Keeping the conversation alive in media blogs
Video Blogging, Vlogging or what ever you want to call it was born into a tradition of self publishing on the internet and benefits greatly from the infrastructure developed for blogging. The tools to create media and now to distribute media online are accessible and affordable. Furthermore, video blogging is often considered participatory and socially interactive. Much of this is due to what blogs have done, enabled true two-way conversation through comments and loose networking through trackbacks.
Unfortunately, while video blogging benefits from these, it doesn’t really do much to improve or enhance this capability with video.
At ITP Research, myself and a couple of others have been working to change this or at least push commenting and trackbacks a bit further. We have created a Video Commenting plugin for WordPress that allows people to leave comments in-time with a video. This, we believe is one of the first steps to allowing conversation to happen around video and furthermore enable richer conversation with video.
Check it out, download it, modify it, use it… Video Comments, WordPress Plugin
From the site:
It’s really exciting to see the number of blogs that exist today, thousands of voices are talking about every possible topic. Blog syndication and commenting allows readers to subscribe, discuss and carry the conversation further, however, with the different forms of media becoming a normal part of many blogs there’s a need to keep this open communication open. Audio and video blogs are forming communities and to encourage conversation the viewers must be able to respond, so we developed a plug-in for WordPress called Video Comments.
Looks cool Shawn! It’s interesting that the project is called “Video Comments” but the module itself seems to be called “QuickTime Video Comment” internally. The implication seems to be video blogging == QuickTime. Is this a permanent equation or will there eventually also be FLV_COMMENTS, etc.?
QuickTime is kind of a weird set of technologies — the same name applies to the player as well as the video file format. I’m guessing all this would work with filenames ending with “.mp4” (or .3gp, as in your example) which aren’t explicitely QuickTime-centric, but perhaps QuickTime is ubiquitous enough to be the player of choice?
One last thing that comes to mind — this sentence seems to imply a bit of standards legwork on somebody’s part:
By encoding the timestamp into the comments themselves I guess you sidestep this to some degree, but as far as I know there doesn’t seem to be a standard (used loosely) for autodiscovery of comments. I’ll be presumptuous and make a suggestion here:
<link rel=”video-comments” type=”application/rss+xml” href=”foo.xml”/>
or <link rel=”video-comments” type=”application/atom+xml” href=”foo.xml”/>
this is pretty cool. Good work by all you guys. Maybe we can now port this to all other blogging API’s, maybe Blogger also ? have you looked into that ? That way, it will become pretty popular. Is it too difficuilt ? I can certainly help if needed
Hi Dan, Thanks for the comments.
Yes, the plan is for this to work with Real, Windows Media, Flash and the like down the road. Right now it is anything that is supported by QuickTime (including MP4 and 3GP). We will probably make this work with vPIP (http://utilities.cinegage.com/videos-playing-in-place/) to support more formats as well as more blogging software.
Also, yes, we have a plan to do a couple of things regarding RSS. The first will probably be a namespace and then a microformat as you suggest..
Thanks again..
Hey Ram,
Yeah, it is the plan to make this work with as many blogging software as possible.
Also, I just realized that it doesn’t work with Opera so fixing that will probably be the first priority.
The source is available so anything you would like to do is welcome.
-shawn