[uf-new] Launching the hVideo exploratory discussion!

[Manu Sporny]

Mary Hodder wrote:
> Is the video microformat use case one that is about video hosters or
> about what users do, or both?

Both... we're going for general video metadata markup. :)

> At Dabble, as we take in metadata from both sources, we see users and
> hosters publishing titles, thumbnail (users don't call it "image
> summary" and actually, the hosters don't either much), category AND
> tags, uploader, director or creator, license, description, duration,
> sometimes size, and almost always, urls for html page, with some people
> giving multiple download and streaming urls. 

Just to be clear, those names are "property names"... they are not the
official Microformat "class name" that we are going to use in hVideo. It
is too early to decide on a vocabulary yet... expect most of those names
to change (re-used from other Microformats if possible, created if there
is no other choice). We do, however, define what every one of those
property names mean on the video-info-examples page:

http://microformats.org/wiki/video-info-examples#Properties

> In fact there is almost
> always a "permalink url" (how did you come up with 58% on that one?)

The Permalink URLs are for sites that explicitly state a Permalink URL
on the page. Believe it or not, only 58% of the examples had permalinks.
I was surprised as well, but it shows us why we collect examples.

> because no one would be able to get to it if that didn't exist.
> 
> What we never see is "published" (what does that mean?) or "email video
> url" in a feed or api.. 

All definitions of property names are listed on the video-info-examples
page:

http://microformats.org/wiki/video-info-examples#Properties

published - The Published Date specifies the date that a video file was
made available to the public. Examples include: The airing date of a
video podcast, the air date of a television show, or the release date of
a movie.

> sometimes that's on a page and often buried in
> flash or dhtml .. but it wouldn't be very helpful, as it's actually the
> same as the html url usually with extra code for email.

If the data is in the DOM somewhere, we included the property. If the
data doesn't reside in the DOM, then we did not include the property.

> Also most individual users never publish "popularity rating" or "number
> of views" etc.

Got a list of examples that we could merge into the video-info-examples
page? That would be very helpful...

> I thought the point of the microformat was for users and publishing
> companies to be able to put out data that would be easily readable in
> both an RSS feed and via spidering an html page, that was commonly
> published online?

It is! Most users are publishing video via MySpace, Yahoo Video, Google
Video and YouTube... service websites. However, if you have another
subculture that we should examine, please give us some links so that we
may analyze those sites as well.

> I think the basic set of commonly published items includes:
> 
> title
> html url (sometimes same and sometimes different from the url to embed,
> or link directly to the video)
> video url (if existing - could be multiple, see Blip or Revver or soon
> to be Youtube)
> category and / or tags
> description
> license
> creator or uploader or both (many youtube videos have both, with
> "director" as the creator designation)
> embed code
> size
> duration
> 
> We see these all elements highly published.

We need your examples, then! :)

> Also, the sense I get from your write up here:
> http://microformats.org/wiki/video-info-examples
> 
> is that you are more interested in the use-case of microformats for
> selling video or other content.

Nope... in fact, what we're finding is that most of the video sites do
not sell content! Bummer, as we were hoping we'd find that they do... :)
but since we can't find many examples of this happening, it nullifies
the idea that this is a use-case for selling video or other content.

Thanks for the input Mary, always appreciated :). Do these statements
help clarify matters?

-- manu