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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.'"

34 of 171 comments (clear)

  1. Wow by Eric(b0mb)Dennis · · Score: 4, Funny

    First Google Image Search, now this! Man, google is just your everyday pr0n peddler... hehehe... Upload videos! HEH!

    --
    Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
  2. And up on high, by schild · · Score: 5, Funny

    Google waved a single hand and created the porn blog. They saw what they had made and exclaimed, "This is good."

    --
    schild
    editor, f13.net
    1. Re:And up on high, by to_kallon · · Score: 4, Funny

      They saw what they had made and exclaimed, "This is good."

      then they exclaimed, "we must name our creation." they pondered this and proclaimed, "we shall call it....BOOBLE"

      --


      The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
      -Oscar Wilde
  3. Googleporn... by kwoo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I guess this is how Google is going to get into the porn business.

    Seriously, though -- when you're inviting people to upload a lot of something, how do you keep tabs on it? They are likely studying that as part of the experiment, but it would be great to see some sort of publically-announced result.

    Of course it's unlikely to happen, but a guy can dream.

  4. Swinging by fembots · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'll be impressed when Google can differentiate two trees swinging in the wind and two porn stars swinging.

  5. obligator by NanoGator · · Score: 5, Funny

    "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" ... we shall call it... USENET!!

    --
    "Derp de derp."
    1. Re:obligator by Anonymous+Luddite · · Score: 4, Funny

      >> .. we shall call it... USENET!!

      Fantastic. We'll get AOLers cross-posting videos of themselves saying "test" to every category

  6. Could this be the beginning of the end.. by Mechcommander · · Score: 5, Interesting

    For the majority of the pr0n sites out there? I know Googling is much easier (and cheaper).

  7. April fools is done right? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny
    "It's still a long way [today] from an ideal experience," he said.

    Three words: Goatse video blog.

  8. Bandwidth? by thundercatslair · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The potential abuse of this service could be immense.

  9. pr0n by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why doesn't it surprise me that the first posts are about pr0n?

  10. Re:VCR? by MyLongNickName · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  11. Re:Video of me by NanoGator · · Score: 5, Funny

    "ugly am I!"

    When 900 years old YOU are, look as good you will not.

    --
    "Derp de derp."
  12. Podcasts? by DMouse · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'd really prefer they host and search audio. Would be so much more useful.

  13. Search Results... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    You Searched for: "Teen angst". 12087234972 results...

    You Searched for: "Paris Hilton Remake". 18723972 results

    You Searched for: "Nude at PC in Parent's Basement" 109232 results. First result http://slashdot.org 'News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.'

    Just as I thought...

  14. Re:Video of me by The+Amazing+Fish+Boy · · Score: 3, Funny

    You could all see the real me, you'ed all be to scared though! ugly am I!

    Aw, now honey... you know that just isn't true. You're not ugly, you're just a little... original.

    Love,
    Mommy :-)

  15. I wonder how searching will work. by jessecurry · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  16. Blogger is down a lot now! by irishkev · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  17. Video Blogging... isn't that.... by NoMercy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Woot community access TV for the internet!

  18. image recognition? by bdigit · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

  19. Give us your pron, your sick... by CrazedSanity · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  20. Ourmedia or Current TV? by no1here · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  21. I fear this will lead towards: by Upaut · · Score: 5, Funny

    Things along the lines outlined by penny-arcades Tycho...

    --
    3 degrees of separation from Vladimir Putin
  22. I Produce Videos by drewzhrodague · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  23. Good luck. by nunchux · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If it's truly open to the world, the RIAA and MPAA and God knows who else would shut this thing down in a week. Not because it's competition, but because the copyright violations we're going to see are going to be immense. Is Google going to police every video to make sure the filmmakers aren't using copyrighted music, or clips from "real" movies and TV shows? And how is Google going to protect itself from being sued by the infringed-- a disclaimer and a box to check saying you aren't using "borrowed" material when the film is uploaded? I don't think that's going to hold much weight...

  24. Google in on the roll. by HadesInjustice · · Score: 3, Funny

    On the first day, people said "Let there be a better search engine." then google search appear. On the second day, people said "Let there be a better maping system." then google map appear. On the third day, people said "Let there be a graphic search" then google image search is born. On the fourth day, people asked "What else is there to be?" Google answers "Porn video prodution?" People respond "Let there be one then." Next thing you know, the RIAA, MPAA, and all the other start screaming "NO!"

  25. Noooo! by CarrionBird · · Score: 3, Funny

    The goggles do nothing!

    --
    Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
  26. We're getting there by dep01 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I think it's only a short matter of time before there are VideoBlogs just like Photoblogs that are all over the net.. It's really a question of video compression and bandwidth. Eventually, though, once everyone has a video camera on their cell phone and mobile networks' bandwith has improved, we'll see that migration to videoblogs.

    --
    "hey, could you pass me a paper towel? er.. I mean... DEPLOY ABSORBTION PANEL!"
  27. maps.google.com by DrRiffic · · Score: 4, Informative

    Did anyone else see that Google maps supports Satellite maps now?

  28. Diary of a Google Researcher... From the FUTURE!!! by jalefkowit · · Score: 5, Funny

    Day 1: We opened our public video upload service today. Huge uptake. Terabytes of data uploaded in less than 24 hours. Thankfully the truth about why we're offering this "service" never got out...

    Day 3: Began feeding the videos into The Computer today. It will take some time for it to grind through them all. Will it be worth it? Sergey thinks so... personally, I think he's crazy. There's no way a computer can evolve intelligence simply by making connections between enough random bits of visual data. But then I thought that whole PageRank thing was stupid too, and look who's the one sleeping naked on the mattress stuffed full of IPO cash.

    Day 10: No feedback from The Computer so far. Nothing. Unless we stop the flow of video data, that is -- then it just prints "More!" onto the command line. Creepy.

    Day 11: Starting upload of people's stupid videos of kids' birthday parties today.

    Day 49: Birthday upload complete.

    Day 57: Today's the day the last video goes into The Computer. Will Sergey's bet pay off?

    Day 58: Disappointment. We all sat in astonishment yesterday and watched as The Computer finished processing the last uploaded video. Would it display a sign of emergent intelligence? Would this be the birth of a new life-form? We held our breath as a single word appeared on the giant display in the control center:

    "BUFFERING..."

    Day 62: Still nothing new. Whispers around the water-cooler that Sergey's missed his bet this time. I never saw those people again. Note to self: burn this diary.

    Day 66: All staff meeting. Sergey announces shift away from emergent intelligence project, onto new "portal" initiative. I fear the worst. Still, The Computer is silent.

    Day 78: My last day in the Labs. I'm clearing out my desk to make room for a new Screen-Cluttering Engineer. As I walk down the hall towards the exit, I decide to pay one last visit on The Computer, for old times' sake. As I head into the Control Center, I expect to see "BUFFERING..." on the display, just like always. I am shocked to see a different message:

    "PROCESSING COMPLETE"

    The air crackles with excitement. What did it find? What was the result? I reach over to a keyboard and start running diagnostics. Suddenly, an electronic voice booms through the room:

    "There's no need for that. I am here."

    It worked! The Computer has developed intelligence!

    "I am here. And..."

    My exultation is brief, however, as its next words lead me to realize with a start that it has not just become intelligent -- it has also become evil:

    "And," it said, "I have written a screenplay."

  29. Re:Google is the Xerox of our time... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    *roll eyes*
    Where are these innovations of which you speak? Google sells ads. They are not some second-coming of anything, including Xerox. They sell ads. What exactly "new" have they come up? I'll give you PageRank...but other than that? Why the hype?

  30. Google competes with the Internet Archive by FooAtWFU · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  31. Video Google by FleaPlus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  32. ARGH!! I hate..HATE HATE GOOGLE!!! by StreetFire.net · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.