I’ve always been against texting while driving, videotaping while driving or talking on your mobile device without a hands-free headset while driving. It makes me angry when I see videos on YouTube where a driver is holding a camera and videotaping themselves while driving (many times at high speeds on the highway). As Judge Judy says, it’s one thing if you want to take your own life, but when you are reckless you put so many others in the path of potential harm. It’s too bad that local police agencies don’t go after those who post their videos on YouTube showing off their “oh so important” video they just had to create while driving.

If you think driving your car while filming a video is not appropriate, what about a city bus driver driving a bus down a busy street using his elbows while operating two cellular phones? The bus driver is operating the bus in Rome and appears to be talking on one cell phone while setting up email and other online accounts on the second phone.

Here’s hoping the bus operator was able to get out that important tweet, check-in to his bus, Like his bus, or tip his important update. Those things are certainly more important than passenger safety and the safety of those around the bus.

Here’s the video from the incident — I am unable to confirm whether the driver has only been suspended or whether he has been fired.

Find more stories about: Europe, online video, transit, Video, YouTube

The big story today outside of the OMG white OMG iPhone OMG was the acquisition of the Delicious bookmarking site. Former owner Yahoo has sold the bookmarking service to the founders of online video sharing service YouTube and their new company AVOS. In reviewing about 20 blog/news posts about the acquisition, so far there has been no chatter about the acquisition price.

Back in December, Yahoo hinted that they would close Delicious service – a move I noted would hurt Yahoo within the developer/early adopter tech community. I also thought the best place for Delicious would be to be acquired by commenting service Disqus. I still think Disqus should consider expanding into bookmarking as it would make the service more sticky and could provide even more benefits to publishers.

This evening I received an email from Yahoo regarding the Delicious acquisition. There are a couple of interesting bits that got me wondering exactly what did YouTube founder Steve Chen and Chad Hurley purchase? I assumed when I read all of the copies of the press releases that the Delicious site would be put onto a blu-ray disc, handed off to AVOS, and then the entire service would be available as it is today but now hosted by AVOS.

It appears that the only bookmarks that will be available after the transition period is complete in July are those where a Delicious user has selected to move their bookmarks and opted-in to the new terms of service.

Here’s the portion of the email that discusses my point:

What happens if you do not transfer your bookmarks
– Delicious in its current form will be available until approximately July 2011.
– After that, you will no longer be able to use your existing Delicious account and will not have access to your existing bookmarks or account information.

Yahoo does explain why you should move your bookmarks over to AVOS which includes the ability to keep the bookmarks you have worked to save, ability to keep using Delicious today and into the future, and that the design won’t change (huh?).

So I am left wondering what percentage of current Delicious users will actually spend the time and move their bookmarks over? I have to imagine the percentage will be low for a few reasons:

• Delicious began operations in 2003 – how many users from the early days no longer even control the email account they registered with?
• How many users don’t even care about their bookmarks from so many years ago?
• How many users just don’t want to spend the time to do the move?
• How many users have no interest in keeping their bookmarks?

I fall into the last category – I was never a huge Delicious user to begin with but I am not sure I even care about what I saved. I am sure someone like RWW writer Marshall Kirkpatrick has already transferred over his bookmarks – I know he has always talked about how important the service is to his story research. But for casual users, will they even read the email Yahoo sent to me and everyone else?

I guess to some extent AVOS acquired the power of the Delicious brand and I am sure both very smart entrepreneurs knew going in that not everyone would transfer their bookmarks over to AVOS.

Perhaps this is best – AVOS begins their Delicious management with a set of very passionate, early adopters ready to help grow the service all over again.

Find more stories about: acquisition, acquisitions, delicious, social bookmarking, YouTube

Last week I was the first to report that Google Video would be removing the ability to watch hosted videos and would delete the videos effective May 13, 2011. I also created a how-to guide to help you download your Google Video hosted videos in the event that the download button wasn’t visible in your account.

Shortly after my post, Francine Hardaway posted on Twitter that she wondered why Google Video didn’t just create a simple Google Video-to-YouTube converter. Many others posted similar comments (some using expletives) both on Twitter and on CN.

Today Google announced they have created an easy way to move your Google Video hosted videos to YouTube.  The Google post notes, “we will be working to automatically migrate your Google Videos to YouTube.” You can also go ahead and migrate your videos to YouTube now. To do so, you need to make sure your YouTube and Google accounts are connected and then it’s as simple as clicking the “Upload videos to YouTube” option.

The best part about the migration tool is that Google is working to make sure your links won’t break and will be forwarded to YouTube. I am not sure if that includes embedded videos or just links to hosted videos.

It’s great to see that Google has listened to user feedback and created a quick transfer option.

(title came from suggestion from Ed Tatton)

Find more stories about: Google, Google Video, online video, YouTube

Two days ago we wrote about Google Video basically going offline for hosted videos. On April 29, you will no longer be able to watch videos hosted on Google Video and on May 13, you will no longer be able to download the videos you have uploaded to Google Video over the last few years. Thanks to Jason Kincaid and Nimish Sawant for their links.

I like Francine Hardaway’s comment – she wonders why Google didn’t create a simple one-click “transfer this video to YouTube” option. Assuming Google doesn’t create a transfer to YouTube option, here are three ways to download your videos from Google Video. No matter which option you use, if you have a lot of videos on GV, it will take some time to grab all of them. I’ve listed the options in order from easiest to more complicated.

Option #1 – Use Download Button

In my research it seems about 50% of Google Video users have a “Download” button appearing next to their videos. I am not one of those people – no button shows up on my Google Video page. Click the download button and then after you download the video, it will change to “downloaded” to let you know that you have downloaded that video.

Here’s what the download option looks like:

Option #2 – Modify the URL

If you don’t have the download option listed above, you can modify the URL to get the download option to work. Just hover over the link “Edit Video Info” and copy the CID from the URL into the following link:

Find more stories about: Google Video, Video, YouTube

One of my colleagues in Switzerland just forwarded an email from Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) which includes a very important update regarding the Google Video service.  Two years ago Google announced that they would discontinue support for uploads to Google Video. At that time Google noted, “Don’t worry, we’re not removing any content hosted on Google Video — this just means you will no longer be able to upload new content to the service.”

It appears that might be changing. The email below (in German) basically includes the following changes:

• As of April 29, 2011, you will no longer be able to view videos hosted on Google Video
• As of May 13, 2011, you will no longer be able to download videos hosted on Google Video
• Google suggests you re-upload your videos to YouTube

Update Friday 9pm: We can now confirm that these changes are worldwide. Early this morning we reported that the changes might be for the German Google Video but the email below (now in English) confirms that the changes are worldwide.

From testing with my Swiss colleague, it seems that the download button is visible on German Google Video while my U.S. version does not currently display the download button on the videos I’ve uploaded to Google Video.

If you want to download your videos (which is probably a good idea) and the download button isn’t visible, you can use the following link to download your videos. Just hover over the link “Edit Video Info” and copy the CID into the following link:

• http://www.google.com/video/upload/DownloadVideo?cid=XXXXXXX&hl=en

Here’s the full email in German – I tried to find a place to link to for an English translation but came up empty as Google Translate and Babelfish don’t provide direct links.

Dear Google Video User,

Later this month, hosted video content on Google Video will no longer be available for playback. Google Video stopped taking uploads in May 2009 and now we’re removing the remaining hosted content. We’ve always maintained that the strength of Google Video is its ability to let people search videos from across the web, regardless of where those videos are hosted. And this move will enable us to focus on developing these technologies further to the benefit of searchers worldwide.

On April 29, 2011, videos that have been uploaded to Google Video will no longer be available for playback. We’ve added a Download button to the video status page, so you can download any video content you want to save. If you don’t want to download your content, you don’t need to do anything. (The Download feature will be disabled after May 13, 2011.)

We encourage you to move to your content to YouTube if you haven’t done so already. YouTube offers many video hosting options including the ability to share your videos privately or in an unlisted manner. To learn more go here.

Here’s how to download your videos:

1. Go to the Video Status page.
2. To download a video to your computer, click the Download Video link located on the right side of each of your videos in the Actions column.

Once a video has been downloaded, “Already Downloaded” will appear next to the Download Video link.

If you have many videos on Google Video, you may need to use the paging controls located on the bottom right of the page to access them all. Please note: This download option will be available through May 13, 2011.

Find more stories about: Google, Google Video, online video, Video, YouTube

I’m sure there have been times when you’ve wanted to link to a particular part of a YouTube video but, if you’re anything like me, you had no idea how to go about doing so. Well, you have two options:

1. You can link to the video on YouTube and specify the minute and second at which you want the video to start playing.
2. You can embed the video and specify the second at which you would like the video to start playing.

Linking to YouTube

To link to the video on YouTube and specify a starting point, you need to add a URL hash at the end of the link with the minutes and seconds specified. The link might look something like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWhalXA7z2I#t=02m55s

The link above will lead to the 2:55 mark in that particular video. All you need to do is add “#t=” to the end of the URL, then specify the minutes in two digits, followed by the letter “m” (for minutes), followed by the seconds (two digits), followed by the letter “s” (for seconds).

Unfortunately, at this time, this feature seems to be a little spotty and unreliable, especially when trying to watch the video with YouTube’s HTML5 player. However, it can be a pretty handy little tip for the right situations.

You can try it out in your own browser and see if it works for you.

Starting an Embedded Video at a Specific Point

To embed a video and have it start playing at a specific point in the video, you need to take a slightly different approach, but it’s still just as simple. Instead of using the URL hash with minutes and seconds specified, you will simply add a “start” parameter to the end of the embed URL and provide the starting point in seconds. Therefore, if I were to embed the video shown above, I would use code similar to the following:

<object width="640" height="385">

<param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/EWhalXA7z2I&hl=en_US&fs=1&start=175″></param>

<param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param>

<param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param>

<embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/EWhalXA7z2I&hl=en_US&fs=1&start=175″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”640″ height=”385″></embed>

</object>

Notice the &start=175 at the end of the param name="movie" URL and the end of the embed source URL. That tells YouTube to start playing the video at the 175 second mark (which is 2 minutes and 55 seconds for those with poor math skills).

The embedded video should then act something like the following video (if WordPress doesn’t butcher my embed code):

Credits

I found these two tips in the following locations. Thanks to those authors for providing this information.

• Link to a specific part of a YouTube video – Matt Cutts’ Blog
• YouTube Allows You to Start Playing Embed Video at Specific Start Time – My Digital Life

As you can see from the date stamps on both blog entries, neither of these are new YouTube features, but I suspect they will still be new to many of us users.

Find more stories about: online video, YouTube

Web analytics service Clicky has announced the launch of their video analytics service which is part of the overall Clicky web analytics platform. Clicky has integrated directly with video hosting company Viddler and provides the ability to track videos from YouTube and Vimeo as well.

The Viddler integration will go live sometime in August as Clicky notes that the Viddler team has some additional work on their end before the connection is made live. The Viddler integration will not require you do anything different to make sure the video stats reach Clicky.

To use the YouTube connection with Clicky, there is a bit of work involved. You can read about the changes to your blog or website that must be added on the Clicky help site. It addition, the way you embed videos is different than just copying and pasting the code directly from YouTube into your blog. The same goes for Vimeo…you would need to add some code to your templates and then change the way you insert videos into your blog or website.

Here’s an example of the stats page:

Note – we are an affiliate for Clicky but none of the links in this post are affiliate links.

Find more stories about: analytics, Clicky, online video, Viddler, YouTube

As of about 7:52pm Eastern time this evening, YouTube went into “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable” mode. In our testing, embedded videos appear to be working a-ok.

There’s a bunch of chatter about the outage over on Twitter. In fact questions about YouTube’s outage are coming in so quickly that the instant you hit submit, there are already a batch more in the search queue!

Interestingly Ben Parr from Mashable reported that YouTube will start rolling out a new homepage and layout today. Perhaps the outage has to do with the new layout rollout. I have confirmed that interior pages are working fine with the new layout.

One Twitter user noted, “I’m going to die without YouTube ):”

I understand there are several people visiting local hospitals because they are unable to watch the latest cat videos. People, please remain calm during this unfortunate time.

As always, please report in if YouTube is down for you as well.

Update: 8:17pm – YouTube is back, resume video watching.

Find more stories about: YouTube, YouTube Down

As of about 7am Eastern time this morning, YouTube went into “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable” mode. In our testing, embedded videos appear to be working a-ok.

There’s a bunch of chatter about the outage over on Twitter.  In fact questions about YouTube’s outage are coming in so quickly that the instant you hit submit, there are already a batch more in the search queue!

One Twitter user noted, “I’m going to die without YouTube ):”

I understand there are several people visiting local hospitals because they are unable to watch the latest cat videos. People, please remain calm during this unfortunate time. 

As always, please report in if YouTube is down for you as well.

Update 7:13am – the current error message shows a 500 Internal Service Error.

Update: 8:15am – still down – Check out this good list of alternative videos put together by Zee at NextWeb.

Update: 8:45am – YouTube is back! Resume cat video watching!

Find more stories about: online video, Video, YouTube, YouTube Down

YouTube is currently down for maintenance – over the past 2-3 hours, our testing shows the service up and down. There are a bunch of people posting messages on Twitter with their sad smiley faces because they can’t watch the latest cat video or the latest wedding video.  Our sources tell us that the service is down because they are adding “UCM” – ultra cat mode.

While the service is down, please consider cleaning your house, washing your car, taking a walk outside (gasp!), visiting a new startup, reading a book, etc. Check out our YouTube down section for previous outages.

Interestingly, the “down for maintenance” page (as seen below) includes a search box. The search works but any video you select displays the same down for maintenance page – it’s an endless loop! As always please report in if YouTube is down where you are located.

Find more stories about: online video, YouTube

This seems to have been a tough week for Google and their servers. Twice this past week Google News was down. Google noted that the issues apparently had to do with planes and backed-up Web traffic. Now I’ve been noticing for a while now that YouTube isn’t acting correctly. Many pages don’t load, videos are displaying an error message and the search function provides the error message displayed below.

As usual, please report in if you are experiencing issues with YouTube (or any other Google service). I hope they can get everything fixed so that we can watch more cat videos!

The last YouTube outage occured on April 23rd. At least Twitter is up and stable.

Find more stories about: Google, YouTube

Content voting service Reddit has announced the launch of Reddit TV today. Liz Gannes at NewTeeVee notes that Reddit TV is very similar to StumbleVideo from StumbleUpon which launched quite a long time ago.

There are a variety of categories including geek, happy, politics, sports and wtf. They are actively seeking sponsors to create “sponsored channels” and as a test they are using videos from the TED conference. Reddit has integrated Twitter as well so you can send messages to your followers which push them to the Reddit page (not the source content page).

Here’s a video from Reddit on how the service works…

Find more stories about: online video, Reddit, Video, YouTube

Back in December, comScore reported that online video site Hulu reached 235 million streams which moved them into 6th place on the top 10 online video streams list. Today comScore released their latest videos viewed list for March 2009 and Hulu has moved up to the 3rd spot with 380 million videos.

This puts Hulu right behind Google/YouTube and Fox Interactive and moves Hulu above Yahoo, Microsoft and Viacom. To put the 380 million mark in perspective, Google including YouTube videos were viewed over 5 billion times.

comScore is also reporting that for the month of March, Google/YouTube passed 100 million unique viewers. Hulu came in with 41 million viewers which puts the online video service in the 4th slot.

Other notes from comScore include: 77.8 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video and the average video length was just over 3 minutes.

Do you find yourself watching a lot of videos on Hulu? To be honest I’ve only used the service when I have missed a TV show that they offer (e.g. Lost, Chuck, etc.).

Find more stories about: comScore, Hulu, online video, YouTube

The topic of paid social media is something I’ve been thinking about a lot of the past few months. When I met with Scott Monty of Ford, I mentioned the idea of assuming that all social media is paid. Perhaps you already do assume that what you read is already paid or sponsored although I’ve tried to think that what I read is genuine unless otherwise noted. For the purposes of this discussion, I am leaving the “is paid social media good or evil” on the side for another day.

Scott noted that the 100 paid reviewers of the Ford Fiesta will disclose that they are part of the “movement”. That’s great that there will be disclosure – it’s something that many of the paid reviews systems have moved to. And while I am using Ford as an example, they are by no means alone with regards to my question. Whether it’s Izea, Magpie, in-house ad sales, etc, the question continues to grow in importance. And I haven’t even mentioned pimping by investors, friends, family members, etc.

Disclosure is easy on a blog, but what about as the blog entry is pushed around. Does the disclosure travel with the blog entry? And more importantly, what about all of the social media services like Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, Plurk, etc.? How do we define disclosure on these networks?

Scott says that twitter messages will be tagged with a #tag. But if I am a new/general user of Twitter, how do I know that #tag means that it’s a sponsored message? Magpie sticks #magpie into the Twitter message but the same question applies. What if I want to note my post about the Ford Fiesta on Twitter – if I use the #tag, does it then appear that it’s a sponsored post? What about users who find a Twitter message via a search? What about retweets (that is where another Twitter user shares a message from another user)?

Melanie Notkin was paid by Disney to push out Twitter messages about a new movie release. In her blog post she noted, “Every time I tweet a ‘sponsored’ tweet from Disney, I will use #SADisney. That way, you’ll know it.” That works for people who have read her blog post, but what about all of the new followers she gets each day, users searching for Disney or people that don’t read her blog. How do they know that she isn’t just saying she likes the Disney movie and is instead getting paid to push messages to her followers?

Twitter’s not alone – what about photos on Flickr or videos on YouTube. Yesterday I watched a video that was paid for by Intel about Intel. The blog post noted that the video was paid but there was nothing in the actual video regarding the sponsored status. Had they put a note upfront about the paid status inside of the video, that would suffice for the video medium. So viewers on Youtube.com or in an embed have no idea the content was paid.

As more companies expand their efforts to buy users in return for authoritative media impressions and content, this issue of paid social media disclosure will only continue to rise. And companies will increase their spend in this area because it’s cheap and provides a greater return than a traditional banner ad or widget.

The bottom line is that just sticking a hashtag (e.g. #tag) on a twitter message, photo or video isn’t enough to properly disclose a relationship.

Could it be that some companies actually like this usage of paid social media because it looks very authentic and they can claim disclosure that most system users will never realize is actually sponsored or paid? I certainly hope not.

We need to come together to to develop standards around social media disclosure so that we never blur the lines between a person paid for their content and those who are doing it out of true passion or concern. On the other hand, we could just assume everything we read on any of the social media sites is paid.

Find more stories about: advertising, Flickr, Ford, money, social media, Social Networking, Twitter, Web 2.0, YouTube

It appears the video sharing site YouTube is down and as of 2:38pm Eastern it has been down over 15 minutes. It appears embedded videos are working from my testing but the website is not.

There’s a bunch of chatter about the outage over on Twitter.  In fact questions about YouTube’s outage are coming in so quickly that the instant you hit submit, there are already a batch more in the search queue!

I understand there are several people visiting local hospitals because they are unable to watch the latest cat videos. People, please remain calm during this unfortunate time. 

As always, please report in if YouTube is down for you as well.

Update: 2:50 pm – YouTube appears to be back to normal except for the HUGE Honda car ad at the top of the page. Check out this groovy video of a new type of pizza box that breaks apart into plates and can also fold back into a storage box for the leftover pizza!

Find more stories about: online video, Video, YouTube