Adding To Our Detailed Geolocation Database

We once again are focused on geolocation as a value-add to our video and social networking platforms. To give you an idea of the size of our data, France’s detailed town level geolocation took the entire working day to upload.

We currently have the following countries in our database and activated so that members, videos, and properties can be properly geolocated:

- Antigua and Barbuda
- Afghanistan
- Algeria
- Azerbaijan
- Albania
- Armenia
- Andorra
- Angola
- Argentina
- Australia
- Austria
- Bahrain
- Barbados
- Botswana
- Bermuda
- Belgium
- Belize
- Benin
- Belarus
- Soloman Islands
- Brazil
- Bahamas
- Bhutan
- Bulgaria
- Canada
- Chile
- Colombia
- Costa Rica
- Dominican Republic
- Ecuador
- El Salvador
- France
- Guatemala
- Japan
- Mexico
- Nicaragua
- New Zealand
- Paraguay
- Peru
- Panama
- Portugal
- UK
- USA (all 50 states + Puerto Rico)
- Uruguay

We’ll be adding an additional 20-30 countries over the next week or so. If you live in or have video content from any of the above countries, feel free to join any of our social networking platform partners such as http://catalog.vidlisting.com.

You’ll start to see some of the things that we are doing in the geolocation space over the week or so as well.

Video And Twitter Based Help For New Personal Media Catalog Users

We’ve added a bunch of new features to help new users begin to use the full power of their personal media catalogs as quickly as possible after registering or logging in at http://catalog.vidlisting.com

Video Help

 
Video Help is a small application within  the personal media catalog that displays a tiny question mark icon for different types of functionality. The icons link to short videos that explain how to use the given functionality. The icons are unobtrusive, dont block or change any functionality , and members can turn them off/on with a single click (as shown below).

We are adding video content for the help videos as quickly as possible.  We will also have a publically shared catalog where you’ll be to subscribe to all of the help videos from within your own catalog.  Look for “Vidlisting Support Videos” within the Browse Available Shared and Public Catalogs menu. Video help is live now and is “on” by default for new member registrations.

Twitter Based Help

We debated having a user id on Twitter for support and information about Personal Media Catalogs as we have a socaial messaging component which will be added within the week or two and available to all members.  We decided that we should do it and so now you can follow @VideoHelp on twitter to get news/updates as well as have any support or other questions answered via Twitter.

 

 

Over 100,000 Monthly Video Views In April 2008

We had our best video view month ever with just over 100,000 videos viewed for the month of April 2008.  Thank you all and continue enjoying our work - we have a new set of infrastructure and distribution partners as well as our social networking application (http://catalog.vidlisting.com) which will continue to grow views in the future.

Shared Media Catalogs Launch And Subdirectories To Follow Soon

Shared Media Catalogs For Video Content

We’ve launched our shared media catalog functionality designed for content producers and sellers of good and services.  Shared media catalogs allow others to have access to to content within a catalog that has been shared by the catalog owner. Individual content is shared only when you make it public - the default is PRIVATE.  We have a demonstration video of shared media catalogs using real estate video. You can get your own personal media catalog ay http://catalog.vidlisting.com.

Subdirectories For Media Content

In the next few days, we’ll launch another level of social functionality for the media catalog known as shareable subdirectories.  This will be available for premium level members and provides the opportunity to organize and share your videos and real estate shows into shareable subdirectories that function as discrete mini-catalogs. You can organize subdirectories however you decide by theme, location, or type of content (advertising, podcasts, property tours, etc). We are just finishing up the drop and drop capability for subdirectories.

We’ve also made a simple video preview of the subdirectory functionality.

The functionality is still under development and testing until likely this wednesday so the all of the interfaces in the video are not yet customer ready but it gives you a clear idea of how it will work. Some of the uses for subdirectories include:

- sending personalized groups of videos to a customized group of friends using three mouse clicks. As shown in the video, subdirectories hold a flexible mix of content from different sources (Youtube, real estate shows, and our own system). Rather than sending time uploading videos, you’ll be able to better spend your time marketing them.

- wrapping group metadata around related video content: We’ll bring value to channel by making searchable metadata for the groups of videos. If geolocation is included as part of the metadata, this functionality will put hyperlocal syndication capability in the hands of non-technical members by using just a few mouse clicks

Lots more coming - stay tuned.

 

Making A Set of Changes To Media Catalogs Based On Feedback From Last Week

We’ve been identifying sniggly issues and will package them up today. Hopefully, this will let us hard launch the catalog functionality as early as Tuesday. We’re putting a more professional look on many of the supporting interfaces and fixing issues identified by users in the last week. The login issue for Mac users using the latest beta of FF is of primary importance to have fixed quickly as is the issue with sending media to external users not currently using the catalog.

UPDATE: Fixes made and testing today (Tuesday)

New Content Links

Just some quick posts that are elsewhere….

Narrated Video Tutorial: How To Share A Vidlisting Media Catalog That Contains Youtube Videos and Real Estate Shows

ActiveRain Blog Post: Why Managing Video Content Online Generally Sucks

Shared Media Catalogs: The Easy Way To Build Your Business With Video

What Are Shared Media Catalogs?

Shared media catalogs are a way for video content producers to allow people to view video and other media content as if it were their own as well as build widgets and video bars for inclusion in their own blogs/websites.

Here is a short video that shows just how easy it is to add two shared catalogs (one has mixed content from YouTube, Vidlisting, and Real Estate Shows) to a user’s personal media catalog and then build a video bar widget with content from *both* shared catalogs.  It is in real time and takes only a few seconds.  The video bar widget that you see at the end is a live widget with embed code below.

Only content that has been explicitly “shared” by you will be viewable by those that want to consume your content.  There are two types of shareable catalogs - Public and Permissive. Public catalogs are open to everyone that subscribes (explained below) but Permissive catalogs require the catalog owner’s approval to view shared content.

The catalogs currently work with Real Estate Shows, Youtube videos, and any content uploaded to any of the ForSaleByLocals video platform providers. Our implementation marks a disruptive new level of progress in the way that video and virtual tour widgets are created and manipulated in the multimedia space.

Why Are Shared Media Catalogs Important?

Shared media catalogs allow your customers, friends, and just interested parties “pull” your content to see what you have selected to let them see rather than “pushing” content to them.

Video channels have been historically been parking spaces for video content. The only way content could leave the channel is for the user to either have enough HTML knowledge to cut and paste the embed code and have a website (or blog) where they could put the content or paste in emails every time that they want to share the content.

Things are much easier with Media Catalogs. Content in the form of video podcasts, property videos, real estate shows, video interviews, agent introduction videos, spots or just about any type of video content now no longer requires technical skills to distribute, syndicate, or simply just get to other people.  Neither you nor your customers, friends, acquaintances need to worry about readers, feeds, RSS, or anything technical. The content does not even need to be in the same video or mltimedia platform - the video can also be stored in Youtube or can be stored as a virtual tour over at Real Estate Shows. Everything is visual and accessible within 3-4 mouse clicks. It is the easiest way to make video and other multimedia content accessible to those with interest in your product or service.

Your content will shortly be exportable in many more ways without having to know HTML. Soon to be released version 1.0 of our WordPress plugin will let you to directly insert media content from shared catalogs into hosted wordpress blogs. Additionally, a developer application programming interface (API) into our platform will let programmers easily build custom web applications using media catalog as virtual web storage for multimedia. Lots of exciting things are coming.

You can see a detailed how-to over on the Vidlisting real estate video blog.

How Can I Get My Own Shared Media Catalog?

Anyone can consume an available public catalog without permission and permissive catalogs with the owner’s approval. Sharing your own media catalog is normally a paid level of functionality. You must first open your own media catalog and then upgrade your membership to do so.

We are however inviting selected media content providers the opportunity to offer their own content during the shared catalog beta period (approx. the next 30 days). Participation in the beta means that you’ll have a year’s free use of the functionality if approved. Please contact me at sales@forsalebylocals.com to request participation.

Advantages For Using The ForSaleByLocals Platform For Video Conversion

Free Level

- instant conversion to web video formats

- large 640 pixel video that generally does not buffer

- 16×9 or 4:3 aspect ratio (detected at time of upload to maintain original aspect ratio) 

- wide variety of upload file formats

- content management and social networking capability in multiple languages

- ability to build custom video bars with multiple videos for use in your own website or blog

Paid Levels

- fast H.264 conversion for download and use on iPhones

- conversion to 1024 pixel wide flash format for users with screen resolutions above 1200

- custom widgets branded for you or your company

- custom player page for use in your own URL

WordPress 2.5 Video Plugin To Be Posted Tomorrow

We finally finished testing of the ForSaleByLocals multimedia and video plugin for the just released wordpress version 2.5.   Expect to see a release announcement on Wednesday barring any last minute issues.

UPDATED: The vidlisting branded version of the wordpress 2.5 video plugin can be found at http://www.vidlisting.com/services/vidlistingvideowordpressplugindownload.asp.

First Commercial Example Of Our Contextual Developer API For Video

(A less technical discussion is availabe over on our real estate video blog)

We’ve still have a long way to go with the developer API - it is neither complete nor “customer ready”. However, we decided to front load some parts of the programming interface and put together a live commercial example.  The live working example demonstrates some of the types of things that developers will be able to do with our upcoming developer API for video that ties directly into the ForSaleByLocals multimedia platform as well as give us a chance to identify and fix issues. 

Here is a sneak peek at some of the capabilities of the programming interfaces:

Context Sensitive Content Aggregation: We’ve been wrapping certain contextual data around multimedia content for some time now.  This has been limited to aggregating content by language and geolocation (including latitude and longitude in order to span political boundaries). Now, we are able to define additional contexts and use our fledgling developer API to access only content that matches the desired context.

Organization of Content:  Once the right content is retrieved, we are working on being able to use the API to organize related bits of content into “interfacelets” which then can be included like a widget into pages.  We still have a lot of work to do here.

We now have a live commercial example of the ability of the ForSaleByLocals multimedia and video engine to serve up contextual content. The real estate site vidlisting.com is using the developer API to highlight various videos for a huge real estate show in Spain, SIMA 2008. They are using the language and context capabilities to deliver and organize SIMA related video content on a special page (http://vidlisting.com/sima2008/indexsima.asp) which is also going to be their home page during the days of the event - 8 through 12 April 2008. 

We’ll continue to discuss how context can help make content networks more social and effective withi a business context.

Let us know what you think…