Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

This is a very long entry. Don't say I didn't warn you.

On both the videoblogging group and the Show in a Box (SIAB) working group the question of How do we best present video on the internet? has come up multiple times over the past 3-5 months. It is a vital question for the average videoblogger who wants to improve his or her site and especially for groups like Show in a Box which are trying to create software and designs that help present videos in their best light.

However, the discussions on those lists are mixing together three separate issues to answer the question of how to best present video on blogs. I will outline the three issues below and attempt to explain why it is important to solve these separately.

The three issues are:

1. The design issue: How do you present multimedia in a blog so the multimedia comes to be seen as primary citizens instead of secondary ones.
2. The developer issue: How do you get more structured data into blog posts. (e.g. instead of having a post consist of title, body, timestamp, author, tags have it consist of video objects, image objects and audio objects in a way that make it possible to programatically extract and reuse that data.)
3. The connection issue: How do you improve the blog so older content is not buried in archives no one reads.

   I’ll be using the SIAB project as the main case for illustration my points below.

   The design issue

   I sincerely hope there are as many answers to this issue as there are videoblogs. The biggest downside to the SIAB project right now is that they actually don’t have any video centric themes available yet. For a while they had a single theme available with the result that every SIAB videoblog looked the same.

   They know this is their biggest drawback, but themes (especially Wordpress themes that deal with non-traditional content types) are hard to write. I also strongly believe that every videoblog has different needs. It is not a solution to slap a list of thumbnails on a page and call it a day. While including thumbnails on archive listings gives flavour, the thumbnail alone does not provide readers with enough information to determine if a given video is worth watching. It bothers me when I see mockups of archive pages that contains nothing but thumbnails. How is that an improvement over what blogs have now? Look at how 23visual has designed their visual blogs (example). They give a strong focus to the photo itself—they are a photo blog provider—but they also include additional information to help you interpret what’s going on. Titles, authors and dates are shown.

   Thumbnails are fine, but they can very rarely stand on their own. You need to figure out what works best for your individual blog.

   The developer issue

   The question of how to get more structured data into your videoblogging posts has generated surprisingly little discussion, maybe because there are no good videoblogging developer discussion lists.

   Or perhaps the discussions are not happening because this is not a video problem, it’s a general problem. The question is not about attaching thumbnails and video URLs to blog posts, but how to attach any kind of arbitrary data to a post. For that reason, it’s unfortunate that SIAB has been focusing solely on videos in this regard. It is impossible for the SIAB developers to build upon the works of others for this general issue, and it is impossible for others to extend the works of SIAB.

   For this reason, I feel that the choice of using Wordpress as the base for SIAB is strange. Using a different option that is more framework-y and less blog-y gives developers better opportunities. Drupal, for example, has had a general way of attaching arbitrary data to content for years through CCK and related modules. Rather than re-inventing the wheel, it would be rational to build upon the works of others because this is a general problem. In addition interoperability becomes smoother since you are basing your work off a common framework.

   The connection issue

   Lots of people have complained over time about the difficulties connecting old and new content on their sites. Mark, for instance, doesn’t like the ‘diary’ style of the blog as he feels it buries his content fast. I’ve heard the same argument from both Jay and Raymond, especially as a selling point for SIAB’s Related Videos plugin.

   The discussion tends to be around blogs in general (mostly how blogs suck) and not really about videos. The Related Videos plugin should be called Related Posts because it is—or should be—a way to manually link a post together with a number of previously posted content. Not to be confused with the handful of Wordpress plugins that deal with automatically creating these lists of related posts based on tags or keywords.

   “But the Related Videos plugin automatically inserts thumbnails of the related videos.” Yes, and it should stop doing that. Displaying the related content is a design decision and should be kept separate from the functionality of linking related content together.

   There seems to be a strong dislike for the blog style or diary form. As far as I can tell this covers showing the most recent posts on the front page and using monthly archives. But while I understand this complaint, I cannot see how removing these features of a blog will result in better reuse of older content.

   Displaying the most recent posts prominently on the front page has been the defining property of blogs for the past 10 years for a reason. It is a very convenient way of establishing what is going on at the blog and what content you have not seen since your last visit. Ryan Is Hungry is one of many videoblogs that have chosen to remove this blog stable by only having the lastest post on the front page making it hard for returning visitors to see what has been posted since their last visit. On the other hand, Mike Moon—using a similar layout—keeps the most recent 10 posts on his front page. The result is a better overview of the lastest content, as well as his archive.

   Using monthly archives is noted by Mark as a pretty poor way of locating older content when it’s the only archive available. It does however still have a place and removing them makes little sense.

   Depending on your blog you will have different needs for re-connecting with older content. This is something we thought much about when we created OurHoist. On an OurHoist site, you have several entry points to find previously published content (in OurHoist we are only concerned with locating old content, not about creating connections when publishing fresh content). Our variables are people (who posted this), time (when was it posted/updated), tags & related tags (how was it described) and type (was it a discussion item, a page or a file). You almost always know at least one or two of the answers, and we give you the opportunity to combine your knowledge using our super slick interface (“I know it’s a file about toy cars and was posted in the past three weeks or so”).

   Two distinct videoblogs handle this problem in two different ways. Lost in Light digitizes old home movies and have other needs. There they re-connect new content to older by factors like the format of the video (Super 8, 8mm etc.) and the decade the movies is from (1940s, 1960s etc.). For their blog the publishing date only matters as a measure for those visitors who need to see what’s new since the last visit. On the other hand, Ryan is Hungry uses the Related Videos plugin where new posts are manually connected to older ones. This must be because they cover a wide range of topics and have a hard time automating the related posts.

   My point here is simply that this issue is not a video centric problem either. It’s something that needs to be evaluated on a blog-by-blog basis. There are some common denominators in the default blog software setups namely time-based archives and tags/categories. If you find these inadequate it is not a reason to denounce bloggyness. Instead realize that you have a strong platform to build on. There is no reason to start over from scratch. Seeing the thumbnails as part of the design and developer issues rather than a part of the problem of re-connecting old content allows you to re-use the modules and plugins that already exist and work today. There is no need to re-invent them.

   Conclusion

   Of the three issues raised only one, the design issue, is actually a video centric problem. Both developer and connection issues are not specifically related to video content although they are being talked about (and developed) as if they were. This is a mistake, ensuring that work is being done while someone else has already solved the issue.

   Writing this has made me wonder how far one can come today without writing any code yourself other than regular HTML. Drupal seems to be the perfect framework for a blog that needs to be more than monthly archives and tag pages. It has a strong and separate theme layer allowing designers to create flexible layouts without having to know PHP. There are strong generalized modules (Views, CCK, embedded media field etc.) that allow non-programmers to set up structured data and create display lists based off them. Finally, it is possible to create install profiles allowing you to setup a specialized video blog Drupal package so non-hackers only need to download files and click buttons to get started.

   It should be an interesting project to see how far you can get today in Drupal without writing any additional modules and just combine what is already out there today. I bet you can get close to the 90% mark when trying to setup a videoblog that has thumbnails galore and related content and other methods of combining new content with old. The only pre-requisite being that you have to write the HTML that makes up your theme yourself.