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Google Experiments with Video Blogging
PunkOfLinux writes "TechWeb
has an article about Google's plans to start a video service that sounds similar to Picasa. Excerpt: 'While there's no formal announcement yet, Google co-founder Larry Page said Monday that the well-known search engine concern would soon let the general public upload self-produced videos to Google's servers, partly in an effort to learn more about how to more efficiently search and display information about video-based data.'"
For the majority of the pr0n sites out there? I know Googling is much easier (and cheaper).
No, but it is really hard to search for a specific clip in your 250 tape collection, much less the world's collection.
Kinda curious to see what the brains at Google will be able to do with this.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I'd really prefer they host and search audio. Would be so much more useful.
Do you think that when you upload the video clips that you'll have to input some information about the video in order to allow it to be searched or will google tap into the vast resources of it's server farm and try to run a speech to text app and record data themselves?
I don't really know that text to speech would be a feasible option to catalog the audio contents of a file, but it would be interesting if they could implement some type of automatic content cataloging system. I suppose that if this is just going to be for video blogging that it's really not as interesting as I had first thougt, but google does always seem to try and advance what is possible.
Even just being able to post video for the world to see presents us with an interesting opportunity, but I'd love if there were something more behind this.
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
I hope they try to make the system more robust before adding resource hogging features. Note the message from status.blogger.com just today:
Monday, April 04, 2005
Some users may be experiencing an unexpected Blogger outage right now; we're looking into it and will post updated info soon. Thanks for your patience.
Posted by Eric at 10:26
If the thing is routinely failing with plain text, which it is, how is it going to work with video? - rhetorical question.
Woot community access TV for the internet!
Are they going to be using image recognition or just a boring metadata search of the video? If it's metadata , what would be stopping me from saying this video of a woman blowing a horse is just an educational video on animals or an episode of the simpsons? I wonder what kind of powerful algorithms are brewing behind their doors to tell the difference between a penis and a hot dog
I'm just waiting for the Google announcement: "Store your hard drive online" (and the resulting disclaimer when 10 million people suddenly have access to all that private data you thought was encrypted).
Sanity is like a condom: rather have it and not need it, than need it and not have it.
For those readers who remember the early days of Xerox, when the Palo Alto facility theorized about a great deal of the earth-shattering technology that has emerged since the mid 80's, they will understand my reference.
One of Google's primary goals, as a company, is to do vast amounts of independant CS-Related research: research without the promise of profit. Their innovations are just now beginning to step outside of their offices in a big way, and it'll continue as they continue to release source code and theory documents to the Open Source community. Unlike Xerox, Google has an Open Source community in place to distribute this data to.
My hat is off to them for their efforts.
-Vendal Thornheart
Could Google be behind Ourmedia or Al Gore's Current TV? Angela Beesley, one of the five directors of the Wikimedia Foundation, is on the Ourmedia Board of Directors. Al Gore has been a senior adviser at Google and Current TV is receiving support from Google and Google's Video Search.
JasonBlogs
I produce videos, and so they've got my attention. Free uploads storage? Excellent! I'd vblog more often, and record from odd places, using different cameras, and on different subjects. There really aren't any video blogging sites, and bandwidth is expensive from the handset. What will Google offer us?
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
For those who think parent is kidding...I give you booble!
Wow. Looks like Google intends to compete with the Internet Archive's Ourmedia project, which also is willing to host your video. Well, one is more about hosting and the other is more about searching, I suppose, but still... maybe there could be some sort of cooperation going on here, Idunno.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I have always thought it would be great if people would share their knowledge with instructional videos. You know, like how to use vim, write a C program, backup Windows machines with smbtar, etc. When it comes to computers it is frequently a lot easier to just demonstrate something rather than ask someone to read some arcane documentation. It seems to me we have all of the important peices in place - fast hardware, mass storage, and quick data links.
If Google will host video this could be the start of an educational renaissance! Well maybe it's not going to be like "I know Kung Fu!" but it would still be nice to WTFV instead of RTFM.
But unfortunately after looking around a bit I have failed to locate any software that can export the display as a digital video import source. I just bought a Mac Mini and thought it would be ideal for this sort of thing but iMovie doesn't appear to do it out of the box. So what's the best way to capture your desktop as compressed video?
This reminds me a little bit of a rather neat system I came across the other day, Video Google (despite the name, I don't think it has anything to do with the Google company). It doesn't use metadata or cheats like that, but rather uses image analysis to identify recurring objects and scenes.
They have a demo on their web site where you can select a portion of a video frame, and it'll show you all the places in the movie where the algorithm thinks that snippet shows up. Some other cool examples are displaying the appearances of a clock from 'Groundhog Day," and a recurring poster from 'Run Lola Run.' A research paper with more details is available here.
The abstract:
We describe an approach to object and scene retrieval which searches for and localizes all the occurrences of a user outlined object in a video. The object is represented by a set of viewpoint invariant region descriptors so that recognition can proceed successfully despite changes in view-point, illumination and partial occlusion. The temporal continuity of the video within a shot is used to track the regions in order to reject unstable regions and reduce the effects of noise in the descriptors.
The analogy with text retrieval is in the implementation where matches on descriptors are pre-computed (using vector quantization), and inverted file systems and document rankings are used. The result is that retrieval is immediate, returning a ranked list of key frames/shots in the manner of Google.
The method is illustrated for matching on two full length feature films.
let the general public upload self-produced videos to Google's servers
Google: "All your video are belong to us."
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Picasa isn't blogging. Allowing people to upload videos isn't blogging. A Picasa-like service allowing people to upload videos isn't blogging. Does blogging ever come into the picture, are people pulling buzzwords out of their asses here or have they just lost the ability to type out "publishing"?
Nobody even reads on planes or trains anymore, we all have laptops and watch DVDs. You can even rent little DVD players in the airport.
Now we need video blogs. How low can our attention spans get?
One of the many things I hate. thingsihate.org
Okay this pisses me off, the "Benign Giant" yet again kills another one of my fledgling companies.
Last year I started a company to offer people and business free 1GB email and 2GB File Sharing... within a month of use debuting, Google anounces GMAIL. The writing was on the wall they had buzz, and name, we had nothing. I would literally see people say "Anyone have a good webmail account?" I'd post "feel free to use mine 1GB mail and 2GB file/photo sharing" Next post down someone would say "I have 6 GMAIL invites" and my post would be ignored.
Okay so we canned that (software we had spent 4 years developing) went back tot he drawing board and made it into a video sharing service you can add to your website. (That is point CNAME.yourwebsite.com to our server and we skin your site with our video portal).
For Example:
http://videos.streetfire.net/
http://video.freevideoblog.com/
We debuted this in February and in 6 weeks we went from 500 visitors a day to 25,000 and 55,000 videos served a day. 30% week to week growth. Finally we had something that people wanted and was growing fast.
Now Google launches free video hosting and yet again I'm screwed. Do they have my phones tapped or something?
Next I'm going to launch a free Potatoe Gun building service just to see how Google destroys that business too.
GOOGLE I HATE YOU!!!!
-Adam, destitute programmer watching a big company destroy my livelyhood...again.
Have you applied with Google?