Where’s the meta-data?
I was talking to Mike Hudack (of blip.tv) yesterday about video feeds and he mentioned that they had all his data about their video - which he wanted to ‘put into their video feeds’.
I suggested that he go onto the Media RSS list and talk about extending the spec to support that data - but what this really got me thinking about was “how the hell is it the end of 2006 and we still don’t have meta-data flowing through our media feeds?”
Quick looks at the feeds from:
- YouTube - can’t find a normal feed!
- Yahoo Video - Media RSS!
- Google Video = Media RSS!
- PodTech - iTunes stuff
- PodShow - description, pub date
- dabble - description, keywords, pub date, category, thumbnail!
- Technorati - pub date, description
…….show a world of no sandardization and clarity. The closest we come - is Yahoo’s Media RSS - which they’ve tried to NOT make Yahoo’s - but it really still is Yahoo’s. Bu the good news is that Google is supporting it.
It’s too bad that Podcasting got called podcasting - but what’s worse is that it doesn’t have meta-data tightl;y couipled to it. Oh well.
Wouldn’t it be coolio if - when you subscribed to a video feed - that:
a) the thumbnail of the video was there
b) a link to the page where the video it stored
c) a list of who’s in the video or audio
d) what the video or audio is about
e) you know - meta-data
…. would be part of the feed?
October 24th, 2006 at 8:35 pm
oh so true.
and, not to forget: licensing and billing information,
October 25th, 2006 at 10:34 am
[…] « Where’s the meta-data? […]
October 26th, 2006 at 10:08 am
I’ve been struggling with some “media” feeds lately and they really are all over the place. I think one problem might be that a lot of the tools to parse feeds (e.g., w/ php Magpie and SimplePie are popular parseing engines) don’t take advantage of these extra namespaces, yet, so the low end hackers aren’t able to easily make use of this kind of stuff for cool effects…
October 26th, 2006 at 2:32 pm
Just an FYI Youtube does have excellent RSS feeds with media RSS with all the bells and whistles.
They’re just VERY hard to find.
The only other negative thing I can say is they enclose their flash files. Which of course are useless to 99% of all aggregators. But Democracy from participatory media does support them and so does mefeedia.com
The tragic flaw is it makes youtube and their business plan completely incompatible with the growing portable media revolution.
The iPod video, Sony PSP… and best of all you should read up on the Nokia N95 … it’s the true future. Direct to device aggregation of audio and video podcasts over wifi or various wireless networks… no more syncing… no more “hub”. It’s the next step in audio and video podcasting eventually becoming more ubiquitous than TV… but it’s not TV… it’s about audio video telepresence and communication…. web-time communications… like what the blackberry has done for email.
So… we do have youtube feeds all over mefeedia.com for users and groups. You just have to know the syntax because they’re hard to find on youtube’s site.
Here’s a few examples
http://mefeedia.com/search.php?q=youtube&object=feed&Submit=Search
October 26th, 2006 at 5:19 pm
[…] Some folks (Michael Meiser and Peter) have been saying that mefeedia does media. No wonder Mary Hodder likes it so much. […]