We'll let you in on a little secret: There are a ton of music videos and live performances on YouTube. What? You knew that? Well, then you also probably know how hard it can be to find every song on an album and play it in order. YouTube is really designed for searching for videos one at a time. But Jogli helps organize the mess.
Jogli is basically a search engine and music video player. Search for an artist and Jogli will bring up a list of possible results. Click an artist name and you'll find a list of albums. Click an album and you'll be presented with a list of songs. In many cases not each song is clickable, but many are.
When you hit the play button, a YouTube video will start playing in the corner. But you can also queue up additional songs and even search for new songs without stopping your recording. Jogli is a lot like MyStrands, another site we covered earlier this year. But the way Jogli organizes songs by artist and album sets it apart from the competition.
Timelines are a great way to provide an overview of events. But what's even better is a timeline that generates content automatically based on information you probably already have.
Dipity takes automated timeline creation to a new level. If you have (and quite frankly who doesn't) a Blogger, Flickr, WordPress, YouTube, Twitter or any of the other supported social networking site just enter in your user name, URL or an RSS feed and dipity will do the rest.
You can view your timeline in years, months, weeks or even one day. Dipity also let's you rate your events so that those with higher ratings are displayed more prominently than others with lower ratings.
You're free to embed your timeline on your own site or list them on dipity's searchable directory.
If you ever wanted to see your online life sprawled out in front of you, dipity is one way to go about it.
Qbox is a search engine/media player combo that lets you find and listen to music available from social networking sites including MySpace, Bebo, and YouTube. The interface is a bit more complicated than it needs to be. If you just download the standalone media player for Windows, you'll be told that you need to sign in if you want to search for music.
Search results are displayed in your default web browser, which is odd because the Qbox media player acts as sort of a stripped down browser for playing web audio and video clips. Don't ask us why it won't display search results.
Now here comes the important part: Qbox is not compatible with Firefox 3. If you conduct a search from the media player or the web site using Firefox 3, you'll get a list of songs. But when you click the play buttons next to those songs, you'll be told that you haven't installed the Qbox media player if you're using Firefox 3. When we logged into the web site with Internet Explorer, everything worked properly. But when we tried to search from songs from the media player interface, the results were again displayed in our default browser, which was Firefox 3. There doesn't seem to be a way to select your prefered browser from within the software.
You can also click on genre tags to browse for songs within the media player itself. Qbox is currently available as a public beta, so it's possible the company could improve the interface and adds Firefox 3 compatibility.
You watch videos online. From Youtube, from other people's blogs, and so on.
But more than likely, you're not currently getting a desktop type experience with online video.
uvLayer is a web based application that is similar to other web-based desktops. But there's a twist. uvLayer is built around search, discovery, and sharing of online video.
You add friends, and they show up on the left hand side of your uvLayer desktop. Search for videos, and drag them out to your uvLayer desktop. If you want to share a video with someone, simply drag the video onto your friend. It's that easy.
Watching videos is pretty simple and it all stays within the uvLayer web environment.
They have an Adobe AIR app which is pretty nice as well, but we think the value here is the in-browser experience.
If you're into online video and hate that you have to hop around different sites, copy and paste code, and jump through the normal hoops, then uvLayer is for you.
You can use three different formats, speech bubbles, notes, and spotlights. You can see a speech bubble in the image above. A note looks pretty much the same, but without the arrow pointing toward a mouth. And the spotlight lets you draw a box around some element in the video. When a user scrolls their mouse over that element, the text will pop up.
Annotations are easy to customize. You can change the size, location on the screen, and location in the video. You can also adjust how long they stay on the screen.
YouTube has been linking copyrighted videos uploaded by third parties to their respective content owners. This occurred with a Modest Mouse video, which YouTube linked to the official Modest Mouse page. The link says "Contains Content From: Sony BMG," and it may be YouTube's way of preventing content owners from removing videos uploaded by fans.
Up until now, YouTube has said it shouldn't be held responsible for the copyright violations performed by its members, but it has also been very cooperative in removing copyrighted material when asked. Last year Google announced a video identification system, permitting content owners to identify (and choose how to share or remove) their content, so it seems this is what's at play here.
We're sure YouTube doesn't like to remove member videos. It's bad for business: a site with unhappy members typically means a site that eventually has no members. But if YouTube's just linking videos instead of removing them, it must be a positive step for consumers in the ongoing Copyright war.
Vidnik is a new Mac application that lets you quickly record video from your Mac's iSight camera and then upload it to YouTube. Simply run Vidnik, set your YouTube account username and password, record some video, crop it, add some tags and a description, choose the video category, and then click "Upload."
The movies you record are saved as .mov files in ~/Movies/Vidnik so that you can use them for other things as well. You can also drag other movies onto Vidnik for easy upload to YouTube.
Vidnik is a good tool for video bloggers (who want to use YouTube's bandwidth instead of their own), video responses to other YouTube videos, and solo musicians who want to be able to quickly upload performance video.
You know those pretty slideshows that you can view in Flickr? PicLens is a browser plugin for Firefox and Internet Explorer that lets you view images from a bunch of sites as slideshows. When we last looked at PicLens, you could view images from Flickr, Google, Photobucket, SmugMug, DeviantArt, and Yahoo! Now PicLens has added support for YouTube videos.
When you click the PicLens button in your browser, you get a black screen and a search bar. Just type any term in the search bar and you can sift through a wall of YouTube thumbnails. Click a video and it will start playing. You can blow videos up to full screen, or look through more thumbnails while your video is playing. In other words, it's kind of like watching YouTube without the ads.
YouTube, the mayor of New Orleans, and the governor of Louisiana have publicly invited the presidential candidates to participate in a presidential forum this September. Since this is not an official debate, it is unknown if any of the candidates will actually show up. Either way, the event should prove successful -- here's why.
It's been quite some time since New Orleans was hit by Hurricane Katrina, but the city is not done suffering. There's about 86,000 evacuees stuck in Houston, Atlanta and 40 other cities, and there the government currently has no plan on how it will bring these people home (not to mention the city's other 921,332,437,208 problems). So even if the candidates don't show up to the debate, the publicity stunt should help to remind government officials that it's not over yet. In other words, it's a giant call for help.
Despite that many may dismiss YouTube as a time-waster, this isn't the site's first dive into the presidential race. Last year, YouTube allowed its users to record and send in questions, which would be answered by the candidates on TV. And though we know the Google owned site gets a lot of great publicity out stuff like this, we can't help but tip our hat for the good work.
There are two things that make FLV.To absolutel amazing. The first is the sheer number of Google AdSense and referral ads that the developer managed to cram into a small space. But we're willing to overlook that because the other remarkable thing about FLV.To is how easy the site makes it to save YouTube videos as MP3 files.
No, you're not going crazy. YouTube deals in videos, and MP3 files are audio only. But there's a huge number of music videos on YouTube, and FLV.To will let you save the audio from those videos in a matter of seconds. Just pop in the URL of any YouTube video and the site will proces the file and spit out an MP3 which you can download and listen to. If you've already gone through the process of downloading YouTube videos as FLV files, you can also upload Flash videos from your desktop for easy conversion.
One of the things that's always bothered us about YouTube is that there's no way to search for videos without stopping playback of the video you're currently watching (unless you open a new tab or browser window). MSN Video has had a feature for a while that lets you search for videos and create a video playlist without interrupting any video you happen to be watching at the time, but if you want to browse YouTube's library in this way you'll need to look to a third party solution like YouTube Fast Search.
YouTube Fast Search is a nifty web site that lets you play any video you can find on YouTube. While one video is playing, you can search for additional videos and drag and drop them to a playlist window at the bottom of the screen. When your first video is done playing, the next video in your playlist will start. Easy as pie, and something YouTube really should implement on its own site.
Timelines are a great way to provide an overview of events. But what's even better is a timeline that generates content automatically based on information you probably already have.
You watch videos online. From Youtube, from other people's blogs, and so on.
Vidnik is a new Mac application that lets you quickly record video from your Mac's iSight camera and then upload it to YouTube. Simply run Vidnik, set your YouTube account username and password, record some video, crop it, add some tags and a description, choose the video category, and then click "Upload."
