Xeni Jardin has done a bunch of the kind of newsy shows of “wonderful things” in video, but she’s often joined by other Boing Boingers like Mark Frauenfelder. They are doing a terrific job highlighting great stuff. I really liked this episode from a few days ago about the upcoming release of a digitally remastered “Final Cut” of Blade Runner because of the great footage they were able to get of the movie. Check it out!

Another good episode came out today with Mark Frauenfelder showing how to make a little motor and then Xeni discusses EcoNouveau fashion with Bahar Shahpar:

More episodes can be found here at the tag, bbtv.

Tags: bbtv, MarkFrauenfelder, XeniJardin, BoingBoingTV

We actually get a lot of requests for this sort of thing in our feedback email and I haven’t really had very helpful answers until now, mostly because I haven’t had much time to research the latest stuff. Yoav is the man.

Thanks!

I said then that I quibbled with the “ownership” model for user’s data. That maybe it should read “co-ownership.”

Well after thinking it through, in different scenarios, and talking with people at the Data Sharing Summit over the weekend, and a couple of our advisors, I’ve decided that it makes more sense for users to:

1. own their data, solely
2. give a non-exclusive license to Dabble when they put data at our site.
3. be able to remove the data, to the extent that we can take it out (backup tapes are problematic but we’ll do our best)
4. part of the non-exclusive license to Dabble will include that we can distribute the data (RSS feeds, etc) about the user’s activities.

Web20, etc. (I still hate that term but I’m mellowing a bit) won’t work unless we do this as a complete package, because users need, if they are using someone else’s site, to be able to share data, make it searchable elsewhere, make it reusable and remixable, depending on the data. But they also need to know they have control over it. And sites like ours need to architect with this understanding.

For example, if I join Dabble and make playlists and collect videos, I can remove them as I please. In addition, I can remove my account any time I want. We’ll remove everything we can, but exceptions might include backup tapes stored away.

Anyway, I know this is a slight (maybe semantic) shift, but I think it matters, gives users more control, and makes the partnership between the user and Dabble which hosts functionality and activities more clear, more accountable, and more fair.

I think it’s the right thing to do. And so we’re taking steps to make a slight change to the Dabble Privacy and Data Policy to reflect this. It should be there shortly.

We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:

* Ownership of their own personal information, including:
o their own profile data
o the list of people they are connected to
o the activity stream of content they create;
* Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
* Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

Sites supporting these rights shall:

* Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
* Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
* Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
* Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.

My only quibble? I think the users should “co-own” so that there is no confusion that the sites we play on co-own a copy and so do we. And in some cases, depending on the TOU of the sites, when the data flows out, anyone else who reuses/remixes it can either co-own or have an open license.

But I still support it. Dabble’s TOU has said these things from the beginning (co-ownership specified) and as we build out the one or two items on this list we don’t yet have, we will follow the logic and make information available along these lines as well.

But overall, great work guys!

Several other folks also were mentioned, including Alive in Bagdad, Wallstrip and Break a Leg, all high quality programs. Sponsorship is a great model for producers that are in sync with companies that want to support video production. It’s a budding model for online video and we’re really pleased to see it take shape.

If we’re not back up, at the appointed time, you’ll know that our best-laid-plan has gone sideways. Never fear.  We’re on the job.

Check out all the bloggers who’ve written about it so far (here)! They’ve got a really impressive campaign going to spread the word, with 1900+ posts so far talking about the day.

Their mission is to get people to blog about the environment, as this year’s issue. I liked the answer to this question on their site:

Why the environment?

We have selected the environment as the 2007 theme both for the clarity of its importance and the undeniable urgency that issues like global warming and pollution have. It is an issue that can relate to virtually any subject, any blog and anybody.

So sign up to get a notice 2 days ahead, and then get out there and blog your thoughts about the environment on Oct 15!

After a being severely disappointed by Spiderman 3, I am happy to see it listed on the site as their next production. That should be a hoot.

Keep ‘em coming!

Tags: How, it, Should, Have, Ended,, parody,, spoof,, Lord, of, the, Rings,, movie,, comedy

Via Valleywag.

Btw, we just hit 19 million videos indexed a few minutes ago.

Cool. If you’d like a Dabbler Tshirt, pls email me at mary at dabble dot com.

Take a look:

Now, if only I could have thought of that in my futile attempts to explain the meaning of RSS to my parents. . .

Good work, Common Craft!

Tags: RSS,, Social, Networking,, video, explanation,, Wiki,, In, Plain, English,, Common, Craft,

More than 150 data partnerships and links to the most video hosts makes Dabble the web’s hub for intelligent, human-powered video search.

Berkeley, CA (PRWEB) August 2, 2007 — Dabble.com, the central hub for finding, sharing and organizing rich media from across the web, last week celebrated its first year in business after having indexed more than 17 million videos. In the short time since Dabble’s July 2006 launch the company has forged 150 data partnerships and indexed the entire inventories of hundreds of video hosts, from major corporate players to independent, viral sites. Dabble’s reach across hosts of every size provides unmatched availability of content and relevance, making Dabble the online destination for anyone looking for video from every available source.

Dabble searches more than 630 video hosts — more than any other media search site — from every corner of the web (for instance, YouTube’s inventory is available to Dabble users and is an example of a *single* host site) to bring searchers the most available content, including viral and traditional media-generated clips such as Stephen Colbert shorts. Just some of the partners Dabble works with to deliver the widest variety includes YouTube/Google, AOL, Revver, Internet Archive (www.archive.org), dailymotion, metacafe, AtomFilms, blip.tv, EVTV1, Crackle (Grouper), GoFish, Heavy.com, ifilm, Salon and The Onion among hundreds of others.

When we started building Dabble in 2005 it was hard to imagine the video search market getting this big as quickly as it did. But we knew the conditions were right for a site which would use the best technology to map videos no matter where they were hosted and deliver users the most relevant search results and best experience
Some of the accomplishments Dabble has logged since August 1, 2006 include having seen its traffic spike more than 1000 percent; being named to Red Herring’s Red Herring 100; profiled by USAToday and being listed as one of the “25 Startups to Watch” by Business 2.0 magazine. Also in this past year, Kai Mildenberger joined as CEO to see Dabble through its early challenges while guiding the company as a leading video search destination for millions of video enthusiasts. Incredibly, Dabble has assumed a leadership position in video search on just its initial angel investment of $800,000; other video search sites in the space have spent tens of millions of investment dollars to market and make a name for their video search products, which deliver far less relevant content and results.

“When we started building Dabble in 2005 it was hard to imagine the video search market getting this big as quickly as it did. But we knew the conditions were right for a site which would use the best technology to map videos no matter where they were hosted and deliver users the most relevant search results and best experience,” said Mary Hodder, Dabble founder and CTO. “Our approach to finding rich media from across the web has paid off and I couldn’t be more proud of the people I have working with me. Video search isn’t an easy problem to solve and the Dabble team has devised an elegant solution using structured data. Dabble’s approach delivers better results than competing technologies including keyword match or speech to text search. If it weren’t for the talent within Dabble’s walls, we never would have hit this milestone as quickly as we have.”

Dabble doesn’t directly host any media; the search engine keeps track of the bookmarks — or indexes the links — to wherever media is stored on the web along with essential details about the media such as who made it, who’s in it, tags from outside of Dabble (as well as our own), and who’s watching and collecting it into playlists. Dabble users add details and notes, correct mistakes and share what’s valuable to them about the video, making Dabble’s search intelligent by design. This human powered effort enhances the details surrounding the Web’s video inventory and lets Dabble know why a video is valuable (in addition to where it is), enabling the Dabble engine to return exceptionally accurate search results.

Stay tuned for Dabble Version 2, launching soon.

About Dabble.com:
Dabble collects videos from all over the web, no matter where they are hosted. Dabble gathers video data from tens of thousands of hosting websites and keeps a record of where web videos are located, descriptions about the video, who made it, what it’s about, and its popularity. Dabble’s human powered search engine with a community of users who add details and notes, correct mistakes, and share what is valuable to them about the media, enhances the metadata in a massive team effort that goes far beyond what any one site can do alone. Dabble is the location to find videos of interest to you, no matter what your taste, gathering all the media you’ve seen elsewhere into one organized collection.

We received notice yesterday that the Dabble blog has been nominated by Chris Abraham for the Blogger’s Choice Awards, in the Best Video Blogger Category. Needless to say, we’re pretty psyched! To find out more about the competition, you can check out the details, here.

Naturally we are asking you, our dear readers, to go ahead and vote so that we can measure up to our fierce competition. So if you enjoy reading our posts as much as we enjoy writing them, please register and vote for us here.

According to the site, the voting for the awards ends at 11:55pm on October 19, 2007, and winners will be recognized on November 10, 2007, at PostieCon in Las Vegas, NV.

Thank you for your continued support!

1. they can link to each other in Dabble and watch using our system, each time they come to the site.
2. they can pull out RSS feeds into whatever system they use to watch those.

and now.. we’ve discovered a new one:

Profilactic has made it possible for their users to pull in their Dabble profiles and bookmarked videos. We love it! (Not the name.. guys, please, you’ve got to change it to something that doesn’t sound like a 20 year old’s frat party. Prophylaxis means “something that prevents disease” which includes STDs…).

But we love the idea of the site.

It’s a kind of distributed Facebook, where I don’t think they intend the site to prevent diseases, but rather to share your personal and social experience. This means that you can grab your profile info from lots of sites, including Dabble, as well as Flickr, del.icio.us, YouTube, Technorati, Odeo and Twitter, and loads and loads more:

So.. keep up the great work guys!

mary

PS. pls reconsider the name.

We’ve come a long way since our launch date last year, and are so proud of how far we’ve come. We currently have over 15 million videos indexed, and our index is growing by leaps and bounds. The past 5 days, we’ve brought in 1 million new video records alone.

We couldn’t have gotten very far without our faithful and steadfast engineers who’ve worked so hard for so long.

Thank you, our users, for all the continued interest and enthusiasm. We’re very excited about we have in store for you, and we hope that you’ll continue to grow with us as we continue to evolve.

Here are a few Dabble stats to give you an idea of our progress over the last year.

Videos indexed:

Users have tagged or added other metadata to 200,000 videos, since we launched. While that’s a small percentage, it shows us that overall, we are inline with other kinds of communities like Wikipedia, where the often see 2% of their most avid users making or enhancing the content on the site.

Also.. we’ve seen our traffic grow, after that initial launch bounce, by 1000% since last August 1. That’s super exciting for us!

And, we have to thank all the bloggers and journalists, who wrote about Dabble which are available on Dabble’s press pages.

These guys can dance!

As someone here at Dabble pointed out, this isn’t the first dance segment coming out of this prison. Check out this video to see the inmates perform the Algorithm March, which was originally made popular by Pythagoras Switch, a Japanese children’s television program.

Classic!

To catch a look, check out the link below:

Staying true to mash-up trends, the video has already been re-remixed. It’s called Teletubbies: Walk it Out. ‘Nuff said.

Tags: Walk, it, Out,, remix,, remake,, DJ, Unk,, Bob, Fosse,, Gwen, Verdon,, dance,

Now, not only is it “the funniest 5 second viral on the internet ever”, it is also, without doubt, the most remixed 5 second video on the internet. I’ve collected a few I liked into a playlist, which you can view below, but I’m sure more will pop-up throughout the course of the month.

Personally, I’m a fan of the Kill Bill Remix, and Dramatic Chipmunk-Lost. So be sure not to miss those. . .

Enjoy!

In browsing through videos yesterday, I came across tons of footage from fireworks displays all over the country. I grabbed some of my favorites and collected them into a playlist, which you can view below.

Admittedly, watching videos of fireworks is not nearly as exciting as the real thing. Although, if you haven’t been to Walt Disney World for Fourth of July fireworks, you should check out Fantasy in the Sky 4th of July 2007, it looks like it was a pretty phenomenal show.

Hope that everyone enjoyed their holiday!

Regarding the DMCA notice, we also noted that Web Sheriff didn’t comply with DMCA rules and not just because they pointed us to the correct and legal copy. We have a DMCA and copyright policy, and don’t allow people to email in requests like this because they can be forged and don’t have a real signature.

Since we don’t host the video in question, Youtube does, we also don’t have the video itself to remove, just links and text around it.

Additionally, Web Sheriff said that we were violating The White Stripes “copyright, trademark and moral rights.”

Regarding the trademark, I would beg to differ. Dabble is a search engine, and therefore has “speech about things” but not the things themselves. Talking about something, correctly (as in the Dabble record they said was infringing the White Stripes trademark was actually a White Stripes video, put up by Warner Brothers) is not “causing confusion in the marketplace for users” which is usually the problem when trademark infringement occurs. Trademark protection is supposed to prevent brand confusion in the marketplace, among other things.

There is a case, noted here: The NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK et. al. v. NEWS AMERICA PUBLISHING, INC. et. al.

Where the New Kids on the Block sued to have a newspaper not refer to them by name, because they said it was “trademark infringement.” They lost the case because the judge said that the newspaper was accurately talking about the real New Kids and that free speech trumped the use of words which happen to be trademarked, in this case, because there was no confusing use of the trademark. We believe that search engines fall under this category as well.

I used to process DMCA notice and takedown requests from Google, for Chilling Effects, a couple of years ago, and would suggest people take a look at Chilling Effects, which catalogs all this stuff.

When we get real notices in the mail, we file them there so there is a public record of it. Most of what’s at Chilling Effects includes things from Scientologists, music companies and a few other disparate entities.

Scouta should do the same with their Web Sherrif notice or any other DMCA notices they get.

Looking High and Low: Who Will Be the Google of Video Search? by Annalee Newitz

The Web has gone wacky for video. From Animal Planet to zefrank.com, sites now brim with clips. The problem: Search engines can’t index video files as easily as text. That’s tripping up the Web’s next great leap forward. So the race is on to become the Google of video search. And guess what? It might not be Google.

NOTE: The emphasis within the chart’s regular data is mine.

Thanks Wired and Annalee!

Ben Relles, the founder of the website BarelyPolitical.com, released the video I Got a Crush . . . on Obama on June 13th, and it has since generated similar amounts of buzz (but not quite as much controversy) as the first memorable 2008 Presidential Election video, Hillary ‘1984′. I Got a Crush . . . on Obama stars actress Amber Lee Ettinger aka Obama Girl, and was written and sung by Leah Kauffman, who also wrote the lyrics for the viral parody, My Box in a Box. The video already has over 1.5+ million hits on YouTube, alone — and according to its producer, it has been featured on over 200 broadcast television stations, as well. The Obama camp claims they are completely unaffiliated with the video. Seems they’ve been pretty lucky with free, unaffiliated viral video publicity. . . or is it really just luck?

If you haven’t already, check it out:

If you’d like to get the full background on its origins, you can check out the I Got A Crush. . . on Obama Wikipedia page.

It will be very interesting to see how deeply affecting online video will be on the upcoming election, especially considering how much attention the early content has already received.

Tags: Barack, Obama,, Obama, Girl,, I, Got, a, Crush, on, Obama,, 2008,, Presidential, Election

Apparently, I’m not the only one to notice their comedic prowess; browsing through their site, I discovered that they were named Variety’s “10 Comics to Watch in 2007″, and are represented by one of the most distinguished talent agencies in the entertainment industry. Not so bad, considering half of the duo just graduated college.

If you haven’t already seen their video 14 Days in a Civic, I’d definitely start there. It’s a hilarious parody Nissan’s “7 Days in a Sentra” campaign. Or you can check out their latest parody, Gap’s Boyfriend Trouser, below:

We hope Joey and David keep the laughs coming in the future!

After doing a little poking around, I found that Jeff also produced a sequel in the same style called The Invitation, which he sent out to guests as the official wedding invite. Is this guy innovative, or what?

Tags: Love, Letter:, An, Animated, Proposal,, Jeff,, Computer, Animation,, The, Invitation

Of the six episodes that have been posted online, my current favorite is the third episode, Airhorn:

You’ll have to watch the rest and choose for yourself! And Man in the Box isn’t the only series produced by Runawaybox.com. Be sure to browse through the others on the site!

Tags: Man, in, the, Box,, Runawaybox.com,, Airhorn,, Mike, Polk,, Office,, The, Office,, humor,, series