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August 7, 2009 • 2:52 pm 0

Moderating Comments on Vodpod

We’ve tried to make Vodpod more engaging for visitors by allowing guests to comment on videos you collect at Vodpod.

Most of the time, people add interesting comments. Occasionally, guests visit and even add excellent comments. But not everyone out there has good manners, or good taste, and occasionally comments might get left on videos you collect that aren’t appropriate.

In the rare instances when this happens, you can “hide” the comment. Just go to the video page, mouse over the comment that is inappropriate, and click the “thumbs down” button:

comment_example_spam

This will have the effect of “hiding” the comment:

spam_after_comment_mod

Of course, because we’re a diverse video community, it’s important to strike the right balance with this tool. The “down mod” tool isn’t designed to exclude comments you disagree with; rather, you should use it only when the comment violates the overall ethos of our community here at Vodpod.

The most common examples see of comments that should get “down modded” are:

Spam — the comment includes a link that isn’t relevant, and is only provided to drive traffic

Inappropriate language — racial epithets, excessive swearing, personal insults

Jibberish — some people just type in jibberish to get a reaction

We hope you’ll use the tool — judiciously — to make Vodpod a more interesting community, a place where we allow people to express a wide range of views, but where we keep things civil and informed, too.

Filed under: Basics, Tips, Tricks, Hacks

July 13, 2009 • 1:32 pm 0

Using the Vodpod Organizer to Publish a Set of Videos

Our Organizer is a really powerful tool if you want to quickly curate a set of videos to publish to a widget, VodSpot, or a video site powered by our API.

From your Vodpod home page, click the “organize your videos” link. This will bring up the organizer:

organizer

You can then use the organizer to quickly assemble a set of videos from your collection. Just shift + click to select the videos you want (or use search to refine your list first). Once you have selected the videos you want, you can then give them a specific tag (or tags), or move them into a separate collection.

Then, just setup a widget based on those tags (or, create a VodSpot module that points to those tags).

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

July 6, 2009 • 1:11 pm 0

Techstars.tv on Boxee, with Vodpod

We love it when people build cool stuff using Vodpod.

When we launched VodSpot last year, among the first folks to try it out was TechStars. They built a really nice video site using VodSpot, which was impressive given our early tools were a bit crude!

TechStars is a Boulder-based seed investment fund, that provides a lot more than early stage funding to entrepreneurs. They invite a select group of start-ups to Boulder each summer, provide them with early funding and great mentors. Check out their VodSpot at TechStars.tv or their website to learn more.

Now TechStars has gone further, and built a Boxee application. David Cohen, the man behind TechStars, describes it on their blog — here are a few key bits:

I thought I’d take a second and tell you how we built TechStars.tv, because I think the solutions we’re using rock.

The TechStars.tv web site is powered by VodSpot, which is one of the services available from Vodpod, a popular video bookmarking service. VodSpot gives you a flexible, branded, fully-skinned way to display any given collection of videos from around the web. It supports all the popular sites like YouTube, Vimeo, etc. Your VodSpot doesn’t host your videos, it just organizes videos that already exist elsewhere on the web. It’s simple, intuitive, and it works flawlessly. When you are looking at TechStars.tv, you’re looking at an example of VodSpot, plain and simple. We’ve just skinned it to look like the TechStars web site using CSS. Our collection of videos simply includes our original content such as our new weekly documentary series “The Founders” as well as other relevant content from our great mentors from around the web.

Once we had this working, it seemed like the natural thing to do was to enable the content within Boxee. I dropped a note to the guys at VodPod, and they quickly turned around and gave me a video RSS feed that was compatible with Boxee. I then tweeted to see if anybody in our community might want to hack together a Boxee app out of that feed. Michael Sitarzewski stepped up and spent one late night figuring it out. It’s pretty simple (basic instructions here) and Michael had the finished up completed in two or three days. Of course, he rocks, so it might take normal people longer. Michael runs a startup called Callisto.fm which is a new way to discover and listen to podcasts. If you dig the Boxee app he helped create, please give him some feedback on Callisto.fm – I’m sure he’d appreciate it.

So there you have it – TechStars.tv is now live on Boxee. Thanks to VodPod and Michael of Callisto.fm for their help in making it happen.

That’s cool! We’ve got Boxee running on a Mac Mini and 42″ flat panel here at Vodpod HQ — we’re looking forward to playing with the new TechStars app this afternoon.

As we blogged a few weeks ago, anyone can get their Vodpod collection working on Boxee. It’s cool to see people starting to build apps now — this is definitely something we’re paying close attention to, and we expect to have more on this later in the summer.

Filed under: Stuff We Love, Tips, Tricks, Hacks

June 16, 2009 • 12:01 am 0

Bookmark the Videos You Tweet

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.

Filed under: Collecting Tools, Tips, Tricks, Hacks

June 2, 2009 • 7:40 pm 0

Post Videos to Your Blog with Vodpod

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:

post_to_blog_choose_platform

The first time you use the “Post to Blog” service you’ll need to enter your blog credentials (username and password and blog URL) .

post_to_blog

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.

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

May 27, 2009 • 10:00 am 2

How do I setup my WordPress.com Widget?

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.

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

May 19, 2009 • 12:36 pm 2

New (beta!) feature – blog autoposting

In our continuing efforts to help people get more out of their videos collections at Vodpod, I’m working on a new auto-publish feature. This will automatically publish videos you collect to your blog.

This feature is not formally released or supported yet, but if you want to try it out and send me feedback I’d be happy to get it. You can reach the setup page here:

http://vodpod.com/account/widgets/blog_autopost

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

August 21, 2008 • 1:53 pm 0

How to Edit, Delete, and Organize Your Videos

Want to edit or delete one of the videos you’ve collected? Or, want to organize the videos in your collection?

From your account page, just click the link to go to your collection:

From the your collection front page, you can click the “edit” link to edit or delete a specific video; or, click the “organize your videos” link at the top if you want to edit or delete multiple videos:

You can delete videos from the organizer, too. Just roll your cursor over the thumbnail of the video you want to delete, and you’ll see a trashcan icon in the upper right corner of the thumbnail. Click on the trashcan icon to delete the video.

If you want to batch organize your videos into tags (tags are basically like categories, but more flexible), just click the “organize tags” link at the bottom of the organizer. You’ll be able to drag-and-drop videos into the appropriate tag group, and also create new tags if you need them to organize your videos.

Filed under: Basics, Tips, Tricks, Hacks

August 4, 2008 • 12:56 pm 0

Thumbs Up!

We’ve simplified the way you can react or rate a video, and replaced our menu of “emoticons” with a simple thumbs up and thumbs down reaction. You’ll see the icons for this right below the video:

Just click the thumbs up (or down) to react to a video. You can, as always, give a more detailed reaction with a comment. In the coming months, we plan to make good and interesting use of the thumbs up (and down) data, so click away.

Filed under: Basics, Tips, Tricks, Hacks

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

VodTweet

  • Today's unusual sighting during Vodpod collection review? Video of three-headed frog http://bit.ly/7bYPwO....just about...21 hours ago
  • Vodpod DB maintenance done, you should be able to add videos without a hitch. Thanks for your patience.....just about...3 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...3 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.