YouTube has added video annotations to their inline videos. The downside? They’re text only. The player is Flash after all so I don’t understand why they didn’t allow free form strokes? This should have been easy to do.
We made a slight change to the blog grouping content I posted about today and yesterday. Now it includes ”popular” YouTube videos that have been recently posted which are on topic. Up to this point, the only way to get YouTube videos to show up was for at least one blog to link to them. Now, a popular YouTube video can makes its way to the list even if there’s no referring link. The YouTube RSS feeds/API really help out here.
I do see one thing I have to fix here: The list picked up the non-English video entry “Asus Notebook KickOff 2008 Munchen.” Hmmm. I’ll have to see if I can restrict the content to just English.
Layne and Lora set up a page over on WhatIsNew that is going to make my life of tracking Tablet PC and UMPC YouTube videos a snap.
It lists all the videos by category and author. So far he has three categories for videos:
UMPC Videos
Tablet PC Videos
MID Videos
and three lists of authors:
GottaBeMobile
TabletPCOwner (me 
)
Hugo Ortega
This is a first pass list so if you know of some other categories or YouTube authors that make sense, post a comment on WhatIsNew. Oh, Josh Bancroft–he has some great videos–that’s one good one to add to the list.
Layne also needs a way to sort by date. I’ve read that there’s an orderby term that can be applied to the YouTube API.
Ideas anyone?
I’ve been watching the stats on YouTube for the screencast I posted yesterday and a couple things are becoming obvious: In terms of real-time reporting the stats don’t mean much. I’m not sure if they have a server sync problem or what, but there can be times where even on the same page two different view counts show up. I wish I’d taken a screenshot.
I’ve also see counts go up and down. At one time YouTube was reporting 541 views. Then it went down to 345. That seems to be its favorite number, because for the last several minutes that’s where the count has stayed–despite several new links to the video feed and I’m sure many more viewers.
Update: Here’s a screenshot showing two different stats now, 345 and 611.
I’m not sure what its update rate is. Minimally, YouTube should be showing a last update time for their view counts and other data.
And one more thing while I’m at it: Why is it so impossible to find a video that I know exists on YouTube using their text search? You know how I find things? I go to Google. (I’ve tried Microsoft’s Live Search, but it usually doesn’t find videos I’m looking for, but then again their video search is in beta.)