Vodpod Blog

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September 24, 2007 • 7:35 pm 8

Configuring your Vodpod Widget

Vodpod widgets work on dozens of different websites and blog platforms, and are easy to setup and configure.

From your Vodpod home page (you’ll need to be logged in) click on the appropriate link under “Share and Publish”:

You can simply install the basic version of the widget, or use the Advanced Setup features to make further customizations:

A live preview is available on the right of the page, so you can preview the widget before you deploy it on your blog or website.

You can enable advertising on your widget, too — details here.

Filed under: Basics, For Your Blog, Publishing Tools

September 11, 2007 • 12:16 am 6

New Tools, Useful and Fun

We’re excited to tell you about some cool, fun, useful new tools we’ve been working on the past couple of months:

1. The New & Improved “Save to Vodpod” Button
Our simple but powerful button for your browser has helped our members collect videos from nearly 1400 different sites around the web. Tonight, we’re happy to announce a new upgrade to the button, you can get it here.

You can now use the “Save to Vodpod” to post videos to your blog (we’re supporting WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, Tumblr and Twitter to start) as well as saving them to your Pod. You can even write a post and save it (and the video) as a draft, so you can do further editing in the blog editor or your choice. More information about the button is here.

If you use the Firefox browser, we’ve built a special Firefox extension that’s even more powerful, and obtains the embed code from more sites (we’re working on an IE version, stay tuned IE users).

You can even use the button to post videos to WordPress.com blogs. We’ve worked with the WordPress crew so that bloggers can use our new button to embed videos from 1000s of other sites around the web to their WordPress.com blogs (and we even built them a special, “Post to WordPress” edition of the button which you can get here if you’re a WordPress.com blogger).

2. The Organizer
We’ve been tinkering over the summer with a powerful, new tool to help you organize your video collection, sorting videos into categories you choose. We know many of you now have 50 or more videos in your collection and we think this new tool will make it much easier to put videos into categories (so it’s easier, in turn, for your visitors to browse your collection). We’ve got a separate post about the organizer here.

In addition to the Organizer, we’ve made it easier to replace “broken” videos on Vodpod. Click the “replace” link on a video that’s marked as broken, and we’ll help you to find a replacement video.

3. New Home Page for Members
Finally, we should note that we launched a new home page for your members in mid-August.

Among other things, the new home page makes it easier to keep track of videos being added on other Pods you like, or by people whose taste you appreciate. And, a new recommendations service helps to introduce you to new pods and videos on Vodpod, based on the videos you collect. More information about the home page is here.

We’re always working on new things, and will have more to announce in just a couple of weeks. But we wanted to let you know about these new tools. Try ‘em out, let us know what you think.

Filed under: News ,

September 10, 2007 • 11:52 pm 0

Vodpod by the numbers: September 2007 Edition

It’s been six months since I did a proper “Vodpod by the numbers” post.

On March 11, 2007 I wrote:

Some vod:pod number haiku:
22,993 videos collected
From 310 sites
In 3986 pods
By 3913 members

We were thrilled with the growth then, after just a couple of months of Vodpod having gone live. We’re still thrilled after eight full months of operation. The numbers today are:

253,154 videos collected

From 1390 sites

In 139,848 Pods

By 137,183 members

Traffic continues to grow nicely, too. In August, we had approximately 1.35 million absolute unique visitors use Vodpod.com (you can see the trajectory through June here).

Of our 137,000 members, about 22,000 are really “collectors.” The others have joined Vodpod to interact in some way or another with the service or a Pod (to rate a video, leave a comment, gain access to a Pod marked “mature” and so on).

We may alter the service in the future to allow some or all of that interactivity without having to join Vodpod, and that will likely have an impact on our total member number. But we feel the key metrics aren’t number of members, but how many people are creating great Pods, and how many others are enjoying and watching those collections (whether they’re members or not).

We continue to be amazed, excited, but not really surprised by the number of sites from which our members have collected video. In our minds, it simply illustrates that offering videos, typically in Flash with an embed code, is a mainstream feature of many sites. Let us repeat: it’s not that our members have collected videos from nearly 1400 video sharing sites; rather, they’ve collected videos from 1400 web sites that happen to offer video sharing (along with other things in many cases).

We’ve had fun building the service, and it’s always gratifying to see people using it and to see it grow. But we’re deeply aware it’s still early in the lifecycle of this adventure, we have a lot yet to build, and we plan to continue experimenting, trying new things — some of which we know will fail.

Thanks for your support — and especially patience — and we’ll check in again in 3-6 months with an update on the growth!

Filed under: News ,

• 10:36 pm 4

Can I search for videos for my Pod?

Yes.

At the top of every Vodpod page is a search box. You can search for both videos and Pods (the default is set to videos, just click on the “Pods” link above the search box to search for Pods).

When you enter your search query, you’ll get results from Vodpod (i.e., videos that our members have collected on their pods) as well as YouTube, Google, Myspace, Daily Motion and Comedy Central:

Search Results

Just click on the thumbnails or titles of the videos you want to watch, or that you think you might want to add to your Pod. Results from YouTube, Google, Myspace, Daily Motion and Comedy Central will play in a pop-up window that looks like this:

Search Popup

You can watch the video in the pop-up window, and click the add button to put it in your Pod.

From the popup window, you can also select the Pod you want to save it to (if you have more than one Pod); add a title, comments and tags; and add a reaction, too, if you are feeling ambitious.

Filed under: Basics, Collecting Tools, FAQs, Tips, Tricks, Hacks

September 7, 2007 • 6:00 pm 27

Posting videos to WordPress.com with the “Post to WordPress” Button

With the folks at WordPress.com, we’ve built a special version of our “Post to Vodpod” button that lets you post videos from 1000s of sites to your WordPress.com blog.

It’s a handy bookmark button for your browser (works on Firefox, IE, Safari, Chrome and possibly others!) that takes approximately 1.9 seconds to install!

You can get the “Post to WordPress” button here.

The “Post to WordPress” button will work on just about any site that offers (a) Flash video with (b) an embed code.

When you are browsing the web, and see a video you’d like to post to your WordPress.com blog, just click this button. You’ll get a pop-up that looks like this:

You should see a preview of the video you want to add, and can provide a title and write a post to go with the video. If you want your post to be a draft, so you can do further work on the post or layout, just click the “send to blog editor” link. You can grab the video now, and perfect your post later (also a handy method for grabbing multiple videos for a post).

If you don’t see the preview for the video, don’t panic. You can copy and paste the embed code into the form we’ve provided (more information here if you need it). Click preview to make sure you’ve got the right video.

When everything is just as you’d like it, click “Publish” and you’re all done.

You don’t have to be a member of Vodpod.com to use this button. But we’ve built Vodpod specifically to help people build collections of video and to manage those collections. So if you think you’re going to add more than 2-3 clips to your blog, get going and join Vopod. Costs nada, and it’s fun.

Filed under: For Your Blog, Publishing Tools

September 5, 2007 • 4:19 pm 6

Overview: How to Add Videos on Vodpod

Vodpod provides three great tools for collecting videos from around the Web: a browser button (bookmarklet); search; and an automatic importer that works with your blog or YouTube account.

The best way to collect videos from thousands of sites is with our bookmarklet or our orange Vodpod browser button, shown here next (it’s the orange button!):

FF_extension_2

It  allows you to add videos from 1000s of sites around the web with just a click. You can also use this button to post videos directly to your blog, or favorite social network (Facebook, Myspace, etc.) or bookmarking service (Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us). You can learn about it here.

Vodpod Search is another great, easy way to add videos. When you search on Vodpod, we’ll show you results from the millions of videos collected by other Vodpod members. You can sort those results by date, relevance, or views.

search_results

Clicking on a result will take you to the video page; to add the video to your collection, just click the “Collect this video” link next to our orange logo under the video.

videopage_videoarea

If you don’t see the video you want among our Vodpod results, take a gander at the “web results” tab; you’ll  see videos from YouTube, Daily Motion, Google Video, Myspace and Comedy Central (for the Daily Show and Colbert Report among others) and dozens of other sites like Hulu not yet collected on Vodpod.

Finally, if you’re a blogger and already in the habit of posting videos directly to your blog, you can use our blog importer to automatically add those to your Vodpod.com collection.

Filed under: Basics, FAQs

• 4:19 pm 0

Where can I find videos to collect?

Literally, from thousands of sites.

Vodpod members have already collected videos from 1300over 4100 different sites, and that number increases every day.

You can add videos to your pod from any “video sharing” site. That is, any site with Flash videos and embed codes that allow you to post the video in a blog or website.

Some of the best known sites for finding videos are YouTube, Google Video, MySpace.TV, Daily Motion, blip.tv, Metacafe, and Veoh.

But there are lots of others, so be sure to have your Vodpod browser button installed. When you’re browsing the web, and see a video you want to add, just click it.

Filed under: Basics

• 4:18 pm 0

Are there guidelines or rules?

Yes, we have a Member Agreement and Community Guidelines and you should read them.

We’re trying to balance two things: allowing the widest range of expression through your video collections while keeping Vodpod a safe, fun place for everyone.

Our main advice is this: please be considerate of your fellow Vodpod users.

If you collect video that’s not appropriate for a teenager (or someone else who might not appreciate strong language, or other content your Grandma might not find appropriate), please mark your pod “Mature.” You can do that through the settings link on your pod.

Please don’t collect videos showing explicit sexual acts. And if you just have to collect videos that contain sexually suggestive programming or nudity, please mark your pod private.

Filed under: Basics

VodTweet

  • Cool new Wordpress plugin from @1080d for Wordpress and Vodpod users http://bit.ly/6zV4fs....just about...1 day ago
  • Scott & Kyle at Vodpod talking mobile video strategy. http://twitvid.com/A4302....just about...1 day ago
  • Today's unusual sighting during Vodpod collection review? Video of three-headed frog http://bit.ly/7bYPwO....just about...2 days ago
  • Vodpod DB maintenance done, you should be able to add videos without a hitch. Thanks for your patience.....just about...4 days ago
  • We're doing maintenance on our databases this morning, so Vodpod is "read-only" for the next couple of hours. Thanks for the patience.....just about...5 days ago
Watch videos at Vodpod and other videos from this collection.