So I was watching the local news a few nights ago, and they had an entire story about their internet website. You can see it here although it pretty much sucks. (Long page, no focus, too much junk, too many ads, et al.) This story focused on a new section of their website: a video upload section.
It was being heralded as, perhaps, the Second Coming of Google: finally! You! can upload your! videos! to our website! And share them with strangers and family and friends! Well, guys, I have some news for you: YouTube is pretty much the best way to upload videos for wide distribution right now. Some little local news site isn’t the way to go.
While I don’t think YouTube is unstoppable, they’ve got just tons of momentum. It’s a reflection of the internet itself: diverse, some good, lots of crap, and an archive of all sorts of information. It’s silly for a local station to add its own video section; it’d be smarter of them to have an account on YouTube and upload videos to that instead – much like GM has done with flickr.
It’s too bad. I’d rather they spent the time and effort put into their video section into just making the website more useful and less ugly.
Posted in Technology
Dave Walls August 29, 2006, 2:59 am
Site looks great….but we need registration, or something. The first freaking comment! SPAM! Nooooo!
Dave Walls August 29, 2006, 3:10 am
Never mind..I just read the note about the ease-of-use of the new Ping. Pardon my insolance, oh humble Ping mastas.
Ryan August 29, 2006, 3:42 am
How’s that for irony? All this talk about anti-spam and the first comment…
Oh well, it was easy to trash, at least.
Paul August 29, 2006, 3:54 am
Anal Leakage Represent, apparently.
COD August 29, 2006, 12:12 pm
You need the math turing test I have at Horseshues.com – I’m fairly certain that the correlation between people who comment 12 months after a Ping is posted and people who can’t pass the test would approach 1.
Ryan August 29, 2006, 9:16 pm
The math turing test is good, but it seems like it would be pretty easy to write a script to answer it by simply parsing the text.
Of course, most comment spammers go for the low-hanging fruit (like, say, a web site with hand-coded scripts written before there were comment spammers).
We do have a captcha in place for entries beyond a certain age, which should help a lot.
Marcus Mackey September 24, 2006, 6:27 am
While I’m apt to agree that YouTube is awesome and is an awesome idea, I did run into a problem with uploading to it recently due to a quirky coding “loop” that wasn’t entirely Safari friendly. You see, I went through the process of verifying my email but even though I was verified, it kept asking me to verify my verified email.
So, I uploaded the video to my MySpace video uploads which worked without a hitch, and which offers much the same functionality as YouTube, and the fact it’s accessible via my MySpace profile for easy access to those that know my MySpace profile… worked out great. While I do have to admit MySpace isn’t as nicely rounded or well-conceived as it should be, it’s video content section worked better for me than YouTube did.
In as far as Flickr… I don’t know that I see the appeal of it as much as I’d like to. While it’s a well written app. and a great idea, it has far too little space devoted to it compared to what I have on my Sony Imagestation account (irony, free and I don’t own a Sony camera… I have a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ10K). While Imagestation isn’t nearly as accessible as I’d like on all levels, the fact I can upload the full contents of my photos to an account without having to resize them to a shrunken size, and that photos can be purchased from the account (printed and mailed to you or printed and capable of being picked up, in-store, at various supporting store partners) using the full high-res images is highly appealing to me. For me to do the same with Flickr, I would need to pay for an upgraded account (you get unlimited access to a Platinum account for x amount of time, but the eventual Basic account on Imagestation gives you unlimited upload space but you may only view low-res versions online). I know that Flickr has some uses beyond what Imagestation can do, but I think Imagestation is a much more killer product for the $ (free) than Flickr is considering the space limitations. I use Imagestation as an online photo album, something that Flickr’s upload limitations seriously prevents without a paid upgrade.
Oh and for the record… I can upload to either one directly from iPhoto (PC users can use Picasa), so Flickr integration with iPhoto isn’t a feature Imagestation lacks either.