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  • How to Improve YouTube Video Quality
  • YouTube Updates - Contextual Help and Character Counter
  • The Vlog Era Has Arrived
  • YouTube Will Add Live Video in 2008
  • Quarterlife’s Creators Says the Show isn’t Big Enough for TV
  • Pakistan Breaks YouTube
  • Google Begins Pushing Adsense for Video Again
  • How To Vlogs Gaining in Popularity
  • DailyMotion High Definition Video
  • China Simultaneously Cracks Down and Lightens Up on Video Sharing Sites
  • Political Vlogs Go European
  • Video Tutorial for Revver Wordpress Plugin
  • The 10 Most Popular Videos on YouTube for 2007
  • Tips for Shooting Video in the Snow
  • YouTube Gives You a Slew of Upgrades
  • Video Advertising to Increase
  • YouTube Partner Program Now Open to the General Public
  • DailyMotion Unveils New Video Player
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So, we wrote a while ago about the Revver / Wordpress plugin for video bloggers.

I came across this nice video tutorial from Tubetorial.com recently about the plugin. While there’s no substitute for actually playing around with a plugin that you’ve installed, when it’s something that is a little involved on the frontend, and you aren’t sure whether you want to use it or not, a vlog on the topic is an excellent way to check it out.

LINKS:

You can get the plugin at Revver.

You can check out Tubetorial here.

I came across this video recently from Videomaker magazine about shooting video in the snow. Seems like a timely piece. In addition to some technical advice about white balance and the like, there are some useful tips about the kinds of shots you might want to capture when vlogging in the winter.

To see more tips from Videomaker, visit their tips section.

YouTube has just announced a new tool that allows you to upload mulitiple videos all at once. In addition, they have upped the file size limit to 1GB. Previously files had been compressed to a size of 100MB (that’s 1/10 the size of current 1GB limit). The length of each video is capped at 10 minutes.

The new uploader tool is currently only available for Windows users, but a Mac version is on its way.

You will need to first intall the uploader onto your computer. You can do that at the installation page.

Once installed, you can upload multiple videos on the multi-video upload page.

If you have large files, it may take as much as 30 minutes before they are processed and viewable.

Revver has recently released an interesting new Wordpress video plugin for vloggers who want to run their video blogs on their own websites.

Once installed and set up, a vlogger can essentially run all their uploading and manage everything from tracking to advertising from the backend of their own blog. In addition to nice features such as the advertising platform, visitors can even post video responses directly to the vlogger’s blog. Everything is actually stored on Revver’s servers, of course.

Revver describes it as “your own interactive video portal.”

There is a beta version of the plugin available for download on the Revver site, and word is that a newer, improved version with more cutomization features is due out shortly.

You can learn more and download the plugin at the following Revver page.

Above you can see an example of YouTube’s new video bar application (hopefully — if it’s loading, that is). Instead of simply embedding single videos on your vlog / blog / website, you can choose to display a sample of various videos from a YouTube channel.

In addition to simply showing random videos from a channel, you can also choose to show Most Viewed Videos, Top Rated Videos, Recently Featured Videos, or video from a search query.

In order set up your YouTube video bar, you need to go to the following Google setup page.

Google Earth and YouTube have teamed up so that you can now watch videos in the popular mapping program based on where they were created or where they take place.

In theory, this is a nice addition to Google Earth, and it seems it could actually add real value. The question becomes, however, who decides which videos actually get in for the location they are listed for?

In the picture at the top of this post, there is a video of July 4th fireworks on the National Mall in Washington D.C. The YouTube icon found on the map is pinned on the Washington Monument, smack dab in the middle of the Mall. This, obviously, is how the system is supposed to work.

If you move on up the Mall to the Capitol, however, the only YouTube icon currently pinned onto the august rotunda of that building gives us a video of … Star Trek.

Even the most enthusiastic Trekkie would admit that this, alas, is not how the system should work.

One has to wonder how long it will be before this interesting feature will be completely over-run with spam.

Although there may be an editing system in place, YouTube doesn’t make that clear. They simply say the following:

You can tag your video with a location during the upload process on YouTube. Simply click the “Date and Map Options” to display the maplet, then drag the marker or use the search browser to choose a specific location. Once your location is recorded, your video will appear on Google Earth.

If there is, in fact, any editorial control over this system, then I fear we already have a glimpse of how it’s going to work.

To get to the YouTube videos on your Google Earth page, you will need to go to the left-hand side to the Layers section, then to Featured Content , and then tick the option for YouTube as in the image below:

LINKS:

If you don’t have Google Earth, you can download it here.

Funny thing - I had been thinking of something like this for a while, but I didn’t know if one existed or not: a video camera / camcorder extender tool. Well, I recently came across one from Xshotpix.com.

It allows you to get your camera out away from you so that your shot has a more natural perspective to it. Perfect for the solo vlogger, or even for two or more when both want to be in the shot.

The Xshot, as they call it, extends up to 37 inches and collapses down to a store-away size of 9 inches. It weighs 3.9 ounces.

Carrying one around, then, seems simple enough and worth the extra hassle if you plan on doing a fair amount of vlogging, or even regular picture taking.

Another good use, it would seem, would be for getting some otherwise unusual angles on things - such as overhead shots.

As of a recent visit to the site, the extender is selling for $24.95.

You can check them out at Xshotpix.com.

Verizon Wireless and YouTube are teaming up to make uploading video a little simpler.

Instead of managing your way through the YouTube web interface via your phone, you can now upload with an easy-to-remember code - YTUBE (the numbers - 98823).

In order to set this up, you will need to go into your YouTube account and make sure your phone number is included. “Standard messaging rates apply,” as they say.

For $15/month, you can also view YouTube videos on a v-cast phone.

Vimeo has just released a very nice new video tool that they call the “Projector.” It’s an embedding tool for a blog or MySpace. With the Projector, once a video has finished, the next video you have lined up will automatically begin to play.

That might catch a few extra views and gain some more fans. It somewhat mirrors what smart TV stations do - saving one last bit of the show you’re watching till the very end, and then immediately rolling into the beginning of the next show. Before you know it, you find you’re watching a show you hadn’t even planned on watching.

But the new tool isn’t just a device to “trick” the viewer. It’s also great for browsing.

The Projector allows the viewer to page through videos that you have selected to be seen (be they your own videos or your “subscription” to others’ videos). Here again, however, it’s a nice way to draw your viewers into more of your vlogs. Get thier attention with one video, and you may have them sticking around for a lot more.

A few other nice featurs including being able to watch your subscriptions in places like Netvibes, as well as being able to customize the video player’s colors.

You can check out the Projector in action below. Click “older” or “newer” to page through the selection.

(I have no idea what videos will be playing, by the way. I attempted to put the Vimeo Staff videos on here. And so who knows what they’ll show us.)

LINKS:

You can check out the Projector on the Vimeo site here.

In a move to make friends with vloggers, Sony has recently announced their latest camcorder, the Net-sharing CAM , designed specifially with video bloggers in mind.

What makes it so “video blogging” friendly is the compact size and the fact that you can designate certain videos or photos with a tag, and then once connected to a compatible PC, directly publish them to the web . Users of the big video sharing sites like YouTube are obviously in their sights, but you can also upload directly to an independent blog as well.

If you’re looking for something that’s easy to carry around and makes uploading video to the web quick, then it might be worth taking a look at. It might also serve as a nice “carry around” camera if your “regular” camcorder is too big to conveniently take with you all the time. (It can also serve as a webcam.)

While this isn’t a high-level camcorder with lots of bells and whistles, if you have video that you’d just like to shoot and shove to the web, it might do the trick nicely.

Some basic specs from Sony:

… seamlessly uploads short video clips to the web, and snaps print-quality, 5-megapixel digital still photos. Weighing just about five ounces, the model has ultra-portable dimensions (1 3/16 by 4 1/8 by 2 1/4 inches, W x H x D).It can record about five hours of web-ready video footage on a Memory Stick PRO Duo media card, when recording with the default settings on a 2GB media card.

The device shoots video in the “web-ready” MPEG-4 recording format, with selectable picture qualities ranging from QVGA/15 frames per second to VGA/30 frames per second, which can be viewed on televisions. It sports a distinctive “sharemark” button so users can easily “tag” or select video and photos they want to upload.

Designed to be sleek and intuitive, the Net-sharing CAM sports separate buttons for movies and photos, eliminating the need to select specific modes before shooting. It has a built-in flash, 4x digital zoom, and a 2.4-inch color LCD screen. Powered with rechargeable Lithium-ion technology, the model has a battery life of about 90 minutes (depending on recording conditions).

It runs about $200 at Amazon.

Vlip.com raises the level of video discussions a notch or two for video bloggers.

What most video blogging sites are going to figure out fairly quickly, if they haven’t already, is that they are not going to be the next YouTube Killer. Once that happens, they will need to decide how to make themselves different. What niche will they tackle? Why would someone choose to come to them over the larger sites, or even an independent, self-run vlog site?

The folks over at Vlip.com seem to have at least one answer to this question. Instead of tackling a topic niche, they have tackled a technological one.

While sites like YouTube already allow for responding to a video, at Vlip the “post and response” is everything. There are no people doing odd things with Coke bottles, no wannabe actors making low-grade TV shows. At Vlip, all the content is organized into a discussion, somewhat like a good old fashion forum — only with video.

And to make it even easier, it’s all done with webcams. You simply hit a record button on the site, speak your piece into your webcam, and then post it. There’s also the ability to embed these discussions in other places such as on MySpace or in a blog. (Currently it looks like only Blogger and Blogspot are supported. Attempting to embed a discussion here failed.)

While Vlip is still young, and may or may not ultimately be successful, it’s easy to see how this technology could easily become a staple in all sorts of sites in the future.

Although vlogging an opinion, question, or something else and then having someone respond with a video of their own is nothing new, it’s nice to see that technology is being developed to make this whole process easier. Equally as nice is seeing these discussions becoming better organized.

LINKS:

You can check out what Vlip is doing at Vlip.com.

Some good news out of Apple recently for vloggers who happen to have Macs - iMovie (Apple’s video editing software) has recently gotten an upgrade and a makeover.

A few of the better enhancements are highlighted below:

• “Super-fast movie creation,” as they call it, allows you to skim easily through a video at various speeds, forward or backward, starting in various places.
• When you find something from your footage you want to use, you simply select the footage in the same way you would select text. Then you simply paste that into a movie making frame.
• The default setting for the thumbnails under the main video pane is broken up into sections according to when you started and stopped recording. However you also have the ability to dig down into each section of each video and see clips broken up into thumbnails for every 10 seconds, every five seconds, or even more detailed.
• Nice title templates.
• Can publish directly to YouTube right from the iMovie interface.
• A new video library.

The new iMovie is part of the the iLife package, which includes other programs such as their photo and audio editing software. For those who already own a Mac, the iLife ’08 package is available for a suggested retail price of $79. All new Macs will come with the software included.

To see the features in action, check out the video below. To get to the nitty-gritty and bypass the very basics, like uploading a video, etc. - skip ahead to the point in the video where there is approximately 6 minutes left (about 1/3 of the way in).

LINKS:

The Apple iMovie Homepage

Skype recently announced that their users can now share videos from Metacafe and Dailymotion. The videos can be seen in the “mood” mode of Skype, a section where you tell your friends how you’re feeling. While this may seem a little odd, my guess is there just wasn’t a convenient other place to put it. My suggestion would be to create a section called “videos” (but I’ve always been plagued by logic).

Or, if Skype would like to keep the “personal” feel that the word “mood” seems to communicate, how about calling it “vlogs.” As Skype expands its services to become a platform for all sorts of web interactivity and communication, this would be a logical step. If you’re a heavy Skype user with a lot of people on your contact list, then this would also be a good place to broadcast your latest vlog.

In addtion to sharing the videos in the mood mode, you can also share them in a chat, which is practical. Instead of sending your friend off to some video sharing site, you can just drop the video into the chat.

Currently, as mentioned, the Skype deal only applies to Metacafe and Dailymotion, however the tabs at the top of their video window seem ripe to add more services. For most U.S. customers especially, YouTube would be a must, of course.

YouTube has a little more functionality now, allowing you to choose between three different thumbnail images for the “face” of your video.

While this is a “small” change, it could actually turn out to be fairly major if used correctly. The thumbnail on your video is like a headline - it’s what people look at first, and many people will decide to click or not click depending on that image.

The choice of three different images isn’t a lot, granted, but it is an improvement.

The instructions from YouTube are as follows:

On the My Videos page just select the video, click “Edit Video Info,” then select one of three images available on the Video Still section at the top. After you update the video info, your selected thumbnail will appear on the site. (Please note: in some cases it may take up to six hours for the image to appear.)

The other week we reported on a new multi-site video uploader called HeySpread. Recently, however, we came across another new multi-site uploader called TubeMogul that takes the process to the next level.

The reason TubeMogul gets the label “amazing” is because of the statistic-tracking ability that comes with it. Even if you’re making your vlogs “for fun,” everyone is interested in their stats. And for the professionals who are looking to seriously track and analyze their efforts, this program looks like a must have.

Even better - it’s free.

Not only can you upload to multiple sites, you can track how your videos are doing on all of those sites. You can seperate out single sites, single videos, lump everything together, or compare one video to another. You can then export all this data and save it. It truly does look like a stat-freak’s dream.

On top of all this, you can track any video - even videos that aren’t yours. Talk about keeping an eye on your competition.

It’s good to see companies out there building nice vlog tools. No doubt this will be a lucrative and rapidly growing market for years to come.

You can check out TubeMogul here.

To see some of the stats that they offer, check out the video below.

For those who use Blogger, there’s finally a much easier way to upload videos to your blog. There’s only one small catch. Well, not a catch, really, just a piece of information you need to know - sort of a secret in a way.

The new video upload component is still officially in beta (a testing phase), and so you won’t see an option for it on your regular blog dashboard. Instead, you’ll need to log into draft.blogger.com. When you do this, you will still see your same blog, but now the video option will be available.

Once you’re on the “draft” version of Blogger, you should now see a video upload icon like the one in the picture at the top of this post (circled in red). Click that and upload your video straight to your blog.

The “draft” version of blogger is a version where new but not completely public features are available. To make sure you are on the “draft” version of blogger, you should see a blueprint-looking logo at the top, and when you look in your address bar, you should also see draft.blogger.com …

Once uploaded, your videos are stored on Google Video. You can also choose to set up your videos for “enclosures.” Enclosures are what make “video podcasting” possible — i.e. the ability for people to subscribe to a feed of your videos. To get the details on enclosures and how they work, see this post on the Blogger in Draft Blog.

The Blogger in Draft Blog is a good place to check out occasionally if you use Blogger. You can find the main page here.

No doubt that tags help to create a little bit of order out of this mess we call the web. But as messy as the web is, what’s worse is having nothing at all. With video, to a large degree, that’s what we’ve had. Sure, we’ve had the ability to tag in a general way, and we’ve always had the text around the video (headlines, captions, etc.) to provide some context, but now it looks like tagging inside the video itself is gaining momentum.

Although there are a number of companies engaged in deep tagging videos, Viddler seems to be one that’s getting it done nicely. There are a lot of cool things that can be done with deep tagging, including allowing others to put comments inside the clip, both text and video comments. Very cool.

To see how deep tagging works, watch the Viddler promotional clip above.

And the next step? Who knows? Maybe automatic transcription that gets stored as text in the video file as well.

You can check out Viddler here.

Shaky, out of focus, dark, blurry, inaudible, nauseatingly zoom-crazy.

You name it and some vlogger is out there doing it right this very moment. While there’s a lot to like out in the vlog world, there’s also a lot that is simply painful to watch.

Although it’s true that good content can shine through even the worst style, why would a vlogger want to put that extra hurdle in the viewer’s way?

There’s an old maxim in writing that says you have to know the rules before you can break them. This, of course, means that the writer who is breaking the rules after he/she knows them is doing it intentionally - FOR EFFECT.

A lot of vloggers could learn from this.

That said, vloggers don’t need to be professional videographers. Far from it. In fact, the realistic “cinéma vérité” style lends a certain authenticity to a vlog.

At the moment anyway, this “non-professional” look that most vlogs have is actually beneficial. It separates them from their overly slick film and TV cousins. They are the girl next door, not the air-brushed centerfold who turns out to be more photoshop than girl.

But far too often the overly shaky picture or wind-blown audio can start to grate on the viewer’s nerves. Unless your subject/content is so dramatically interesting that people can’t wait to see what comes next, over time you’re likely to lose viewers. Even if they find your content interesting, psychologically, the “ugly” in your vlog may start to wear on them to the point where they will begin avoiding you.

Even the straight point-and-shoot, talking-head vloggers can probably make their videos better by learning and practicing a few simple tips. The idea is not necessarily to put the “pretty” in, but, rather, to take the “ugly” out. 

If you can achieve that simple goal, you’ll be miles ahead of other vloggers out there, and in the long run, your reward will be more viewers – and more loyal viewers. When the ugly isn’t acting as a distraction, they will be able to concentrate on your content.

With that in mind, if you’re interested in improving your videos, there are a few places that might make for a good starting point.

A short 8-point text guide for the basics can be found at LifeHacker: 8 Ways to Shoot Video Like a Pro

For something more in-depth (and with more tricks), check out the video tutorials at MetaCafe Studio’s “Production School”

And lastly, one of the people who contributed some of the MetaCafe videos is Israel Hyman, who offers a whole boatload of free video tutorials over at his site IzzyVideo.com

 

One good thing about Google buying YouTube is the seemless integration with different applications. One new, interesting mashup is being able to see YouTube videos on Google maps.

If you enable the “YouTube Mapplet” plugin (just one click), you have the ablility to see markers all over the world with a corresponding YouTube video. Click the little green marker and a mini version of the video appears right on the map. You can watch the small version right there, or, of course, click through to the original YouTube page.

One nice feature is that you can search either geographically by the markers on the map, or you can click on a video preview on the left side and Google maps will take you to the location on the map.

As another way to search and find videos is added, that makes one more way to get your vlog out there to be discovered.

Get the YouTube Mapplet Plugin (click the “Add it to Map”s button)

The problem of illegal use of copyrighted material is a big one for the video world, and even for some vloggers who would like to use clips or audio from some other source in their vlogs.

With so many using and posting copyrighted material onto the web, it’s nearly impossible for video sites to keep up with it.

A major step in solving this problem may lie in technologies like the one DailyMotion has recently incorporated — a tool to detect copyrighted video and audio.

Of the two, copyrighted audio is the problem most likely to affect vloggers - who tend to use their own video footage, but then layer copyrighted music into it to give it that important “extra.”

For this, DailyMotion may have an answer (and a glimpse into the future of putting video online). It’s a tool they call Audio Remix, and they describe it as follows:

When one of your videos is detected to have a copyrighted audio track, we will ask you to use Audio Remix to replace the audio track.

Audio Remix is very easy to use. Only three steps are necessary to change the audio track of your video:

1. Choose a genre and artist
2. Select the track you would like to use
3. Click “Publish” to insert the new track into your video

DailyMotion has sought our partners in the music industry to clear music that can be used free of charge and legally. As of this writing it seems that they only have a little over 50 songs available through a partnership with Jamendo.com. However, there’s sure to be more in the future if the tool works as it’s designed to.

The only problem with such a tool for vloggers would be that inserting just the right music in the right spots would obviously be nearly impossible. Still, it’s looking like a step in the “helpful” direction, which is the only way the “right direction” is going to achieved in the end.

LINKS:

DailyMotion.com
Jamendo.com

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