{"id":264,"date":"2009-02-09T15:22:22","date_gmt":"2009-02-09T19:22:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/designforpeople.ca\/?p=264"},"modified":"2009-02-09T16:24:16","modified_gmt":"2009-02-09T20:24:16","slug":"slideshow-predation-on-youtube","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/designforpeople.ca\/?p=264","title":{"rendered":"Slideshow Predation on YouTube"},"content":{"rendered":"

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If you’ve been to youtube lately (or… ever), you have probably noticed evidence of the over-population of Windows Movie Maker users, eager to show off their madskills at generating white text on a blue background with their favorite to 90’s track pumping. Advanced users will also add real, full-color photographs with transitions such as wipe and crossfades.<\/p>\n

For people who are playing with video editing software for the first time, this is great. They can throw something together and upload it to YouTube in a few minutes, and gain some sense of accomplishment without having to do anything overly technical.<\/p>\n

For people who are on YouTube looking for an actual video (which I assume is all or most users), this is just awful. I’ll go out on a limb and assume that most people searching for something on YouTube are not overly critical, they will tolerate mediocre-quality video and amateurish production – that is the whole appeal, but it is fair to assume that these people are, at the very least, looking for video. Not slideshows.<\/p>\n

And you can’t blame the MovieMakers. Making slideshows is easy, and fun. But what I cannot fathom is how YouTube has fostered the growth of this truly unwelcome phenomena on their service. If I am searching for an eagle attacking a wolf, I would expect, at the very least, to see an eagle attacking a wolf, not a handfull of photographs someone found of the same, with a cheezy hip-hop midi in the background.<\/p>\n

Considering all of the energy Google has devoted to identifying copyright-protected content<\/a> in YouTube, you would think they could use some of that same mojo for at least identifying what content is actually a video. How many “videos” for example, are there out there, that are just a still image with a full-length copyright song? Come on!<\/p>\n

The technology required to identify slideshows and still images is pretty basic. This could be implemented where the user uploads a video. They could tick off a radio button that identifies the content as “full motion video” or “slideshow”. Viewers could also flag content as a slideshow when the creator does not. And furthermore, the video itself could be\u00a0analyzed, either when it is uploaded, or on a\u00a0random\u00a0\/ periodic basis, to determine if there is motion from one frame to the next. Really, there is no excuse for them to leave all these slideshows “in the soup” of a site intended for video.<\/p>\n

All it takes is a little “Mark as slideshow” link, like this:<\/p>\n

\"youtube_slideshow1\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you’ve been to youtube lately (or… ever), you have probably noticed evidence of the over-population of Windows Movie Maker users, eager to show off their madskills at generating white text on a blue background with their favorite to 90’s track pumping. Advanced users will also add real, full-color photographs with transitions such as wipe […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,23,11,10,15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/designforpeople.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/designforpeople.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/designforpeople.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/designforpeople.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/designforpeople.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=264"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/designforpeople.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":273,"href":"http:\/\/designforpeople.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264\/revisions\/273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/designforpeople.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/designforpeople.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/designforpeople.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}