Users Helping Users

The first announcement is an extension of what YouTube has already been doing in allowing users to submit their own help videos. YouTube chooses the ones they liked best and applied them to their appropriate sections in the Help Center.

They have now decided to keep the ability to submit help videos as a standing feature on YouTube. Users can submit them at any time by going to the Help Center and going to the upload gadget in the top right-hand corner.

"Pick the entry you think is funny, incomplete, too short, whatever! You can share tips you’ve discovered while using YouTube, tell your story through a funny sketch, a song, an animation — we’re sure you can come up with lots more ideas than us!" says Colin W. the Help Center Guru of the YouTube Help Team. "We’ll take a look at what you put together and will embed the ones that best accompany each article right there on the Help Center, where millions of YouTube users will see it."

Mashing it Up

The second announcement is for developers interested in including YouTube in their mashups.

"You may have noticed that YouTube became more social a couple of months ago with the addition of the "Recent Activity" box to YouTube channels," explains Stephanie Liu of the YouTube APIs and Tools Team. "Well, the YouTube API is now following suit by providing activity feeds for integration into other apps and sites. Before you ask, the API respects all privacy settings, so the user still has complete control over what does or does not appear in the feed."

Liu has linked to the following resources for further details on this:

- YouTube API Blog post
- Protocol guide
- PHP guide
- Java guide
- Activity viewer sample in PHP (source)

YouTube’s announcement reflects its dedication to the user experience. This has been a continuing theme with YouTube and Google in general. While there are certainly beefs between users and Google, you can’t say they don’t provide extensive resources on how to better use their products from their array of blogs to their help centers.

The first one is "Your View of History" from CNN. It maps "iReports," and features CNN photos and videos. It will be updated throughout the day. CNN also has one for Obama’s "Whistle Stop" Train Tour.

Next is a mashup from Oprah.com, featuring on-the-scene updates from Washington D.C. "Oprah’s producers and journalist Lisa Ling are in D.C. to meet people and visit the inauguration hotspots," explains Michael Pegg at the Google Lat Long Blog. "They have made use of Google Maps to plot their adventures and map streaming videos from their interviews with the big celebs and ordinary folks alike. Click "Start watching exclusive, around-the-clock videos from Washington, D.C.!" to launch the Google Maps view."

WashingtonPost.com has one called "TimeSpace: Inauguration" that will geocode real-time photos, videos and blog posts from over 30 photographers and videographers and over 40 reporters.

And finally, the Wall Street Journal has one called "The Journal Guide to the Obama Inauguration" that showcases a guide to events and other things around the area.

If you need some more places to watch Inauguration coverage, you can find them here. On another Inauguration note, there are no special logos from Google or Yahoo.

That’s interesting information, but even more interesting is the name of the BBC’s pal in this endeavor: Google.  “One-third of the prototypes hosted on backstage.bbc.co.uk – where developers can post ideas and prototypes for reusing Auntie’s content in new and interesting ways – are mash-ups with Google Maps or other Google apps,” reports Silicon.com’s Gemma Simpson.

Also, lest you should get the idea that Google somehow slipped those mash-ups into place while “Auntie” (also known as the BBC) was looking the other way, Simpson adds that “Matthew Cashmore, BBC Backstage producer, said a lot of the content on the BBC website has a geographical element . . . and this sort of content fits well within a Google Maps mash-up.”

The BBC has, after all, proven that it wants to transition smoothly into the 21st century; it even arranged a deal with Google-owned YouTube.  As for Google, well . . . we all know how the search engine company loves to forge partnerships and make acquisitions.  In the end, it’s nice to see both gigantic corporations taking an interest in mash-ups, though what this means for the traditional creators of such things remains to be seen.

This took place at Developer Day in Australia, so, as you might imagine, at least one of the mashups won’t (in its current state of being) be of much use to anyone outside Australia.  It’s still pretty nifty, however, and the other mashups appear to be much more widely applicable.

PropertyGuru, the Australia-only example, also won the whole speedgeeking event.  It’s described as “a map driven real estate search engine, comprising of homes for sale throughout Australia.  It features an intuitive interface, powerful search and property comparison tools,” and “allows the home buyer to locate potential properties by moving an interactive Google map to any area in Australia, bringing up pins for properties that meet their budget and requirements.”

There were five other finalists and, as far as I can tell, they all “work” everywhere.  Bikely doesn’t seem to be aware of many bicycle routes in Russia, but, well, you can’t have everything.

Another entry, Remember the Milk, “is here to save us from ourselves!” according to the Sydney Morning Herald.  Perhaps I’m not quite as worried about my grocery list, but this task management service “integrates with Google services by providing task management in Google Calendar (including another Maps mashup), and sends reminders via Google Talk.”

The last few mashups in the speedgeeking contest were planOfile, FGMap, and Cannondade (The Patrick O’Brian Mapping Project), and they are, respectively, “a trip collaboration system,” “a Google Map web app,” and a sort of book-related fan map.  Very interesting stuff – maybe there’s something to this speedgeeking thing after all.

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“At Photobucket we’re committed to helping our users get the most out of their personal media, and have fun doing so,” said Alex Welch, CEO, Photobucket. “Collaborating with Adobe gives our millions of users a simple way to create mashups that showcase their personality and creativity. Users can either broadcast these mashups widely, or share with a small group of friends and family.”

Photobucket users can combine images and video with captions, bubbles, frames, transitions, and music by dragging and dropping content to a sceneline. Users can work with content from their albums or they can choose from the publicly shared images and videos on Photobucket.

When users have finished editing they can have their mashup embedded into any Web page, blog, or social network by copying and pasting HTML code. The completed mashup can also be shared with family and friends using Photobucket’s sharing tools.

“For the tens of millions of people who place their videos online, it is no longer good enough to simply post and share them – people want their videos to be compelling compared to other content,” said John Loiacono, senior vice president, of the Creative Solutions Business Unit at Adobe. “Adobe’s web-based video remix and editing technology gives consumers an easy-to-use, ‘no experience required’ approach to web-based video editing that will help their stories stand out. We have fully integrated our tools into the Photobucket experience, enabling anyone who has Adobe® Flash® Player installed on their PC to use it.”

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BubblePLY – Enables you to add narrative bubbles to video. From a practical standpoint, this is helpful for offering translated versions of a video.

Comeeko – Create comic strips from your photos.

I’m sure there are a host of other tools for mashing up and modifying original media. Feel free to suggest your favorites in the comments.

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Jeff Nolan, the brave young man who runs Teqlo, a startup that makes widgets work together and allows you to combine and integrate useful web services, has decided to skip the usual private beta and do a public beta instead. That means you can run over there right now, sign up, and build your first monster mash before lunch.

Two key things to remember: this is a demonstration of the technology, not the business; it’s still a little rough around the edges (that’s why they call it beta) and, alas, it only works with Firefox.

"Please keep in mind that this is a development release and we have much more to come that will define how the business is built around it," Nolan says. "Also, in the interests of setting expectations appropriately, there are only a small number of widgets that you can use and that means you shouldnt expect to do anything productive with this. This release is intended to demonstrate how the core technology works and get your feedback about where we should go with it."

Have fun.

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About the Author

Jerry Bowles has more than 30 years of varied experience as a writer, editor, marketing consultant, corporate communications director and blogger. For the past 20 years, he has produced and written special supplements on new technologies for a number of magazines, including Forbes, Fortune and Newsweek.

http://www.enterpriseweb2.com

Oodle announced the expanded availability of the API. Site publishers can add classifieds listings to their websites through use of the interface.

Big users of the API, being those affiliates who send more than 10,000 refers per month to Oodle’s listings, can be eligible for the new revenue stream announced today.

The company sees interest from sites emphasizing local and vertical niches. Oodle’s API will allow them to expand an existing classified offering with its listings.

Developers who like mashups can use Oodle’s API along with other applications. Major Internet sites like Yahoo and Google have also made various APIs available, and these have proved very popular with web service creators.

Oodle’s API can be seen in action at sites like Backpage, which provides online classified sites for local media outlets. Backpage marketing director Carl Ferrer noted in the announcement Backpage has been using the API for three months.

He described the implementation as “painless” and said the Oodle listings have been well-received by Backpage users.

Oodle noted in its documentation for the API that it is based on XML using the XMLRPC specification. Open source client libraries for XMLRPC may be obtained for all major programming languages, like C/C++, Java, PHP, Perl, and Python.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Ok.. but really, something we do have in common is that we were both in attendance at Where 2.0 recently and looks like we both still have a big ? on where the money will be found in the mashup space. There’s no doubt that there’s money to be had, however, companies still haven’t ironed out their business models and the most common model being sought after in the mashup space to date is advertising revenues.

Keep in mind though, with players like Autodesk open sourcing apps like Mapguide it creates a plethora of opportunities for developers and with commercial licensing for APIs from Google and Yahoo! once again we have increased opportunities for collecting some green. In the article at Forbes, Rosmarin spends some time discussing things she saw and people she spoke with, like Di-Ann Eisnor, chief executive of Platial – Platial got loads of airtime at the event for their popular social networking application/mashup – think Panoramio or Frappr on steroids! Platial packs more functionality (and fun) than most other similar hacks in the same space although after listening to the CEO the company is still unclear as to what their business model is/will be – I even heard Eisnor state that she hopes that the company will still be around in this space next year! Clearly they aren’t going anywhere, mostly since they are Angel funded, giving them an advantage most mashers don’t have… they have cash to burn while a business model surfaces.

If you haven’t tried Platial yet be sure to check it out (www.platial.com). The Forbes piece is an interesting, short read but there’s no doubt with Mashups and Geospatial solution providers like Autodesk, Microsoft, and Vexcel getting print in Forbes it’s clear that Geospatial is going mainstream and the opportunities are there. See the article Maps. Mash-Ups. Money? HERE – For fun, you can also check out this test drive at Platial that I threw together in about 3 minutes… pretty cool!

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Anything Geospatial: Tracking developments affecting GIS, geospatial technologies, location-based services, mapping, google earth and google maps. Published by the creator and editor of GISuser.com & LBSzone.com