Decentralized video sharing can learn from blogging
YouTube is not the only community suffering from Google’s willingness to comply with unsound claims of copyright infringement. Two months ago, major mp3 bloggers discovered posts missing from their histories — occasionally without notice. In a parallel to the user comments removed from the pages of disabled videos on YouTube, Larissa Mann reports that,
“[M]any [mp3] blog sites go far beyond simple link lists, including commentary, images and bloggers’ own creative work alongside music. The blogger’s original work, also covered by copyright law, often disappears along with the problematic link.”
Bloggers like Gregzinho of Beat Diaspora responded to this disrespect much like the migratory YouTube fanvidder, cmspillane. They left a message for their readers and moved to another service provider.
As a follower of both, I found Greg’s move much easier to follow due to the affordances of blogging’s fundamentally decentralized architecture.
Nearly all blogging platforms consist of a web server with some software to read from and write to a structured database of posts, comments, and metadata. The public face of this system is configured to output posts in at least two common formats: HTML and RSS.
Both of these outputs conform to widely recognized standards that may be adopted by any software developer who wishes to write a new program to interpret them. HTML, the better known of the two, is the markup language read by browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Opera.
RSS shares ancestry with HTML but provides a stripped-down ‘feed’ of only the latest updates. Regular readers use software and services like Google Reader and Bloglines to ’subscribe’ to a blog’s RSS feed. These programs then aggregate and organize posts into a single, integrated stream. Subscribers can then see posts from many blogs in one place.
When Greg moved Beat Diaspora, I needed only update his entry in my RSS reader and my subscription continued uninterrupted.
The text and images in blog posts are lightly wrapped in HTML or RSS markup tags. (Try hitting clicking View Source or View Page Source in your web browser to see what this code looks like. It is surprisingly human-readable!) Because of the affordances of this unintrusive markup style, if I wish to respond to a post, I can copy, paste, and comment upon the text inside the browser.
Further, as you can see in the screenshot below, comments written on other blogs are linked in the same space as comments made directly on Beat Diaspora. By using linkback systems, blogging software running on different machines across the Internet can notify one another of new references.
The wrapping around web video is more dense than HTML or RSS and requires a small piece of helper software to make it play in a browser window.1 Unfortunately, this container does not permit the level of interaction we have come to expect from still images and text.2
Ever try to highlight part of a YouTube video and paste it into another page? You can’t!
Unlike the linkback systems common to the popular blogging services, most of today’s video sharing sites encourage centralization by implementing inward-facing commenting systems. To respond to a video on YouTube, you must be logged in with a valid account on the system. Why don’t these services implement linkback systems like Blogger, Wordpress, and Movable Type?
Although bloggers frequently use the remote embedding features of video sharing sites to leverage the rich media of those sites with blogging’s decentralized architecture, the instability of data on services like YouTube renders this a short-term solution at best. The screenshot below is from a blog post I made in April 2008. Today, five of the nine embedded videos have been disabled or removed.
With the affordances and constraints of both centralized video sharing services and distributed blogging platforms in mind, I wish to begin a wish list for the decentralized future of web video.
In sequence from Tall Order to Low Hanging Fruit:
- Copy / Paste, technically possible but quite uncommon.
- Linkbacks, this could be an extension of the video response feature on YouTube but would require some coordination among competing services.
- View Source; Save As…, already implemented as an option on blip.tv and Vimeo. Possible with other sites via third party software like Miro and DownloadHelper.
- Syndication using RSS, Atom, etc., already in place on most sites.
What am I missing? What solutions already exist? What is on your wishlist? What are you working on?
[1] How will HTML5 change this situation?
[2] This post likely rehashes ancient conversations among the Miro team.
(Cross-posted to the YouTomb blog.)
Tags: blogging, decentralization, design, network, p2p, robust, security, sharing, video, youtube
February 13th, 2009 at 00:43:27 (PST -04:00)
Glad I could be a useful example, and thanks for following me down the rabbit hole!
February 13th, 2009 at 19:08:13 (PST -04:00)
definitely! i’m happy to follow!