youtube

An amazing 'interpretation' of American military history from WW2 to the present, told with food.

Embedded here for your convenience:

I'm convinced that so-called 'v-blogging' is a fad. Why?

Because I can read ten times faster than anyone can speak: I'm not alone. In the time it takes a video from youtube to buffer, you'll already have read this paragraph.

Other reasons?

Text is searchable. That's the big roadblock. I know there are many sites out there claiming to be able to search video content using speech recognition, but until voice recognition takes a quantum leap the only option is manual transcription. And who's going to do that for the tens of thousands of videos on sites around the net? No-one.

A while back, I made a remark about the insane steps necessary in order to embed a youtube video into a site.

That's changed now: as the embed code is freely available for videos that haven't disabled embedding.

Having to enter your username and password to an external site in order to embed their videos is insecure, inane, and just stupid.

So, now that I can, I'll be putting up the post I *wanted* to put up: later todaytomorrow.

In the past few months it's been an increasing trend to have sites ask you for your username and password from some service. I've lamented about this in the past regarding youtube and embedding videos, and it's shoved in your face on facebook.

Though, admittedly, youtube has to store your password for some reason, while apparently facebook only uses it then discards it.

Still, I couldn't quite put my finger on why it was a bad idea. Apparently it's in every social networking site, too.

If you *want* users to re-use your content, don't make it insanely difficult to do so:

This was going to be a post entitled Which Car Would You Buy with two youtube videos: one of a Kia Rio (low-end, cheap car currently sold in North America, and the other of a chinese-made piece of crap: the 'Brilliance BS-6'.

But to post videos from youtube to your blog is an annoying, hassle-filled procedure. I'll outline the steps:

1. signup at youtube.com (not so bad, but still: why couldn't I use my google account?)
2. click on 'post to blog' once I'd logged in