Summer seems like a great time to revamp our hosting stack and upgrade our application to Rails 2.3!
We’re finally ditching Apache in favor of Nginx + HAProxy. It’s a little scary to leave the warm embrace of good ‘ol Apache - but we’re ready to move on. Seems sort of appropriate, as we move from something US-built to find products from Russia and France, it rather reflects the growth of vodpod overall.
This change should mean better site performance and more capacity for growth.
Vodpod helps people bookmark and collect their favorite videos from any site,. And we have tools that make it easy and simple to publish your video collection to any site, so people can watch those videos anywhere you like.
A logical next step for us to is to make easy for people to watch your collection not just on any site, but on any device — including your TV.
We’re starting to experiment with just that today, with the release of special RSS feeds for your Vodpod collections, and Vodspot sites, for Boxee, a very new (and very alpha!) bit of software that lets you watch videos on your PC or from the Net on your TV. People can now watch your video collection on a TV connected to Boxee by going to your collection (or your Vodspot, if you have one), copying the URL for the “Boxee RSS” feed, and pasting in at boxee.tv here.
Caveats abound: for someone to watch your videos through Boxee, they’ll have to have have Boxee installed on a device that supports it and is connected to your TV (you can also use Boxee just on your PC, but that kind of misses the point); and not all Flash players play nicely with Boxee, so your viewing experience will be a bit inconsistent.
But it’s interesting, and it certainly provides a peak into the future. We should note Boxee isn’t the only game in town. There is another similar, and very interesting bit of software called Plex, and we read with interest today that Flash10 is coming to a variety of phones this Fall. Interesting times.
Did you know you can have Vodpod automatically bookmark videos you share in Twitter?
Yep, it’s a rhetorical question.
Just go to the blog importer, choose “Twitter” from the drop-down and enter your username. You can see it in action on this vodpodder’s account.
Lori Gregory now has an archive of the videos she’s been sharing on Twitter. Nice, simple, cool.
Footage of Iranians protesting their elections on the streets of Tehran the past three days has been extremely moving. Unlike the uprising in China in 1989 and the massacre in Tiananmen Square, these scenes of unrest are captured on mobile phones and small digital devices and sent to the world.
We’ve tried to document some of the more recent and best footage and reportage here. Many other Vodpod members are collecting videos about the protests from web sites and news sources around the world, including Video Giornale Interattivo, Dheeruyadav, and Dandelionsalad. You can see all the latest footage collected by our members here.
Please bookmark videos you find, and tag them “Iran” or “Iran Election Protests” so we can help one another to stay informed.
Vodpod is simply best way to collect and to keep track of your favorite videos on the web.
We have three powerful tools for collecting videos: a browser button; search; and a “blog importer” that automatically collects videos you post to your blog, share on Twitter, or favorite on YouTube.
You can collect videos from any site that offers Flash video and an embed code so enable sharing. Nearly 10,000 different sites at this point.
Once you’ve collected some videos, we make it easy to publish your collection anywhere you like. You’ll find widgets for your blog; applications for Facebook and Twitter; an API that lets you build most anything you’d like; a variety of RSS feeds, including ones so you can watch your collection on Boxee; and finally a simple, fun way to build your own video site, called Vodspot.
Only six months ago we announced VodSpot, a way to turn your Vodpod video collection into your own video site with the push of a button.
Like so many things we do, VodSpot was an experiment. We put it out there to see what people might create with it and how it might be used. Six months in we see a lot of promise; so much that we’re investing a bunch of energy and time over the next few months to dramatically expand the capabilities of VodSpot, and to turn it into a more substantial publishing platform. Stay tuned.
The ways in which this new service is being used are quite diverse. One of our longtime partners, Talking Points Memo, launched a new video section of their site built on VodSpot in the spring. It is a compendium of recent videos they have produced, as well as relevant and interesting reportage, commentary and even comedy from other media outlets (MSNBC, CNN, The DailyShow among them).
We’re pleased that a number of prominent news and political blogs use Vodpod, and many have created VodSpots as well — among them Americablog and the Sayfie Review.
TechStars is a Boulder, Co.-based organization that provides both seed capital and mentorship for start-ups and entrepreneurs. They’ve created TechStars.tv, where one can watch videos about the TechStars program and the start ups in it, as well as speeches by and interviews with many of the mentors in the program.
Actual startups use VodSpots, too! One is Help Hive, a new service just launched in Seattle. It helps Seattle-ites find plumbers, gardeners, roofers, landscapers and more. They have created a Vodspot where they share very funny collection of DIY-gone-wrong videos — proof if any were needed why it’s better to hire an expert than to try to do it yourself.
A VodSpot can serve as an excellent companion to a blog. A perfect example of this is the NecoleBitchie.com blog, where the author casts a wry eye on the world of R&B and hip-hop stars. Ms. Bitchie’s video collection — named Bitchie TV, naturally — seamlessly fits into the layout and navigation of her blog, maintaining the same header and overall look and feel of the blog. It also shows the range of template styles VodSpot can support.
The ReelSEO blog, which provides in-depth coverage of the online video world, also has done a nice job building out a video section to their site. Again, the overall look and feel of the blog has been maintained, with a consistent and header on both the VodSpot and the main blog.
The most recent, and very intriguing, use of VodSpot comes from the Gawker blog empire. Just today they launched a microsite ad for the HBO show “TrueBlood” — powered by VodSpot. The microsite is linked to from the Gawker.com front door through a Vodpod widget. Cool, we think. And interesting.
There are over 3000 VodSpots in the wild, so we’ve barely gotten started with this post. I’d have to stay up a lot later to cover the full range.
I just pushed out some snazzy new user pages at Vodpod. Now, instead of having a subdomain for each collection (i.e. http://spencerpod.vodpod.com), you’ll have a single user page showing all your recent activity. This page will showcase all the videos you add on vodpod, as well as comments you leave on other videos. You can check out my page at http://vodpod.com/spencer.
For those of you with multiple video collections, each collection will live under your user profile page. For example, my “electronic music videos” collection is at http://vodpod.com/spencer/electro.
In your sidebar, we’ve added a couple of nifty modules, most notably the Stats module. This shows a fancy little chart of your monthly video views. Below that, you can also see how many videos you’ve discovered, meaning you were the first to collect, and videos you’ve made popular, which are those that you discovered, and 5 or more people went on to collect.
I hope you like the changes!
Our Vodpod browser button not only helps you collect videos on Vodpod from over thousands of different sites; it’s also handy for posting videos to your blog (we support Wordpress, Typepad, Blogger, Tumblr) or Twitter or Facebook.
Get the button here if you haven’t installed it.
When you first use the button, you’ll need to choose the blogging platform you want to use:
The first time you use the “Post to Blog” service you’ll need to enter your blog credentials (username and password and blog URL) .
Write your post and hit publish and you’re done. Simple.
If you want to simply save the post as a draft, or control other attributes, click the “send to my editor” link and then edit your post using using your blog editor.
You can also click the “Get the code” link to grab the embed code and paste into your blog (this is especially handy for Wordpress.com bloggers, as we create a short code for the video). That’s also a handy way to grab multiple videos for a single post.
Tomorrow is the 4th WordCamp (I was a proud attendee of the first, in August 2006) and in honor of that we’re launching two new services:
1. A special new Wordpress theme built just for video bloggers, and deeply integrated with Vodpod. You can see an initial version of it in action now, on our GeekBlog. You can get the theme now, right here, from Press75.
2. Our new auto-blog service, which lets you automatically publish videos you collect on Vodpod to your blog. This works, as of today, with any Wordpress, Blogger or Typepad blog.
The new theme was developed in partnership with Press75 and the talented Jason Schuller. At Press75, Jason has created some of the most popular premium Wordpress themes for video bloggers. This new theme is elegant, FREE, open source, and is, we hope, the beginning of a trend.
It may be the perfect way for video bloggers to share their favorite videos from the web.
First, it makes adding a video dead-simple, fast, easy, and painless. It takes just a click to post the video — Vodpod grabs the embed code, makes the thumbnail, and post this all to the Wordpress blog where is displayed effortlessly and elegantly in the new theme.
Second, the theme itself is a beautiful and elegant way to show off videos you think are interesting or relevant. A horizontal video strip at the top allows visitors to watch the a featured set of videos (you can define the set by tag).
In the main column, you can intermingle text posts with video posts. When you post a video, text commentary wraps naturally around the thumbnail — no more clunky looking embeds cluttering the page. Clicking on a thumbnail plays the video in a nice widescreen lightbox; you’re freed from the constraints of narrow columns designed primarily for text display. Clicking on a title lets you watch on a specific page for the video, where you can do all the things you’d want to do on a blog — read the accompanying commentary, rate the video, or comment on the video.
With this new video-centric theme, you still get all of the capabilities you’d expect with a Wordpress blog — great publishing features, support for a wide array of widgets on the sidebar, inclusion of advertising if you want that. It’s still rough in places, and we will work with Jason to refine and improve the theme over the coming weeks. But we think this is an exciting glimpse at how a Wordpress blog can leverage the capabilities of Vodpod (and vice versa).
The second announcement is more under the hood, but also important for both bloggers and theme developers. You can now set up Vodpod to publish directly to your blog. To set this up, just log in to your Vodpod account, click the “blog autopost” link under “Share and Publish.” All you need to do is enter your blog credentials, and we’ll post videos automagically to your blog when you collect on Vodpod (this is our blog importer, in reverse).
Again, if you are a blogger who likes to post videos, you’ll find this an incredibly simple and powerful tool. And the best way to get videos onto your blog. Period. Just one click to get the video both into Vodpod and onto your blog.
This is also important for theme developers. Because we provide the title, text, embed code and a thumbnail (and, we can even more data), theme developers can now build new kinds of video-centric themes that leverage the simplicity and power of Vodpod to make more dynamic, elegant video-centric themes. If you’re interested in that, and working with us, please be in touch.
Wordpress.com is a great, free blogging platform. Scott and I both use it for our personal blogs.
Happily for Wordpress.com users, our Vodpod widget is built in as a sidebar widget. Here are the steps to add and then configure your Vodpod widget on Wordpress.com:
First, login to Wordpress.com, click “Appearance” and then “Widgets.”
You’ll see a menu of Wordpress.com widgets. They’re organized alphabetically, so scroll down to the bottom, and then drag the Vodpod Videos widget over to your sidebar area.
(This video does a nice job showing you how to add a widget to your Wordpress.com blog sidebar).
Then, just paste the code provided at Vodpod.com for your widget into the form and click the “Save” button and your done.
Instructions on how to get the right code from Vodpod.com for your widget are here.