Vodpod Blog

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May 30, 2008 • 7:00 pm 2

Blog Trackbacks!

We’ve just added a niftly new little feature if you use our “Save Videos” button to post videos to your blog. This also works for WordPress bloggers who are using our “Post to WordPress” button.

We now add a trackback to your blog from the video page. You can see an example on one of our video pages here, it looks like this:

We also provide a track back from the video page if you use a Vodpod widget, and you’ve included that video in your widget. Check it:

Just another nice little way to put Vodpod to work for your blog, and to give it the link love it deserves.

Filed under: News, Tips, Tricks, Hacks

May 28, 2008 • 5:38 pm 2

The MSNBC Hack — Updated 9-11

While you can use our great browser extension to collect videos from 1000s of sites, there are sadly a few sites that present problems.

One is MSNBC. The good news: MSNBC is starting to put up a lot of great video. The bad news: it’s hard to collect, or post to your blog.

Here is the solution. First, click the “e-mail” link under the video and copy the URL contained in the e-mail message. The URL in the e-mail message should look something like this:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/26662997#26662997

Then, paste that URL into your browser, click our Vodpod browser button, and add the video to your Vodpod collection, your blog, or your favorite social network.

It’s not elegant, but it works. And, we’ll try to coordinate with the folks at MSNBC to make this more seamless going forward.

Filed under: Collecting Tools, Tips, Tricks, Hacks

• 3:00 am 0

Vodpod on Your FriendFeed

We were “Twitter curious” (hah!) when it first launched in 2006. And so shortly after we launched Vodpod on December 4, 2006, we wired up Vodpod so you could automatically have Vodpod send a “tweet” when you added a video. And we launched a Facebook app last summer.

As blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote a few weeks ago, “FriendFeed is the new hotness” and a lot of the cool kids are also hanging out over there, now. To further overwork this analogy, we’re a bunch of dorks desperately trying to get in with the cool kids, (OK, we had a vote on that last line. Sure I wrote it at 2am, but I thought it was witty and self-deprecating. Scott and Spencer thought it sounded lame, so I redacted — I wield my editorial control lightly!)

Seriously, FriendFeed is cool, so we’ve just enabled our users to hook up their Vodpod to their FriendFeed.

It’s simple to do. Just go to your settings by clicking the “edit your profile” link at the top of the page. Then click the “blog tools” tab, as shown here:

Scroll down the page and you’ll see a place to enter your FriendFeed credentials:

To get your “Remote Key” for FriendFeed, just click on the link; it’ll take you to the page on FriendFeed that gives you your RemoteKey.

Then, next time you add a video to Vodpod, we’ll also post the title, thumbnail, your comment and a link to the video on FriendFeed. It looks like this:

Filed under: News, Publishing Tools, Tips, Tricks, Hacks

• 3:00 am 2

Introducing the Double Wide, and Other Widgets

We’ve been steadily growing a nice array of widgets, of various shapes and sizes, for bloggers and website makers.

Today, we’re adding three new widget styles. And, if you don’t like any of our existing widget styles, we’ve just made it a lot easier to build your own, as we’ve released the source code for our widgets as part of our ongoing updates to our API.

The first of the three widgets we’ve released is called the “double wide” — you can see why here:

This is an ideal sized widget for folks who have blogs or websites with wide sidebars. You can see it in action here, on one of the blogs from the Guardian UK.

We’ve also released two, updated versions of our bigger “gallery” widget which are perfect for those who want a full video gallery on a separate area or page. The basic gallery looks like this:

And, we have a narrower version as well:

You can get a widget for your blog here.

Filed under: For Your Blog, News

May 16, 2008 • 5:35 pm 6

Internet Famous, in Muncie

When you’re an internet company based in the Bay Area, with companies like Google and Yahoo! here in town and newer but way-more-famous startups like Digg and Twitter and WordPress down the street, not to mention hundreds of stories written by bloggers every day about other startups around the city, it’s only natural to feel like a small fish in a big pond, even when you know from your stats and your e-mail inbox that your service is used by millions of people.

Sometimes it helps to get out of our little bubble here for a small little ego boost. This happened to me two weeks ago, in Muncie, Indiana in an office that had absolutely nothing to do with the Internet, online video, or Vodpod.

(Why was I in Muncie? Answer here if you really want to know…)

In this office in Muncie, I happened to look over the shoulder of another person there, who was working on a laptop, and noticed they were watching a video. On the Politico.com. In a Vodpod widget. Naturally, I had to shout out: “Hey, cool, that’s one of our widgets.”

Yes, shameless self-promotion all the time, it’s the Vodpod way. It was then nice to hear a couple of people in the office say “that’s cool, I had no idea you were from Vodpod, I use this every day, it’s great.”

Word went around in the office that this guy (me) from San Francisco who started Vodpod was out in this office in Muncie. The next day, after a full day on the streets cavassing, I returned to the office and a fellow volunteer, a college student from Muncie, came up and said (and here I paraphrase): “I heard you were one of the people behind Vodpod, I’ve been using it for a few months and love it, it’s really cool you’re here and I just wanted to say that I am excited to meet you.”

Now, this never happens. We’re a small startup, we work hard, we love our product, but we’re a long way from being almost famous, even almost internet famous.

But maybe when you make something people like and use, you can be internet famous for a second. Like that beautiful moment in Muncie, a town I’ll always remember fondly:-)

Filed under: Stuff We Love ,

May 1, 2008 • 6:40 pm 0

Following Election 08 on Vodpod, Redux

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

BallotVox from Public Radio Exchange

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!

Filed under: Stuff We Love

• 4:42 pm 0

The Politico on Vodpod!

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.

Filed under: News, Stuff We Love

• 4:28 pm 0

Guardian UK on Vodpod!

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.

Filed under: News, Stuff We Love , , ,

VodTweet

  • Today's unusual sighting during Vodpod collection review? Video of three-headed frog http://bit.ly/7bYPwO....just about...2 hours ago
  • Vodpod DB maintenance done, you should be able to add videos without a hitch. Thanks for your patience.....just about...2 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...2 days ago
  • A little Vodpod maintenance tomorrow AM to fix our Mysql bug. 8am-11am PT. http://bit.ly/8vBgA6....just about...3 days ago
  • Apologies for our 20 min outage today. Our database software (Mysql) has a bug that brought down our database.....just about...3 days ago
Watch videos at Vodpod and other videos from this collection.