My name is Dirk Wendling. I am a web designer / developer at Sun Microsystems. I am currently studying Computer Science and Media at the Stuttgart Media University.
Feel free to add my vCard to your addressbook, visit me on facebook, or on XING.
I am one of the 3 developer of messi (an university jabber project) written in Java.
Please be aware that I am also using this Blog as my playground for new techniques which is why it may sometimes look a bit funny.
sorry for not posting anything these days. i’ve been busy moving to kennington (south london), researching for my dissertation (topic: “global information management”) and working for Sun’s Global Web Publishing team.
will be in germany for easter.
all the best!
http://i.gizmodo.com/5169878/heres-the-most-amazing-mashup-music-video-you-are-going-to-see-this-month
i finished my university project “YourTubeMix.com – The Crossfader for YouTube”!
it’s available to all my readers under this url: http://yourtubemix.com/index1.html
it will be open to public on wednesday 28th of January (the day of my project presentation at my uni).
feedback is much appreciated – i will try to give my best although i won’t have too much free time during the next weeks.
youtube released video annotations in june 2008. i guess it brings a huge usability advantage for disabled people and also brings some meaning (in multiple languages, which is cool!) to the videos but i don’t like them yet.
why? because i can’t turn them off by default.
why would i like to turn them off? because actually only a few people use it in a appropriate way, all the others are just bothering youtubers with advertising or crap within their annotations, here an example:
you can’t even see this video because it’s flooded by useless annotations which don’t bring any advantage to the user watching this video:
But i have to say there are some good / entertaining examples, too:
Here’s a video which shows you how to use annotations.
Use this page to explore the YouTube Data API.
yesterday youtube launched their application gallery, a place where everyone can promote their youtube based application or comment on others’ projects.
the youtube pages got expanded to 960px width to give more space for bigger videos. it looks a bit odd on old 4:3 videos but i guess soon lots of the videos will be in better quality and the black border will disappear. at the moment some users are pretty upset about it, but i am sure those things will be fixed sooner or later. anyway, i welcome that change.
the AJAX Libraries API (blog post) takes away the pain of managing your JavaScript libraries. the list will get updated with the latest versions of the APIs as well as additional APIs.
i am currently using it in my project (a youtube mashup… soon more about that) for loading the SWF Object as well as jQuery and jQuery UI.
it doesn’t only save you time developing, also the loading process for the end user should decrease.
.. on november 22nd, more details
beardyman will be there, too!
he introduces his performances over here. here an other introduction he uploaded:
i just love the progress youtube is doing!
THE monty python channel: youtube.com/user/MontyPython
i am currently working on a project using vairous youtube APIs. i am kind of a youtube power user and always very interested in other projects.
i read about streamdrag at dr web (german article) . it’s a online tool for creating youtube playlists, which will get lost after leaving their site. it focuses on music videos and doesn’t display the videos, only the sound. i’s developed by this german company: vaib
very interesting and a little bit similar to my project. more about this as soon as it reaches a viewable status.
as mentioned: i am currently working on a uni project using the youtube api.
The JW FLW Media Player by Jeroen Wijering is probably the most used FLV player. it is nicely done, you can control quite a lot and there are even plugins and skins and stuff available to use.
but one thing bothers me about the latest version (v.4.2) of JW player:
this problem was raised already a few times in the player’s forum and it seems like it is going to be fixed in the next version (v.4.3).
workaround
i read that previous versions (e.g. v.3.6) were able to play multiple videos. i am going to try this one now.
YouTube’s Halloween special logo:
Talking about YouTube: Today i had my Project’s “Kick Off Meeting” with Björn and Mr. Kretzschmar. i will talk about this sooner or later.
ich habe eben im prospekt eines grossen unterhaltungstechnik haendlers mit dummen werbespots folgendes entdeckt:
Samsung VP-MX 20 SD-Camcorder fuer 179EUR *mit YouTube Funktion.
da ich noch nie von der YouTube Funktion gehoert hatte habe ich mich mal kurz eingelesen.
im grunde wird nach dem betaetigen des youtube knopfes die aufnahmequalitaet gesenkt (soll spaeteres runterschrauben der qualitaet am rechner ersparen) und die aufnahmedauer auf 10 minuten beschraenkt.
naja so ein tolles feature ist das dann also doch nicht.
cool waere, wenn die kamera die videos selbst hochladen koennte, und zwar als live stream!
handys koennen dies schon seit laengerem.
If you want to embed a YouTube video that starts to become interesting somewhere in the middle, there’s a simple way to skip the boring part. YouTube’s embedded player has a parameter that lets you specify the number of seconds that should be skipped before starting to play the video. Here’s how you should edit the code: append &start=[number of seconds from the start of the video] to both URLs.
Videos uploaded per day: 150,000 to over 200,000
YouTube by Category:
Music: 19.8%
Entertainment: 19.0%
People & Blogs: 14.2%
Comedy: 13.4%
Sports: 6.9%
Education: 6.0%
Autos: 5.2%
Film: 4.7%
HowTo: 2.6%
News: 2.6%
Pets: 2.2%
Science: 2.2%
Travel: 1.3%
how does it come that a video like this gets 26mio views in just 3 month?
The creator claims that he is 26 years old and never had professional piano or voice lessons. so how does it come that he got famous? was he in a tv show? this is probably again one of those hypes coming from the us and than spreading all over the world. but neither my friends in uk nor my friends in germany ever forwarded me this video. so i guess it isn’t one of those typically hypes?
TayZonday is running a music channel with loads of other songs performed by him. most of them were viewed less than 500k times. Except a chocolate rain remix (organized by Dr. Pepper to promote their cherry chocolate whatever) with 5mio views.
there is even a chocolate rain charity album. but i doubt that this was a big success. the regarded video got viewed 140k times.
TayZonday
Style: Acoustic
Joined: January 26, 2007
Last Sign In: 8 hours ago
Videos Watched: 17,700
Subscribers: 57,811
Channel Views: 2,785,121
he joined 2 month before he added the famous video. since then (5 month in total) he managed to get quite a lot of personal attention but actually not too many (compared with other users doing their own show).
habe eben dieses video eines jungen skaters gesehen, der von einem baltimore police officer ins visir genommen wird.
hier ein fernseh ausschnitt, der zeigt, dass dieses skatervideo hilft diesen polizisten zur rechenschaft zu ziehen.
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