Promote It!
August 15, 2006
(Official Post here)
We’ve added a new feature on The Video Awards which allows you now to promote your video. Now after posting your video you’ll be presented with a couple of new graphics that you can place right on your own website. We’ve got two now but i’m sure we’ll add some more.
Example 1:
Example 2:
New Blog Home!
August 13, 2006
Just a quick note to let everyone know that our official home for The Video Awards Blog is now at http://www.thevideoawards.com/blog. We’ll continue to post in both locations for awhile until everyone has moved. If you’re using the feeburner feed then you’ll be ok, but if you’re subscribed to the wordpress feed please make sure to update.
Thanks to WordPress for offering free blog, it’s a fantastic service. And also thanks to Michael Martine for offering some great advice. Be sure to check his blog out at http://gvod.blogspot.com/ or http://video-bubble-preview.blogspot.com/
TVA Minor Updates
August 5, 2006
Just a quick couple of notes. We’ve update the homepage to now show the most popular for today. This has changed from the most recent. We’ve also added the ability to limit or expand the amount of videos shown on one page. You can now show 3, 6, 12 or 24… we’ll see how these initial sets work and then tweak from there if needed.
TVA Team
Dugg
August 4, 2006
One of our videos posted on TVA managed to find its way up to the front page of Digg with over a 1000 diggs! Welcome to all our Digg viewers.
-TVA Team
New Design!
July 30, 2006
Well we finally got around updating our design. Not much change in the way of interaction, we more just made it easier to look at :). We still support all of your favorite video providers and we’re still adding them. We hope you enjoy this one alittle more.
Thanks, and keep the feedback coming in.
TVA Team
More RSS Feeds
July 26, 2006
Good news in the way of RSS. We have some additional feeds for your aggregating pleasure. First thing to note is on the most voted page we are now allowing you to see most voted videos by today, this week, this month or ever. And to go along with that you can also subscribe to any of the feeds for the most voted of today, this week, this month or ever (via feedster). If you were subscribed to the original most voted feed then you will now be seeing the days most popular videos.
Also a word out to the video providers, please please please start providing some valuable rss feeds of your content. Most importantly a most popular/featured which changes more than once a year and some facility to do a tag search. We won’t name any names but you know who you are. 
Hopefully in the days/weeks to come we’ll be working on getting the actual video as an enclosure in the feed. So stayed tuned here for the latest.
TVA Team
GUBA and Johnny
July 25, 2006
TechCrunch writes about the new technology which GUBA is working on named “Johnny.” Basically it detects copyrighted footage in videos and is able to flag them.
This could really change the online video landscape, if it works. Goodbye Animal Planet clips on YouTube, for one thing.
This is very interesting news on many fronts. But more importantly, just the pure technology of it seems pretty cool. Not sure what the algorithm to detect these images would be but i’m sure it would be an entertaining read (for a computer science guy anyways )
Google Video New Launch and the Lack of RSS!
July 14, 2006
Mashable writes about the new European launch.
Google Video still lags YouTube for a number of reasons, but I think the core problem was its early failure to tap into the prime demographic: the 15-25 year old MySpace user.
Another reason i’d like to point out is that YouTube provides far superior RSS feeds than Google and for that matter any other provider I’ve encountered. And in our opinion, this is so critical in these types of sites. We’re planning more features for TVA but it makes it difficult when so many providers do not provide RSS Feeds. GO YOUTUBE!
TVA Team
To Embed or not to Embed
July 11, 2006
During the design and development of thevideoawards.com we made a pretty large decision not to allow users to directly enter the embed tag into our system to display their video. The reason was based on security concerns around allowing this type of scripts to get embedded directly. This means whatever you would enter in would get displayed, and since embed has some security ramifications we decided this wasn’t a good way to go. Instead we have a unique way to post every video.
The process we use will not take the embed script and display directly, instead we will take the key to the video and generate the embed automagically. Most of the video providers have a very simple pattern by which the embed string is constant except for the key. The con is this is more difficult on the user, the pro is that we can have complete control on how the video is shown and this is important. For example, in some cases, the embed script provided is with autoplay turned on, this is not an option for us, we can’t have some videos turn on automatically and other not. In other cases, the embed script will specify an unoptimal size or include header information images. All of these things are avoided since we can now control the way the videos appear.
In most cases, retrieving the video key is fairly straightforward, for example YouTube puts it right in their URL to grab it. When you submit a video, based on the provider you choose we display the step-by-step instructions to post your video. We’ve also create a “preview video” function which will ensure you followed the steps right before you post. So if there is any confusion you can test it.
That’s it for now, I hope this answers some of the questions we’ve been getting on this.
TVA Team
