embed-brainstorming

Synopsis

Embedding content across different publishers — such as showing YouTube videos in blog posts, Flickr photographs in Pownce, preview images next to bookmarked links.

Sites such as YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo and others publish ‘embed code’ to aid users in copy+pasting content into their own repostings. This is especially useful for embedding of complex content such as Shockwave Flash movies, where the HTML code is not intuitive. Sites like Flickr use copy+paste code examples to encourage and enforce link-back policies and publication of author, publisher and copyright information.

Goal

Produce a microformat to describe the embedding patterns for content and the author/publisher information connected to the content, such that a user or tool could extract the ‘embed’ from any supporting site in a common manner. That could be in the authoring stage of tools such as blogging platforms, or at the publication stage, such as Pownce showing embedded content for URLs that are posted to teh service.

Use Cases

• Allow users to republish any embeddable piece of content by providing just a URL
• Allow content from a URL to be extracted and displayed alongside links in microblogging systems such as Pownce and Tumbler, without those services having to write unique extraction code for every website.
• Allow content to be shown alongside search results (e.g. via Yahoo SearchMonkey, or behind-the-scenes systems used for image previews)
• Where you type a URL into a message (e.g. on Facebook), a service looks up the URL and grabs the page title and a content snippet to display with the the message. A kind of ‘rich link’. This microformat would enable more relevant content to be parsed out of pages.

Existing Sytems

The creators of Pownce have created an XML standard called oEmbed. This is a standalone XML representation of embeddable content, similar to a feed entry, but including additional fields for the host site (the publisher), and the exact code needed to include the content object in pages.

oEmbed uses an XRDS endpoint, linked to from the content page, to provide the oEmbed representation of a resource.

Examples

Publishers

• YouTube
• Flickr
• Vimeo
• Last.FM
• Skitch
• Photobucket

Consumers

• Pownce
• Tumblr
• Delicious
• Yahoo Search
• Google Search
• Facebook's ‘Compose New Message’ interface