Feedr is a concept I am working on. The name is a play on “News Reader” – just like a reader makes your favorite blogs and online news available from within one interface, feedr allows you to search newly blogged-about videos. The idea is that you enter a search word/term, and the software searches blog posts tagged with those words that include videos. What you get in the feedr player is a continuous stream of videos. There are controls to pause, skip ahead and back, and there is a link to the original video.
I am posting this to get some feedback on the idea. I want to keep the interface extremely minimal – the inspiration is a TV, but instead of a predetermined set of channels, you ‘zap’ by entering search terms, and the channels are ever changing – reflecting the current online trends and discussions. As soon as I get a working prototype up and running, I will post a link here.
This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 7:02 pm and is filed under technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
I definitely like the idea. I think that new forms of distribution for internet video is a necessity as the database is getting larger and larger. Blogs are a great way to filter internet content because you get the intellect of a human (or humans) doing the leg work.
Have you thought about how you would weight the search results? Would there be some method to say that certain blogs posts would be more valuable (and therefore played earlier in the stream) than others?
I definitely like the idea. I think that new forms of distribution for internet video is a necessity as the database is getting larger and larger. Blogs are a great way to filter internet content because you get the intellect of a human (or humans) doing the leg work.
Have you thought about how you would weight the search results? Would there be some method to say that certain blogs posts would be more valuable (and therefore played earlier in the stream) than others?
April 18th, 2008
7:36 pm
The search results could be weighted in a number of ways, one that comes to mind is to count the number of comments and trackbacks to the blog post in question.
So I started playing around with RSS parsing, trying to extract video urls from for example http://intwo.ca/feed. Some problems that arise are that different video servers embed the actual video url in different ways.
I don’t just want to display the original video player, but the principle of incremental (agile) development says that I should start simple. so for now i will put a new player (be it the youtube or blip.tv player or whatever), in the video player placeholder for every new stream that is opened.
the core behind this idea has to do with establishing relationships between video urls and metadata (tags). On the next level, I can start creating hierarchical relationships between tags themselves, to deliver videos that are more or less ‘loosely’ related to the search query.
This project may be trickier than I first thought :)
The search results could be weighted in a number of ways, one that comes to mind is to count the number of comments and trackbacks to the blog post in question.
So I started playing around with RSS parsing, trying to extract video urls from for example http://intwo.ca/feed. Some problems that arise are that different video servers embed the actual video url in different ways.
I don’t just want to display the original video player, but the principle of incremental (agile) development says that I should start simple. so for now i will put a new player (be it the youtube or blip.tv player or whatever), in the video player placeholder for every new stream that is opened.
the core behind this idea has to do with establishing relationships between video urls and metadata (tags). On the next level, I can start creating hierarchical relationships between tags themselves, to deliver videos that are more or less ‘loosely’ related to the search query.
This project may be trickier than I first thought :)
April 19th, 2008
10:52 am
I decided not to pursue this project, as I ran into too many problems. For one, RSS and Atom feeds do not include links to videos in posts, so there is no easy way to crawl a large number of weblogs to collect statistical information.
If anyone has any input on a project of this type, I am still interested in giving it a go.
I decided not to pursue this project, as I ran into too many problems. For one, RSS and Atom feeds do not include links to videos in posts, so there is no easy way to crawl a large number of weblogs to collect statistical information.
If anyone has any input on a project of this type, I am still interested in giving it a go.
September 19th, 2008
3:59 am
I know this isn’t necessarily the same, but it is amusing.
http://upl8.tv
I know this isn’t necessarily the same, but it is amusing.
http://upl8.tv
September 24th, 2008
12:33 pm
upl8.tv/ is awesome – youtube has too many distractions to be operated late at night – just enter a keyword after the slash and you have themed “random internet nonsense”.
The only thing lacking is a link to the video that plays – but i appreciate the minimalism.
upl8.tv/ is awesome – youtube has too many distractions to be operated late at night – just enter a keyword after the slash and you have themed “random internet nonsense”.
The only thing lacking is a link to the video that plays – but i appreciate the minimalism.
October 16th, 2008
8:08 am