[microformats-discuss] Video Pop-up Link Maker

[Joshua Kinberg]

Most commonly, videobloggers use very simple markup for their video posts.
Here is a video tutorial from http://FreeVlog.org that teaches people
how to use Blogger and OurMedia to create a videoblog: <
http://freevlog.org/tutorial/post.htm >

The way they teach it, you upload an image with Blogger and make it
link to your video on OurMedia using the tools provided in the Blogger
GUI: upload image, select image and press the link button, paste in
the link that was copied from OurMedia and you're done without ever
having dealt with HTML.

This is not the most semantically structured markup in the world, but
if you simply add rel="enclosure" and a few other attributes to the
<a> tag, then you've got something like this:

<a href=[URL of video] title=[title of video] type=[mime-type] rel="enclosure">
<img src=[URL of thumbnail image] class="thumbnail" />
</a>

Some people embed the videos in their blog posts, but not many do that
as it requires a greater facility with HTML. Not very many people use
pop-ups like I've done here as it requires knowledge of javascript in
addition to HTML, though I believe it makes for a better viewing
experience on the web, not to mention I'm eliminating the need to make
a new pop-up window for each video by allowing the video URL to be
passed in dynamically:

< http://joshkinberg.com/popupmaker/ >

Perhaps some of these other elements like Creator, Duration, Date,
etc... could be handled by wrapping this basic construct above within
a <div> and including other Microformats inside, like hCard,
hCalendar, relTag, relLicense, relPayment, etc.

My perspective may also be slanted because I am thinking from the
point of view of the videoblogging community, which has different
concerns than most mainstream media outlets when it comes to
publishing video online.

When it comes to mainstream media, they tend to use embedded video,
often streaming, and done in such a way so as to make it very
difficult, if not impossible, to reverse engineer the direct URL to
the media (as if to say, "you will not link to our video no matter how
hard you try... we will destroy our own google ranking, thank you very
much!").

Porn video sites on the other hand probably account for most of the
video content on the Internet (surprise surprise). They seem to use
the basic videoblogger construct above... image links pointing
directly to the video source.... at least that's for the free content,
I'm not a paying customer so I don't know if the for-pay video is
handled any differently mark-up wise.


-josh



On 10/12/05, Ryan King <ryan at technorati.com> wrote:
> On Oct 11, 2005, at 7:51 PM, Joshua Kinberg wrote:
>
> > Just wanted to share a small project I launched today... I modified
> > the javascript hCard Creator to make a wizard to generate pop-up links
> > for videobloggers. If there was a microformat for describing media I
> > would be happily to incorporate it into this (rel="enclosure" is in
> > there).
> On the subject of a media-metadata microformat, here's what I think
> is holding things up...
>
> We have a good deal of coverage on previous (explicit) schemas/
> formats. But, we don't (unless I've missed it) have any documentation
> of implicit schemas/formats as expressed in how people (podcasters,
> vloggers, etc) mark this stuff up.
>
> David Janes has been working on this kind of research for blog
> formats, it'd be great to have it for media as well.
>
> -ryan
>
> PS- The project's really cool. :D
> --
> Ryan King
> ryan at technorati.com
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> microformats-discuss mailing list
> microformats-discuss at microformats.org
> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
>