I hope next year brings a lot of improvements, new projects and ideas.

Wishing everybody a very prosperous 2008!

blip.tv

Blip.tv = Bring your Video in a single upload to all the other web 2.0 sites

One of the things I like about blip.tv is that they implemented features to distribute your video to a lot of other sites:

1. External Blogs
   For example I can set up my account to automatically add the new uploaded video as a new blog entry in fasani.org
2. Internet Archive
   Uploads your video also to archive.org
3. del.icio.us
   Cross posts your video in delicious as a video bookmark
4. Flickr
   Adds the video thumbnail to your Flickr photos
5. Auto Cross-posting
   You can select a list of blogs to automatically cross-post to if you post using non-interactive methods like FTP or uploading from your cell phone.
6. iTunes
   Every show in blip.tv is already set up as a podcast. Even yours. You should take advantage of this by submitting your show to the iTunes Podcast Directory.
7. Adobe Media Player
8. Slide
9. Sidebar
   A sidebar showing your latet videos to implement in your website
10. Show Player
11. Akimbo
12. FeedBurner
13. MySpace
14. Twitter
15. Facebook
    Blip.tv has a fancy Facebook application to show your videos
16. Yahoo! Video
17. AOL Video
18. MeeVee
19. Mefeedia
20. Meebo
21. Blinkx
22. SplashCast
23. blip.tv Channels
24. Pando

Over 20 sites where you are publishing your video creation at the same time.

Knowing that this is a really hard work we must take out our hats for a great blip.tv’s success the following year as one of the main web 2.0 video sites.
On the top of that you can always download the original video version if you need more quality than flash video.

I recommend it to anyone that likes web2.0 and video podcasts.

stage6.com

Video on demand with divX quality

Mick Jagger and Peter Tosh- Div X video + download

What I really enjoy about Stage6 is that sometimes you find really good quality video. It’s better quality compared to Flash video and it’s cool that the divX people is trying something different.

In my humble opinion I don’t think that web 2.0 is dangerous. I think that the designers and programmers can be dangerous implementing web 2.0 features.

And I say this because sometimes giving some fancy “partial refresh” in a website demands the use of AJAX. This adds quite a lot of complexity and you need to be really skilled on this technologies to enhance usability at the same time that you make a better GUI. It’s quite difficult to achieve what Gmail or Flickr did in their Ajax implementations.

Nielsen, in his article “Web 2.0 can be dangerous“, points out that in their latest e-commerce sites tested they found out a lot of problems with Ajax implementations. Mainly because there are small changes like adding an item to the cart that are done Ajax style, like refreshing a small part of the page, and sometimes the user is not aware of this. AJAX is great, but you need to use it very wisely and you need to know the user limitations and be aware of the browser they are using. I did not implement many Ajax in my own websites, but I’m used to browse the web a lot, and regarding Ajax I’m aware that :

• Small changes and partial refreshs: They are not seen, unless you do it in a noticiable way the user may not notice. Remember you are playing the browsers music and it’s not an static application
• Check the scrollbar position before doing changing dynamically a header element!
• Cross-browser is a Must, as you add more javascript, more chances that sometimes fail in some browser
• Increase the speed, but make the code clean and small, because speed is always a important fact even in ADSL times
• All this checks add complexity to a website and in some cases even making things faster for the user the usability level is downgraded, a part of incrementing exponentially the production costs of the development team.
• My advice: Use Ajax wisely! . You don’t need Ajax everywhere just because it’s HIP and web 2. Many important sites as ebay don’t use it at all…and they know why!

The web 2 examples I like and they are really using this technology wisely are Youtube, Flickr, Facebook and Netvibes.-

We feed and we make grow their businesses. We are in fact, their only workforce to make their communities work and generate advertising revenues, so how can we get part of this back to our own sites ?

The answer is easy: We link back to our own sites.

I give you the content but I want the chance to have a link back to my site. So in this post I’m publishing some easy ways to accomplish this.

FLICKR

www.flickr.com/photos/movil/2122684586/
Add a link to the description to your photo story. Sometimes I also add a link to a related entry on my blog. Be sure to TAG all your photos since that’s the most easy way to find and browse related pictures. I’ve seen that non tagged photos get considerably lower traffic than the tagged ones.

YOUTUBE

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJFyRPvPPNM

I discovered this browsing other people videos. Placing a link as the very first words on the description the link appears in the right panel. That is the most clickable area ever!

I hope the readers have more tips and tricks about how to get part of Web 2 traffic back to your site.

The other day I saw in Analytics that suddenly I had like 143 visits in a single day. This blog is read by 4 friends and by my parents so there are not more than 20 or 30 daily visits.
Then I’ve been looking in the traffic sources and discovered that I ‘ve been linked from meneame.net :l