Lastminute.com adds Pixsy media search
October 24, 2007
Online travel agent Lastminute.com has added a new media search engine to their website. The search powered by Pixsy allows users to search for images and content for destinations they may be thinking of buying on Lastminute.com.
Pixsy is a really good search aggregator for images and video so complements the Lastminute.com offering of holiday and travel products perfectly. It’s currently not particularly well integrated, it only offers a link to search the entire site for the words you searched for. I’d expect this integration to get much tighter so that relevant offers are interspersed amongst the images and videos with much more upsell functionality.
Still, a good step for Lastminute, it broadens their offering of inspirational imagery and gives them more content with little effort.
Information R/evolution
October 19, 2007
Great video which really gets the point across about information and the changes in the way we use, access and store it.
YouTube get’s some content identification technology out! (at last…)
October 16, 2007
At long last Google has announced the launch of some technology on YouTube which aims to protect copyright holders. Called YouTube Video Identification, the system does what Google has been promising to do since June, giving content owners the power to block copyrighted clips as they’re uploaded to the popular video-sharing service.
Of course, Google’s post on their blog avoids the mention of ‘blocking’ content and focuses instead on how publishers can ‘manage’ their content ‘proactively’. They also mention all the other steps they have taken to allow content to be managed on YouTube:
- Our strict repeat-infringer policy, which has been in place since our launch, terminates accounts of repeat infringers based on DMCA notices.
- We take a unique “hash” of every video removed for copyright infringement and block re-upload of that exact video file prospectively.
- We require a 10-minute limit on the length of content uploaded to the site.
- We provide content owners with an electronic notification and takedown tool, to help them more easily identify their material and notify us to take it down with the click of a mouse.
- We also publish copyright tips for users in plain English and clear, prominent messaging at the time of user upload.
Great propaganda guys… Here’s the details from the YouTube site. Will this be enough to fend off the copyright subpoenas? I think it probably will. This kind of proactive filtering approach is exactly what was needed to secure YouTube from the lawyers. Hopefully Google will continue to evolve this technology and stay ahead of the game with it, so securing YouTube’s future and allowing them to focus on the more important issues of monetising the video sharing site.
YouTube on Google Earth
October 11, 2007
Google has just announced a new layer for Google Earth which features geotagged videos from YouTube. It’s great! As a frequent traveler and someone who works in the travel industry this is just what I need to discover new destinations.
I’m hoping that Google open up an API to YouTubes geotagging so we can integrate videos into our Google Maps implementation as well.
And while on that subject, what would be really useful would be if YouTube could add categories to it’s videos (such as travel), having access to those sorts of categories through API’s would make a lot of businesses much more willing to integrate YouTube content into their web offering (as you can avoid more of the dross).
Adsense video units are go!
October 9, 2007
Google has announced the launch of their Adsense units for embedded videos.
By embedding certain YouTube clips into your website you can now have advertising units displayed via Adsense. You can choose categories of video to target to your site, select content from individual YouTube partners, or have video automatically targeted to your site content.
When you place a video unit on your website, you’ll earn revenue from two types of ad formats: companion ads, which sit above your video content within the player and can be either text or image-based, and text overlay ads, which appear in the bottom 20% of the video content area. Ads on video units can be paid on either a cost-per-click or cost-per-thousand impression basis.
Sounds good for anyone with a high traffic website or portal, earning potential could be quite high if you place the right videos on your site.
User comments, a different take
October 8, 2007
I love The Onion, and here once again they’ve hit the nail on the proverbial head with this video showing how they (the media) respond to users comments. Really makes sense if you’ve ever run a blog, social network or user generated content based site.
Viewdle, a visual search that works?
September 18, 2007
Creating a visual search engine that can find video (or images) of people is a bit like the holy grail (highly desirable but tricky to get your hands on). Now along comes a company called Viewdle, who are one of the start-ups at the Techcrunch 40 event at the moment. Viewdle quote themselves as a ‘facial recognition powered digital media platform for easily indexing, searching & monetizing video assets’. Quite a powerful thing if they get it working right. Perhaps YouTube should buy them (seeing as Google have yet to make real use of Neven Vision technology).
Viewdle comes out of Reuters Labs and there’s a demo up and running which looks pretty cool. It shows how many times someone appears in clips and how long they feature (demo link here for Angelina Jolie). I’m hoping that as it comes from Reuters it should stack up commercially as I’m sure they’ll have used this on their own archives.
