This is the third post referring to Jon Udell in the last 10 days, but his influence on us is a lasting one. I found something that Jon spoke about at our 2006 Faculty Academy. In the podcast he refers to “the idea of assigning names to fragments of media” (at about the 20:28 mark in the audio file). The name that he refers to is a URL, and specifically pinpointing a time in a media file that you can reference by forming a “custom” URL.
Google, specifically Google Video, has given us a way to do this, adding to the technique that Jon showed us at Faculty Academy using Real Media. Google Video gives Jon and me the feature we’ve been looking for – Linking within a video. The basic idea is that you start with a URL to a video at Google Video’s website. If you want to pinpoint a precise spot in the video you manually add a time specification to the URL. It would look like this:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8489280619054214984#18m12s
So go ahead, click on the link above and you will be 18 minutes and 12 second into a talk about The DaVinci Code: Fact or Fiction?
Blip.tv, are you watching?
UPDATE: It’s important to note that you don’t have to wait for the video to download to the point that you’re interested in. It will immediately jump to the time you specify and then beginning its buffering from that point on.
One Response
I think Jon noted, somewhere or other, that Real Media has always had this time spec available but that few people ever used it. Not to knock the man’s influence, mind you: it’s enormous and growing.