Following Election 08 on Vodpod, Redux

May 1, 2008 – 6:40 pm

Several months ago, we wrote about using Vodpod to follow the 2008 presidential campaign.

Since then, some of the best political bloggers have started using Vodpod to collect timely, interesting videos relevant to the 2008 campaign using our tools and blog widgets (we’re grateful the first to make the leap to use our product was the the wonderful Talking Points Memo).

As a result, I think we can credibly claim Vodpod is one of the two or three best places on the web to keep track of political videos.

Check out these video collections from the best political blogs and sites out there, and follow them if you’re a political junkie:

Talking Points Memo

Ben Smith at The Politico.com

Guardian UK America Blog

Veracifier (by Next New Networks, in conjunction with Talking Points Memo)

Jed Report

It’s Political from blip.tv

The Palmetto Scoop

We also have a number of great individual bloggers on Vodpod who have built terrific collections. We encourage you to check them out, and follow them if you like:

elonkey’s collection

Election ‘08 pod (by my alter ego)

DJ Conservo for a more conservative view

Putsch TV;

VideopoliticaTV (en espagnol!)

DragonFlyEye

When you follow pods on Vodpod, you’ll see the videos they add in a “news feed” on your Vodpod home page. My alter ego follows many of the pods listed above, and my news feed currently looks like this:

You can easily scan what videos are getting added by these terrific bloggers — just click to watch those that intrigue or interest you. It’s a great way to discover new videos, watch them, and collect them for your blog.

Finally, check out our new tag pages to explore the latest political videos being added on Vodpod:

Barack, Obama, Barack Obama, Clinton, Hillary Clinton, McCain, John McCain, politics, election, and Colbert Report!

By mark | Posted in Finding Great Videos, News and Announcements, Pods, Search and Discovery | Comments (0)

The Politico on Vodpod!

May 1, 2008 – 4:42 pm

If you’ve been following the 2008 presidential campaign here in the US, you’ve undoubtedly heard mention of The Politico. In just a little over a year, it’s gone from a brand new startup site to a must-read for those interested in political coverage. (It certainly hasn’t hurt that The Politico is helmed by two very well-regarded ex-Washington Post journalists, John Harris and Jim VandeHei).

For those of us completely obsessed with this year’s campaign, the Politico is home to one of the best political bloggers online, Ben Smith. Smith is also an active, excellent curator of topical online political videos, mining YouTube and other sites for the freshest, most relevant coverage throughout the day.

And happily for those of us who are campaign junkies, those videos are now getting collected in a pod, and can be watched both on Ben’s blog (with one of our widgets) and on Vodpod. Here’s a screenshot of Ben’s widget on The Politico:

If you’re interested in tracking the latest video coverage of the presidential campaign, check out Ben’s pod on Vodpod and follow him.

By mark | Posted in News and Announcements, Pods, Stuff We Love | Comments (0)

Guardian UK on Vodpod!

May 1, 2008 – 4:28 pm

I spent 2002-2005 living in London, and the Guardian was my favorite (should I say “favourite”?) daily read — both the paper and the online site.

And, as students of the online newspaper space know, the Guardian has been a real innovator and leader on the Web. They have embraced RSS, blogging, podcasting and other new online tools extensively and intelligently on their site.

So I’m thrilled to see the Guardian start to use Vodpod this Spring. The Guardian America team is using Vodpod to build a video collection on US politics for their Guardian USA blog, and using one of our widgets shown below:

Check out the full Guardian America pod and follow them to keep track of their collection. It’ll be a great way to follow the campaign season this year here in the United States.

By mark | Posted in News and Announcements, Pods, Stuff We Love | Comments (0)

Hello, Vodpod Deuce

April 28, 2008 – 4:00 am

This weekend, we launched a new version of the Vodpod.com site.

It’s the most sweeping set of changes we’ve made to the service since we launched 17 months ago.

We’ve tried to do two main things:

1. Help you discover new videos you might like by connecting you to other members with similar interests and tastes.

2. Make everything a lot simpler.

The best thing to do at this point is login, and experience the changes for yourself.

But, for those of you who’d like more detail, a few screenshots and some explanatory information follows.

You’ll find that your Pod page is much simpler. At it’s heart is a reverse-chronological list of the videos you’ve collected recently.

Pod Example: The Vodpod Pod

We no longer have categories and tags; just tags, now (if you added categories, don’t worry, they’ve been converted to tags). If you have a large collection, visitors to your pod will be able to browse through it more easily than before, by tag.

When your visitors click to watch a video, they’ll see a page like this:

The new video page shows all of the activity on Vodpod related to that video; who collected it and who commented on it, links that will often take you to other members who might have collections you like.

We also now provide a handy “related” videos list — it’s addictive, though, once you start clicking you can’t stop…

Another addictive way to browse videos is through our new “tag” pages:

You can browse through videos collected by Vodpod members by tag, visit related tags, or the collections of members who have collected the most videos for that tag.

In the end, all of these new connections to other members should help you to find people on Vodpod who collect videos you like. When you find such a member, follow them. When you do, you’ll be able to

By mark | Posted in News and Announcements | Comments (2)

One Million Videos from 3,500 Sites

April 28, 2008 – 2:00 am

Last week, our humble little service passed through two significant milestones:

1. As of Wednesday last week, videos had been collected from over 3,500 different sites.

2. Sometime early Friday morning, a Vodpod member had collected the 1,000,000th video on Vodpod.

We’re excited about both milestones. After all, they prove an important and fundamental point — we all control both the studio and the broadcast station now.

Anyone can now publish just about any video they want. That’s why there our members have been able to collect videos from so many different sites. In the last 17 months, we’ve seen new video sharing sites launch for different countries and languages, as well as specific and particular interests. Because it is so easy now to both publish and watch these videos, we don’t see the numbers slowing down.

In other words, the web is acting like it always has — it’s highly distributed.

And given we can now all make and publish videos easily, freely, we also need to help each other find the good stuff. That’s what Vodpod is about.

I need to make one point about how our members collected videos from so many sites. We can take credit for part of this. The simple but powerful tool we’ve made — the Vodpod “save videos” button that let’s you collect videos with a click — has certainly made it a lot easier to collect videos.

But credit given where credit is due; none of this would be possible without the new and evolving standard for how to publish videos online.

That would be Flash + the embed code.

Thanks to the many creative people who had a role in the evolution of those two things.

By mark | Posted in News and Announcements | Comments (0)

Collect Videos from 1000s of Sites

April 27, 2008 – 6:30 pm

Vodpod is the best way — ok, we’re biased — to build your own personal collection of videos from around the web. You can collect videos to share with your friends, to put on your blog or Facebook or Myspace with our widgets, or just to keep track of the stuff you like.

We have tools that let you collect videos from literally 1000s of sites. (Pretty much any video site that provides an “embed code.”)

The videos you collect go in a “Pod” — it’s the place where people can check out your collection, and looks like this:

Pod Example: The Vodpod Pod

Once you collect some videos, there are plenty of other things to do on Vodpod.

Such as find new videos to watch through our community. The best way to do this is to follow other Vodpod members, so you can keep track of the most interesting videos they’re collecting. Browse through the latest videos by “tag” and you’ll find other Vodpod members who share your tastes and interests.

Vodpod is a great way to share videos with your friends — so invite them to join up so they can track your collection.

Or, share the videos you collect somewhere else — our widgets work more or less any anywhere you want! Put one on your blog, Myspace, Facebook, or other social network or website you use, and your friends and contacts can watch your collection from there, without ever having to visit Vodpod.

By mark | Posted in Overview, Welcome | Comments (3)

How do I put my Vodpod collection on my blog?

April 26, 2008 – 6:30 pm

Our widgets let you take your video collection, and put it where you want: your blog, Myspace, Facebook, or other personal web site or social network page.

We have a variety of shapes and sizes (you can see some of them just surfing our blog, and full gallery is here). If you don’t like the stock widgets we provide, you can customize the layout (if you know a little CSS) or even build your own widget (or, your own version of Vodpod!) using our API.

With our Vodpod widgets, your guests can play through your video collection right on your blog or website (no one’s forced to leave your site):

So, once you’ve collected some videos, you can share them on your blog or Facebook or Myspace.

Just click the “Widget” link on the right side of the page, under the “Tools and Widgets” heading:

That will take you to our widget configuation page, where you can also select the type of widget you’d like to use, and customize the color and layout. For more details, read this.

By mark | Posted in Welcome, Widgets | Comments (3)

Vodpod “Save Videos” Button

April 26, 2008 – 6:06 pm

The easiest way to collect videos on Vodpod with with our “Save to Vodpod” button. It works on literally thousands of sites that provide Flash videos with an embed code (3500 and counting as of April 25, 2008) and lets you save video to your collection with a click. You can also use it to post videos to your blog.

Just go to the page that has the video you want to collect:

Then, click on the Orange Vodpod “Save Videos” button, it looks like this:

That will bring up a pop-up window that looks like this:

Just write a comment — people want to know why you like it! — add some tags (so you can keep your collection organized) and click save. That’s it.

You can also post the video to your blog (or Twitter, or Tumblr) too. Just click the “Post to Blog” tag and you’ll see this window:

Choose your blog platform, enter your blog URL and credentials (you only have to do this once), write your post and click to publish. You’re done!

Get the button here. We have a Firefox extension (pictured above) or “bookmarklet” versions that for your bookmark toolbar for IE, Firefox, Safari and Camino.

If you click the “Save to Vodpod” button but don’t see the preview for the video you want to add, don’t panic. Instructions on what to do here.

UPDATE:
If you have installed the button but it isn’t showing up on your toolbar, click “Tools” then “Add-ons” and make sure that the extension is in fact installed. If it is, but doesn’t show up, try the following:

1. Make sure you’ve restarted Firefox after installing.

2. Make sure your Navigation toolbar is on (it probably is, but just checking). The “Save to Vodpod” extension is displayed on the Navigation toolbar (along with the back, forward and home buttons, the URL box, etc).

3. Go to your Navigation bar customization menu and try to drag it on to your Navigation toolbar. To do that, right click (PC) or Apple Command-click (Mac) and click “Customize.” Then drag the orange Vodpod button up to your Firefox toolbar. One of our members, Steve Hornik, has made a great video showing how he did this here:
http://www.screencast.com/users/shornik/folders/Jing/media/e3a2d612-f731-45ad-8525-c76766beac0e

By mark | Posted in Tools, Welcome | Comments (9)