Performance Improvement Update: look at the bottom of that post: "Technorati Tags: blogosphere, blogs, blogsearch, competition, feedback, givingthanks, google, gratitude, scaling, search, search engine, statistics, stats, technorati, wow, yahoo"

Those are not tags David uses for himself to find his own post back. Those are tags to make sure this post shows up high in Technorati tags. And they feel like the old keyword stuffing to me. Does the way Technorati handles tags encourage tag spam? I've always felt that with tags, it's not about having a lot of them. It's about having a small amount within a social circle that's useful. When I see tag stuffing like in this post, sometimes I wonder: are tags going the way of the meta keyword html tag?

(Do I watch too many sex in the city reruns?)

Technorati Weblog: Temporary Keyword Search Limitation

Technorati Weblog: Temporary Keyword Search Limitation: "Today we experienced a so-called Dictionary Attack on our keyword search service. Someone was trying to extract the contents of our index by doing a large number of searches, going way back in time. Attacks like this can cause slower response times for you, our loyal users, and this makes us very cranky."

Extract the contents of our index? Wow, these are weird times we live in...

TechCrunch » First Screen Shots of Riya

TechCrunch » First Screen Shots of Riya: "Riya’s ability to know who’s in a photo is largely based on who you are and the people you are connected to."

Fascinating.

DV Guru

DV Guru: "Mefeedia has been around since the beginning of videoblogging time (well a little bit afterward). In fact the founder, Peter Van Dijk, also helped start the yahoo videoblogging group with Jay Dedman - which is like a mecca for videobloggers (seriously, talk about a community).

Just recently, mefeedia spruced up their web site features by adding reviews. So now, not only can you subscribe to your favorite vlog, you can also see what other people are saying about them and write a review yourself. You can also apply tags to the videos you see and have your own video queue on the site, which you can apply an RSS feed to. Also, if you have videos on the site, you can bunch them up into an archive and show them off as thumbnails on your own site. Right now there are 1141 vlogs accounted for. Seriously."

Editing rounds for website development

You know how, when you write a book, they assign you different editors? A grammar editor who looks at the book from the point of view of grammar and vocabulary. A technical editor, or factchecker, who checks there are no mistakes in there. A content editor who checks whether you're talking about the right stuff and it's interesting. When you edit text yourself with those hats on, your really find a lot of things you don't if you just try to improve the text without focusing on 1 area. So the same can apply to websites. You can go over a beta site in various rounds, and wear a different hat every time:

• Focus on editing text.
• Focus on writing the right text for usability.
• Do a usability test.
• Focus on the overall layout of each page: does it have a clear beginning? A clear title? A clear focal point?
• Focus on interaction: is it consistent throughout the site?
• And so on.

The advantage of focusing on 1 specific area and spending an hour or 2, 3 doing only that is that you really start to refine the site in a way that just general looking at it wouldn't do. And if you refine it in enough areas, you get something shiny. Nice. Do you use this idea of editing rounds with very specific hats on?

Who will host your vlog?

Netcraft: Podcasts Help Drive Demand for High-Volume Hosting: "As podcasts and video blogs consume disk space and bandwidth, will these large media files reside with major web hosting providers, niche startups spawned by the Blogosphere, or perhaps Yahoo or Google?"

Hosting videoblogs is a large-scale game, which is why I think it will soon (within a year) be the exclusive game of the big boys. Not to say startups like Blip.tv aren't doing an amazingly excellent job - they are. But they'll need serious cash to scale this up, whereas the big guys already are strong in that area. What startups do well is innovation, and where's the innovation in free hosting? That seems to be an inherent problem with many of the video "free-hosting" startups.

Just to say I'm glad I'm working on a directory for videoblogs. Not only is it easier to scale, and easier to compete with Google/Yahoo/MSN. But it's also, in my view, a more valuable project. Directories, especially for video, are super important, because search will not be able to play the dominant role for video taht it plays for the text web. Video search just isn't enough, because video itself demands much more supporting metadata before you decide to give it your attention (you can't scan it quickly and skip it). Video search is an unsolved problem, and will stay that way for a while, not because we can't search video, but because the requirement for you to decide wether you want to watch or skip this video is much higher than just a list of search result.

In other words, video directories/sites that help you find the good stuff will have at least 5 or 10 happy years ahead of them (until video search becomes good enough). And the reason that doing an independent directory is important is that the big media companies (who have deep pockets to promote their stuff) are jumping on internet television.

If we create a world in which the internet video most people watch is that coming from big media, we've missed an opportunity. If we create a world in which the long tail of video can find itself, we've won.

That's the challenge, and that's why I hope that in a year, there will be dozens of videoblog directories, hundreds of community video sites, thousands of revlog blogs, filtering out that long tail, making it easy for you to find video you are interested in, not video that commercial interests think you should watch. That's the vision.

I'm working on the nav of Mefeedia, the experience you have when watching videos in your queue, moving between your queue, feeds you are subscribed to and so on.

I could have specced this out, but I'm finding that just building it really works. I'm changing my mind all the time about how exactly it should look - I spend 5 minutes changing the layout, then putting on my users hat and playing with it for a few minutes... then thinking about it and making a change.

There is no way I could spec this and give it to a developer, because the spec would take longer to think through than actually building it. And I wouldn't have so much opportunity to change my mind.

I was thinking yesterday that there really shouldn't be such a line between people who spec stuff out and people who create. But it's impossibly hard to find good programmers who can also make good decisions on what to build and how it should look.