November 19, 2008 – 7:01 pm
We’ve made some small changes to your Vodpod home page, in an effort to make key, core activities more accessible and apparent: to manage your collections, share your videos on your blog or Facebook or Myspace, and to get a quick overview of the key stats for your collection.
To manage your video collection (or one of your collections), just click on the link to it and you’ll see a menu of options — to customize the layout and settings of your collection, to organize your videos, to replace videos that have been removed, and more.
Under the “Share and Publish” heading, you’ll also see handy links to help you share your video collections on your blog, Facebook, Myspace, or other websites you use. You can share your collection on as many different sites as you’d like — we want to help you and your friends watch videos anywhere. (Let us know what services you’d like us to add).
Finally, you’ll see a digest of stats for your video collection (if you have more than one, you’ll see stats from your default collection). Click the “All Stats” link to see a more complete set of statistics and to learn how your collection is getting used.
November 19, 2008 – 5:59 pm
Vodpod co-founder and developer Scott Persinger has a great post on his blog about insight, programming, and the mechanics of the brain. Here’s the lede:
Occassionally I run into programming brick-walls - problems I just can’t seem to solve. My usual approach is to knuckle down and just grind away at the problem until I figure it out. Programmers like challenges, and damned if we’re gonna quit in the face of something not working!
But for a long time I’ve also known that sometimes the best solution is just to step away from your desk…
Click through to Scott’s blog for the rest!
September 26, 2008 – 2:13 pm
We’ve built a new little product to help you out over the next 40 days until the election (and to keep you informed after that). It’s called Vodpod Newswire.
Newswire gathers the latest videos from over 40 different sites — from news organizations like MSNBC, ABC News, and CBS News to top news and political blogs like Talking Points Memo, Ben Smith at Politico.com, Mark Halperin’s The Page at Time.com, Daily Kos, and JedReport.
We scan these sites every fifteen minutes, looking for their latest videos. We use collecting behaviors on Vodpod.com, as well as data from the sources we track, to help us organize this stream of videos into clusters, so that it’s easier for you to browse.
You can browse videos by source, to see what has been most recently added from your favorite news site or blogger:
Finally, when on a video you’d like to watch, we’ll provide summaries from bloggers and websites that have posted the video and trackbacks o their posts so you can read what they have to say. We also make it easy to collect the video on Vodpod.com or post it to your blog or favorite social network with a click.
Newswire is brand new, it’s not perfect (yet!) by any means, but we hope you’ll enjoy it and find it useful and we’d love your feedback.
September 5, 2008 – 5:31 pm
Our Myspace widget was pretty clunky and old, and we’ve finally gotten around to building a new one.
It’s a new-fangled “Open Social” widget — way better than our old flash widget, with more powerful ways to fully customize the look and feel of the widget.
The widget itself is a simple video wall, that makes it easy for your Myspace friends to browse through and watch your Vodpod video collection:
The real power of the new widget is that it has many more powerful customization features:
You can “skin” your widget by styling the CSS, and adding custom headers and footers. Or, if you want to do something simpler, you can pick custom background and text colors for your widget (by default, we leave it transparent so it will have the same look as your page).
You can also set what videos you want to show in the widget. Not only which video collection you want to use (if you have more than one), but the set of videos from that collection — by tag, or sorted by recency and other filters.
Get the widget here, give it a try, and let us know what you think.
August 21, 2008 – 1:53 pm
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.
Vodpod makes it easy to collect videos from around the web, from any site that offers “video sharing” — that is, any site that provides videos with an embed code so that you can post it on your blog, or collect it with Vodpod.
Sometime last Friday, one of our members collected a video from the 5000th such site in our database. In other words, Vodpodders have now collected videos from over 5000 different sites on the web. (Most sites that purport to let you collect or aggregate videos support only 5, or 10, or 15 such sites).
When we passed the 3500 site mark just three months ago, our friends at NewTeeVee suggested that we provide a top 100 list. In honor of passing the 5000-site mark, we’ve done just that with our inaugural Vodpod Top 100 list at the bottom of this post (we’ll post it in a more prominent place on our site in the coming months).
When we broke the 3500-site mark, we shared some initial analysis of our top 100 list that NewTeeVee posted here, most of which remains the same (worth a read if you’re interested in a quick overview of the make-up of the Top 100.
New and notable entrants to the top 100 list in the last three months include Hulu (#23), eurity.tv (#44), Wordpress.com (#48), disclose.tv (#52) Singsnap (#68), Wat.tv (#78), Seesmic (#95), and cbs.com (#100).
We’ll post post an update to this list when we hit our next major milestone (6000 sites), which at current pace should be in a month or so.
Click the link below to see the full post with the Vodpod Top 100.
Read More »
August 4, 2008 – 12:56 pm
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.
We’ve added yet another option to our easy-but-powerful Vodpod button — you can now use it to share videos on your favorite social networking site, including Facebook, Myspace, Hi5 and many others.
When you click our orange browser button you’ll see a new tab that lets you post a video directly to your social networking sites:
Just click the icon of the social network you want to post to, and follow the instructions from there.
When you’re next logged in over at Vodpod, give a glance to the right side of your screen and you’ll see your Vodpod neighbors.
These are people who have video collections that are similar to yours — try following a few, it’s a fun way to track what they’re adding and you might see some cool new videos.
Click the “find more neighbors” link and you’ll see your full list:
If you’re into cycling and the Tour de France, you’ve got to follow Vodpod member Bikeboyron. He’s got a great collection of TDF 2008 videos, including both longer length videos and short clips.
You can also keep track of all of the Tour de France videos via our TDF tag page.
And, if you’re a cycling fan, build your own collection. If you do, drop us a note (feedback AT vodpod) and we’ll feature it here.
