[microformats-discuss] Video Pop-up Link Maker

[Tantek Ç elik]

On 10/11/05 11:03 PM, "Joshua Kinberg" <jkinberg at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

Makes sense.


> This is not the most semantically structured markup in the world,

The particular markup doesn't matter as much as what is the schema implied
by the *content* that they publish.

> 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>

So in this case, the "elements" implied appear to be:
  video URL
  video title
  video mimetype
  thumbnail image


> 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.

That's ok.  As long as we actually *document* the examples of what these
communities are doing, there is no problem there.  We may find convergence
among what they do, and we may not.  That's the whole point of doing the
research.


> 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!").

Yes, I've noticed that too.  Certainly seems like an anti-pattern to me.


> 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.

Even documenting the implied schemas of such free content would be useful.

Right now there is a big blank in terms of documentation of actual media
info/metadata examples:

<http://microformats.org/wiki/media-metadata-examples#Examples_on_the_Web_to
day>

I know the XSPF folks *have* done a lot of research on actual examples so
perhaps all we need is a link to their research.

As far as all other proposals I've seen, I'm actually quite surprised at how
much theoretical standards work has been done in the area of "media
metadata" without citing of *actual* (as in *real*, *existing*, *right-now*,
on the *web*) use cases.  I'm more than happy to be proven wrong here --
please do so by adding to the abovementioned Examples_on_the_Web_today
section.

Thanks,

Tantek