Vodpod Blog

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June 19, 2008 • 5:19 pm 0

Vodpod Search, Fast and Easy

One of the easiest and fastest ways to add to your collection is with Vodpod search. You can search the more than 1 million videos collected on Vodpod from over 4000 sites; or, you can look for videos not yet in the collection on YouTube, Daily Motion, Myspace, Comedy Central and fifteen other popular video sites including blip.tv, Brightcove,

We just updated our search service, and it got easier and faster, still.

You can search on any page on Vodpod using the search box in the upper right corner:

We first show you Vodpod results:

With over 1 million videos collected from over 4000 different sites, there is a good chance we’ll have what you’re looking for.

Click on the video you want to watch, and we’ll take you to the video page. You can watch the video there, and you’ll find a wealth of other information about the video, including who else has collected it or posted it to their blog and you’ll see links to other, related videos.

If you want to add the video to your collection, just click the orange button below the video (or, you can always use your browser button):

If don’t see the video you want in the Vodpod results, try our “web results” tab. You’ll see up-to-date results from YouTube, Myspace, DailyMotion, Comedy Central and over a dozen other popular video sites in our “Featured sites” group at the top (including Hulu, blip.tv, Brightcove, Reuters with more sites coming soon).

You can “drill down” to see results from just a single site; just click the “see all” results link shown above for the site you want.

When you see a video you might want to add, click on the thumbnail. You’ll see a pop-up window, where you can watch the video, add a title, write a comment and add tags:

Click save when you’re done, and it’ll go in your Pod and onto your blog if you’re using a widget– and we’ll even give you a nice gold star when you’re first to add the video!

Filed under: Basics, News

June 11, 2008 • 7:15 pm 0

Euro 2008 on Vodpod

If you’re interested in the latest highlights from the Euro 2008 football (soccer) tournament, one of our members is maintaining a great collection.

Check it out!

Filed under: Stuff We Love

June 10, 2008 • 12:35 am 0

Vodpod Loves Your Blog, Let Us Count the Ways

If you’re a blogger, and regularly include video on your blog, you need to hook it up with Vodpod.

We can think of at least eight reasons why Vodpod and your blog are made for each other:

1. Widgets
Our fabulous widgets are a great way to share video via your blog. Your readers can browser through and watch your video collection from the comfort of your blog (whether it’s a collection of 5, 50 or 500 videos). We’ve got a full array of shapes, sizes, and configurations, and we’ve just announced a few more. And you can build your own if you like, with our API or our widget source code.

2. Blog Importer
We have some simple but powerful ways to collect videos, but among the most relevant for bloggers is our blog importer. It’s particularly useful if you already have a workflow for posting videos to your blog; all you have to do is enter your blog’s RSS feed, and we’ll add the videos you post to your collection on Vodpod automatically.

3. Post to Blog with Our Browser Button
Our orange browser button lets you save videos to your Vodpod collection with a click, from 1000s of sites. But sometimes you might want to post a video, too, not just share it through our widget. You can use our browser button to do that, too. With just a click, post a video to your blog; works on WordPress, Typepad, Blogger, Twitter and Tumblr. We also have a special version for WordPress.com bloggers.

4. Blog Trackbacks
Blogs (and bloggers!) love links. We got ‘em. When you use one of our widgets, or our “Post to blog” service, we’ll provide a track back from our video page. We want our visitors to find your blog!

5. Share on Other Platforms
We know many of you not only blog, but use services like Facebook, Twitter, or more recently FriendFeed. You can also hook up your Vodpod collection to those services, too. So, collect a video and it goes to your blog (if you have our widget installed), and Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, too, if you like. We also provide media RSS feeds for your collection, and that’ll enable you to hook up your Vodpod almost anywhere else.

6. Stats
Did you know you can see how many videos views you’re getting on your widget? With our stats, you can track that and more.

7. API
Like everything you’ve just read, but doesn’t quite fit your needs? Well go build whatever you want with our API. Our friends at NewTeeVee have done just that, launching a brand new site powered by our API.

8. Search and Discovery and Community
Finally, Vodpod is a great place to hang out, and discover new videos through other people. The best way to do that is to “follow” other members who have tastes and interests similar to yours; here are some tips on that.

Filed under: Basics, For Your Blog, Publishing Tools, Tips, Tricks, Hacks

June 9, 2008 • 11:28 pm 0

NewTeeVee Station & the Vodpod API

Congratulations tonight to the crew at NewTeevee (one of the jewels of Om Malik’s digital media empire!) on the launch of their new site, NewTeeVee Station. It’s a great new site, a must-visit if you want to keep track of the best and funniest clips on the web (or you can *follow* Newteevee on Vodpod to keep track of what they’ve discovered).

And, most exciting in our opinion, it’s powered by the Vodpod API!

NewTeeVee’r Liz Gannes describes the new site as follows:

NTV Station features editorial reviews of online videos written by a team lead by Liz Shannon Miller, who comes to us from Variety and the Daily Reel. We eliminate the static and bring to you videos that are actually good — but also the stuff that’s so bad it has everyone talking. We’ve also developed a database of cast, crew, and other details to map out the expanding web video universe. We encourage our readers to become part of the editorial process by adding their own reviews, comments and ratings. You’re also welcome to get lost in our eight channels of the most memorable comedy, commercials, drama, music, news & talk, personalities, reality, and zeitgeist picks.

NewTeeVee uses Vodpod to collect and store the videos for NTV Station, and pulls titles, thumbnails, embed codes, descriptions and other data from Vodpod via our API. Data can be pulled by tag or in other, flexible ways.

In concert with the launch of NTV Station, we’re announcing some important extensions and additions to our API:

1. We’re ready to expose our “related videos” data. In many ways, this is and will increasingly be the crown jewels here at Vodpod, derived by looking at the collecting patterns of our members. And we’d love to see what folks could build with it. We haven’t posted the API calls yet up on the API site — we want to work directly with the first 5-10 folks who’d like to use this — so send us an e-mail (mark AT vodpod.com) if you’re interested.

2. We’ve also released the code for our widgets. For those who want to build their own video widgets or galleries, but don’t want to start from scratch, this should help.

We’ve made Vodpod to help people collect videos from anywhere (at least anywhere that enables sharing, by providing an embed code), to share their collections anywhere, and with anyone.

So we’ll continue to add capabilities to the API over the coming weeks and months, and are excited to see what comes next. If you’re interested in using the API, but don’t see the capabilities you need, give us a shout (feedback AT vodpod.com).

And, if you’re a blogger who doesn’t want to go to all the trouble of building a whole site, you can always use one of our fabulous widgets…

Filed under: For Your Blog, News, Publishing Tools, Stuff We Love

VodTweet

Watch videos at Vodpod and other videos from this collection.