Now I know I live in the provinces, but I have to admit I had a huge dose of futureshock when I went up to London earlier this week: videos on the underground…
You know those big adverts on the wall opposite you on the tube, at the other side of the track – now they move, powered by magic lanterns in boxes suspended from the ceiling… (It’s called XTP, apparently: Cross-track projection.)
And that’s not all – how about the DEPs – Digital Escalator Panels?
There are also large LCD panels displaying video ads at other strategic locations, such as T-junctions, on various parts of the tube hall network…
The future – as portrayed in Blade Runner and Minority Report – is becoming a part of everyday life. The following movie, produced by CBS Outdoor, is called “Future of the Underground“. But what it describes appears to be the present…
Also on the video front, Google just got a little bit more aggressive in terms of grabbing video search traffic. Not content with already competing for second place behind Google web search itself in terms of search volume, embedded Youtube players now include a Youtube search box (you may have noticed…;-):
If you paste the full Youtube embed code into your pages, then you can disable the display of the search box with the showsearch=0 embedded player parameter. (You can also disable the display of both related videos and the search bar by setting rel=0.)
However, if you are using WordPress, and embed movies using the construction, as I am, you’ll have to settle for whatever defaults WordPress chooses to embed…
I’m actually finding this so annoying that if the hosted WordPress folks don’t change the default embedded code to disable the search box, or they don’t provide me with the option to disable it, for example by using the construction [youtube=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=IrjsR6fdGxo&rel=0], I may well have to move blog again…
OUseful.Info, the blog... 
Tony, host your own WP blog! It’s fun :-)
And things like this…
Now then, how long before we have cars that I don’t actually have to learn how to drive? :)
I found that when getting the video embed code from YouTube you can also stop the search bar appearing by clicking on the cog icon next to the embed code on the video page, and then unticking “Include related videos”. This only works of course for platforms that let you include embed code.
@joss I took the decision to use a hosted blog to force me to work within the constraints that people without access to a server, or the skills to host their own blog, have to work within.
For a similar reason, I try to limit the hacks I do to things that don’t require much, if anything, in the way of server side scripts or desktop client downloads, preferring instead to use third party hosted apps wherever I can.