Which makes more sense to you as a call to action? Doing:
Hence:
RSS subscription hasn’t worked in the browser, or on the Windows desktop… are we trying to syndicate the wrong sort of content? Or using the wrong tone? Certainly, I suspect the RSS icon means little or nothing to most people; and even for those who do know what it refers to, how much use do they make of it?
[Please note, this post originally went out under the title of “Delicious TV”, which happens to be a trademarked “property”. If you’re looking for delicioustv.com (is their DTV identifier also trademarked, I wonder?, which serves up the Totally Vegetarian public television show, you ned to go here. Sorry about that… ]
On of the things that I wanted to explore in the Digital Worlds online short course (T151 Digital worlds: designing games, creating alternative realities – registrations now open for October 2009 start;-) was how we might use Youtube video playlists as a way of pointing students towards an optional set of third party based video resources that could illustrate the various topics contained within the course. Here’s my first attempt how we might deliver such a service using Boxee…
On the original Digital Worlds uncourse blog I explored various ways of using Splashcast to provide a single point of access to video content. In part based on that, I came up with an ad hoc set of requirements for handling video content in a relaxed way;-)
– a browser based or multiplatform delivery interface that would allows users to watch video compilations on a TV/large screen in lean back mode;
– a way of curating content and generating hierarchical playlists in which a course could have a set of topics, and each topic could contain one or more videos or video playlists. Ideally, playlists should be able to contain other playlists.
As a precursor to this, I had a little tinker with Boxee last week to produce a UK HEI Boxee Channel. The recipe was quite simple, and using a list of UK HEI user pages on Youtube generated a channel on Boxee that would let you browse the recent uploads from each HEI.
The list of HEI Youtube pages was originally scraped from a table on a third party web page, but in a comment to the original post I also demonstrated how the recipe could also be used to create a Boxee channel feed from a delicious bookmark list. In particular, I linked to a channel of UK Media Youtube channels, a channel of UK Government Youtube channels and a channel on differential quations built up from separate OER playlists on Youtube. To view the channels in Boxee, grab the RSS feed from the appropriate channel pipe and then subscribe to it in Boxee as a video content feed.
Can you see where we might go with that approach? That is, with this: I also demonstrated how the recipe could also be used to create a Boxee channel feed from a delicious bookmark list…
How about using delicious as a way of curating video playlists and viewing them in Boxee? This would offer quite a large amount of flexibility: if a playlist was based on a tag feed, users could generate many different playlists; if a playlist could contain another (delicious) playlist, one user could build their own playlists that contained nested playlists (e.g. a course playlist could contain separate topic playlists, or a separate playlist for each week of the course) or even other peoples’ playlists; ‘live’ playlists could be copied from one user to another – that is, if my playlist bookmarked one of your playlists, any changes you made to that playlist would show up whenever I watched your channel; and so on…
So here it is – Delicious TV Deli TV:
Here’s what’s on one of my channels:
You may notice that the channel contains the following separate sorts of content:
– programmes listed in a BBC iPlayer category feed (e.g. BBC Satire);
– a podcast feed (Wiley and Downes in Discussion);
– a particular Youtube videos (New Model Army);
– a Youtube Playlist (MIT differential equations);
– recently uploaded videos to a particular user’s Youtube channel (the Guardian)l
– another Delicious TV playlist (psychemedia’s bookmarks).
(Not shown is a link to a particular programme on iPlayer, but that is also supported.)
So here’s how that channel was programmed:
Simply by bookmarking links to delicious…
To get started with your own Delicious TV Deli TV</em channel on Boxee, all you need is a Boxee account from Boxee.tv. Oh, and you’ll also need to download a Boxee client to your computer (Windows, Macs and Linux are all supported).
What next? That all depends on whether or not you have a delicious account…
If you do have an account on the delicious social bookmarking site then you will be able to programme your own Boxee channel by bookmarking programmes and playlists you your delicious account.
If you don’t have a delicious account, you can still programme a Delicious TV channel by subscribing to someone else’s delicious TV playlist in Boxee.
Have a look at http://delicious.com/tag/delitv to see who’s been bookmarking Delicious TV Deli TV content on delicious. (For example, my Delicious TV Deli TV empire is based here: http://delicious.com/psychemedia/delitv ;-)
Use the name of the user whose Delicious TV Deli TV channel you want to subscribe to in the following URL:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/ouseful/delitv?_render=rss&q=DELICIOUS_USERNAME
So for example, my feed is at:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/ouseful/delitv?_render=rss&q=psychemedia
Subscribe to the URL in Boxee:
Now fire up your Boxee client, go to the pop-out Applications menu on the left hand side of the screen and select Video, then choose My Video Feeds:
You should now be able to view the Delicious TV Deli TV Channel you subscribed to.
The top level menu of your Boxee/Delicious TV Deli TV channel will contain those items you have tagged delitv in delicious.
Subscribe to the following Delicious TV Deli TV feed in Boxee:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/ouseful/delitv?_render=rss&q=DELICIOUS_USERNAME
where DELICIOUS_USERNAME is your delicious username.
At the current time, you can bookmark:
If you bookmark another Delicious TV Deli TV feed, that will be rendered as a submenu in Boxee.
You can also bookmark other peoples Delicious TV Deli TV pages.
If you run into any problems with Delicious TV Deli TV, please post a comment below. At the moment, Delicious TV Deli TV is very much in testing, so all feedback is welcome.
If you are outside the UK, then the BBC iPlayer links will not work for you. However, links to US based video streaming services may work for you (if you try them and they do, or don’t, please let me know via a comment below:-)
I haven’t tried the service with watch again content from ITV, Channel 4, or Channel 5 in the UK – anyone know if Boxee supports these yet (or is likely to in the near future?)
I don’t think Boxee has a mobile client, which is a shame; if anyone knows of a mobile video browser that can consume Boxee RSS feeds, please let me know… :-)
If anyone with a design flair would like to help me out with a the design for a simple homepage for Delicious TV Deli TV, a fully blown Delicious TV Deli TV Boxee app, please get in touch… :-)
If anyone is a patent troll who claims to have already got a monopoly over this sort of thing, f**k off – it was obvious and trivial given the current state of the tech and I didn’t need (indeed, I haven’t even seen) your crappy patent, in order to figure it out…
PS so why Delicious TV Deli TV? – So My Boxee “Delicious TV” Gets a Trademark Infringement Warning.
Last night, a post on Liam’s blog announced “ITV on Boxee with a little help from Yahoo Pipes and Scotland” describing how the STV (ITV in Scotland) website has all manner of feed goodness on its watch again programmes pages; and with a little bit of pipework, Liam was easily able to get the programmes playing in Boxee.
A couple of minutes tinkering on the Deli TV pipe, and you can now bookmark either a series page (with a URI like this: http://player.stv.tv/programmes/emmerdale/) or an individual programme page (with a URI like this: http://player.stv.tv/programmes/emmerdale/2009-09-08-1900) on delicious and then either view the series or the individual programme via a Deli TV programmed channel.
So what? So we can now use delicious to programme cross terrestrial channel channels (sic) of our own. So if you fancy a UK soaps channel, just bookmark this DeliTV channel definition page to your DeliTV channel – UK Soaps:
And here’s what’s on…
So what? So EastEnders is broadcast by the BBC on BBC One, and Coronation Street and Emmerdale are broadcast on the commercial STV/ITV network. Which is to say: if you fancy playing channel controller using content from the BBC, STV/ITV or Youtube, you can do so using Deli TV. Clever, eh?:-)
In series catch-up mode… so whether it’s EastEnders from BBC One:
or Coronation Street or Emmerdale from ITV (courtesy of STV):
all your programmes are belong to us:-)
So, would anyone like to pick up on Liam’s comment about DeliTV? :-)
Here’s the UK soaps DeliTV channel URL again: UK Soaps
Unfortunately, I think that broadcast restrictions means the programmes on this channel from STV/ITV and the BBC can only be viewed in the UK. If anyone from outside the UK would like to test DeliTV with video catch-up services with your local video catch-up services, please get in touch. If any UK based educators would like to propose channels or video services that might be able to get through local authority firewalls so you can programme and watch teacher created (curated?) DeliTV channels in schools and FE colleges, please also get in touch:-)
PS a little bit of extra tinkering was required to get the BBC series catch-up working, and it’s a little brittle in that you have to bookmark the correct page for the series feed to be detected, but it’s a start.
Wouldn’t it be handy if, as well as viewing DeliTV feeds in Boxee, you could also consume them on your phone? Well it just so happens that you can… :-)
Whilst messing around with Recent BBC/OU TV Programmes on Boxee, I noticed that my “OU on the BBC 7 Day CatchUp” code used in Recent OU Programmes on the BBC, via iPlayer (also available on iPhone: iPhone 7 Day OU Programme CatchUp, via BBC iPlayer) had broken. Whilst testing the fix on the iPhone/iPod Touch version, (which also works on a wifi link at least with my HTC Magic Android phone) it occurred to m that I should also be able to pipe DeliTV feeds to my phone, and then display them using the the iUI interface libraries too…
So a little bit of tweaking of my OU 7 day catchup code, and couple of extra handlers to wrap the DeliTV (for Boxee) pipe, and what do we get? (Images grabbed from iPhoney on a Mac.)
You can play along here: http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/i/idelitv.php (for a QR code of the URL, see here.)
A clunky homepage…
Leads to the default DeliTV multiplex (psychemedia/boxeetest5):
[You can configure the app to run with your own DeliTV mutliplex:
http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/i/idelitv.php?q=YOURMUTLIPLEX
So e.g. http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/i/idelitv.php?q=psychemedia/delitv_f1 ; or http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/i/idelitv.php?q=psychemedia for my default “delitv” multiplex.]
http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/i/idelitv.php
Here’s the UK Politics suite of channels:
(Note that the page may take some time to load; when I get a chance, I’ll add a loading indicator in…)
If we go into the Political Parties list, and click through on the Liberal Democrats link, we get a list of actual videos:
Clicking through on those takes you to the video page:
And clicking the Watch this video link will play the video for you using whatever your mobile device allows.
Whilst the Youtube content is workingm the iPlayer content is not working – yet. I think the original 7 day catchup had to use a helper for BBC URLs (I seem to remember that iUI doesn’t like BBC mobile URLs), and I haven’t had chance to work it in yet…
Anyway – what does this all tell us? That feeds are a Good Thing, of course…! ;-)
It also means that if you create a hierarchical playlist of Youtube content, at least, that maybe includes curated lists managed by other people, you can watch the content either in Boxee, or on your mobile device.
So that’s the proof of concept done… but as is the way of these things, it needs proper apps building to make it shiny and robust enough, and with a friendly and intuitive UI, to be used on a casual basis by anyone not me… ;-)
Reading lists hit the news last week with Read/Write Web picking up a post from the venerable Dave Winer about Google get[ting] a patent on reading lists. The patent was filed in 2005, a year or so after Dave Winer blogged:
One of the innovations flowing out the Share Your OPML site is the idea of reading lists. An expert in a given area puts together a set of feeds that you would subscribe to if you want a balanced flow of information on his or her topic of expertise. You let the expert subscribe to feeds on your behalf. I’ve gotten the first taste of what this is like by reading the aggregator page on the Share Your OPML site. As new sites come on the Top-100, as the aggregated interests of the community shift, I automatically start reading sites I wasn’t reading before. I don’t have to do anything. I like this. So at last Thursday’s Berkman meeting I asked two of our regulars, Rick Heller and Jay McCarthy, to start doing these reading lists, and Rick is ready with what he calls a list of “political blogs that provide a balanced diet of liberal and conservative views.”
So what are dynamic reading lists? Take one or more RSS feeds, and declare their URIs as items in a reading list feed. Subscribe to that reading list feed. Now whenever there is a change made to the items contained in either of the RSS feeds, the person who subscribed to the reading list feed sees those changes. So a reading list (which could be maintained by anyone) is something I can subscribe to with a single click. And that reading list can be managed, can contain RSS feeds or other reading lists that are curated by other people.
As a student, my degree could have a reading list that contains links to reading lists for each of my courses. Those course reading lists could be maintained by course instructors, and might contain feeds from other students taking the course. I subscribe to single reading list. My instructor on a particular course can change the contents of one of the feeds that is identified in my reading list. I see those changes via my degree reading list.
So it may have occurred to you that reading lists are a great way of sharing a curatorial load… and you’d be right :-)
Another example of the reading list/shared curation pattern is exemplified by Jon Udell’s elmcity project, which allows for separately maintained calendar feeds to be managed and aggregated using the Delicious social bookmarking tool (e.g. Collaborative curation as a service or elmcity project FAQ.
DeliTV also uses a similar pattern to allow users to define video playlists (that may contain other video playlists) on delicious, and then watch them in Boxee or via an appropriate mobile device (e.g. Deli TV – Personally Programmed Social Television Channels on Boxee: Prototype and An Unintended Consequence: DeliTV Goes Mobile on iPhone and Android).
It’s been some time since I properly tinkered with OPML, one of the most convenient formats for describing reading lists, so here’s a note to self about some the services that might be worth playing with:
On my to do list is also a way of putting together ‘highlights’ collections of notable paragraphs contained with in an atomised JISCPress/WriteToReply/Digress.it document…
As a design pattern, reading lists provide a very powerful way of leveraging the power of a community of individuals to collaboratively, yet independently, curate sets of resources. As with RSS, it may be that reading lists won’t achieve much explicit consumer success. But as wiring/plumbing – don’t underestimate them…
PS Remember, many resource centric sites allow you to create playlist feeds – e.g. Youtube Playlists, or, more recently, flickr playlists/galleries
I’m just such a glutton for punishment… the slightest external interest in things that might be OUseful, and like a whotsit chasing a doo dah, I can’t but bite… So for example: in Videographics from the Economist last week(?!), @deburca wrote:
The Economist now has an interesting section on videographics, each of which can be downloaded or embedded into blogs, teaching resources etc.
…
An RSS feed is also available which may be a useful channel addition for Tony Hirst’s Delitv project
Sigh…
Like this at the top?
These channels/programmes:
These packages:
and this sort of content…?
So here’s the pipework… after a quick glance at the Economist video RSS feeds page that @deburca linked to:
and a brief sigh that they don’t make an OPML feed available, I produced a quick pipe that scrapes the page to generate a feed containing links to each of the different video ‘programme’ feeds, rewriting the http:// part of the the URL to the rss:// protocol that Boxee expects:
If you bookmark the pipe URI – http://pipes.yahoo.com/ouseful/dtv_economist – to a DeliTV tag on your delicious account, the Economist programme feeds should appear wherever you’ve tag-programmed them to….
As recent readers may know, I’ve been blogging lately over on the Arcadia Project Blog, a site I have authoring permissions on but not admin rights. At the moment, comments on the site seem to be disabled except to project team members (I’m not sure how they are whitelisted?), which is a bit of a pain because I want wider comments on the site.
So what to do? The blog is hosted on Blogspot, which means I can add embed codes and javascript to a post and hence embed a Disqus comment thread on each post I write.
Alternatively, (additionally), commenters who are running the enhanced Google Toolbar can comment on the page using Google Sidewiki.
Sidewiki is all well and good (or, errr, not – maybe it’s really evil…?) but it means that unless you’re logged in to Google and running the Google toolbar, or you’ve got a Greasemonkey script or bookmarklet to check for Sidewiki comments related to a page you’re probably not going to see the Sidewiki comments.
Fortunately, for the moment at least, Sidewiki comments for a page can be accessed without authentication via a GData/RSS feed: Retrieving Sidewiki entries written for a particular web page:
GET http://www.google.com/sidewiki/feeds/entries/webpage/webpageUri/full
where webpageUri is the URI of the page you want to see comments for, suitably encoded. In Javascript, I think encodeURIComponent(window.location) should do the trick…
How to get a JSON version of the feed, wrapped in a callback function that can be used to display the feed, is documented on the GData API site: Using JSON with Google Data APIs – just add ?alt=json-in-script&callback=myFunction.
Reusing the sample code on the GData site, it was easy enough to create a function to display a Sidewiki comment feed for a particular page:
<div id="demo"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
function c(root) {
var feed=root.feed;
var entries=feed.entry || [];
var html=['<ul>'];
for (var i=0; i < entries.length; ++i) {
var entry=entries[i];
var title=entry.title.$t;
var description=entry.content.$t;
var link=entry.link[0].href;
html.push('<li><em><a href="',link,'">', title,'</a><br/>',description,'</em></li>');
}
html.push('</ul>');
document.getElementById("demo").innerHTML=html.join("");
}
</script>
<script src="http://www.google.com/sidewiki/feeds/entries/webpage/http%3A%2F%2Farcadiaproject.blogspot.com%2F2009%2F10%2Fwanted-library-hardware-hacker-for.html/full?alt=json-in-script&callback=c">
</script>
Note that I have explicitly named the page for the feed I want in the above example and that WordPress has messed it up because I’m using the HTML code view. It should be:
http://www.google.com/sidewiki/feeds/entries/webpage/
http%3A%2F%2Farcadiaproject.blogspot.com%2F2009%2F10%2Fwanted-library-hardware-hacker-for.html/full?alt=json-in-script&callback=c
See it in action here: Wanted: Library Hardware Hacker for Desktop Tattle Tape Detector (bottom of the page).
A general purpose script would add the script dynamically using an encoded version of the URI for the current page. Something like this, maybe?
var s=document.createElement('script');
s.setAttribute('type','text/javascript');
var uri='http://www.google.com/sidewiki/feeds/entries/webpage/' + encodeURIComponent(window.location)+'/full?alt=json-in-script&callback=c';
s.setAttribute('src',uri);
document.body.appendChild(s);
Adding this function along with the c function and ‘demo’ ID’d display div to a page template should display any Google Sidewiki comments associated with a page within the page…
… which might be dangerous, of course, given the lack of control a page owner has over the Sidewiki comments associated with it…
It is said that “fortune favours the prepared mind”, or at least the mildy obsessing one, so when I saw @danbri’s post on Local Video for Local People and realised that it was trivial to get hold of geocoded Youtube videos within a certain distance of a specified location using the following Youtube API call:
it was immediately obviously that this could be used to provide a local (and optionally topical) feed of Youtube videos to populate a hyperlocal DeliTV video channel for watching on Boxee.
So here it is, my DeliTV Local pipe.
And here’s the front end:
To view the channel in Boxee, enter a location, and optionally a topic, and then either:
– run the pipe, and subscribe to the RSS feed directly in Boxee;
– bookmark the URI of the pipe. Enter the URI in you browser location bar according to the following pattern:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/ouseful/delitv_local?l=required,location&q=optional search terms
hit return, check the location and optional search terms are correct and the pipe is giving a plausible output, and then bookmark that page to a DeliTV tag on delicious. (WHen you bookmark the pag, any spacesin your search terms should be replaced by %20. So the above would be bookmarked containing the characters optional%20search%20terms). If you then subscribe to that DeliTV channel via a DeliTV pipe that you have hooked up to your Boxee account, you will be able to watch the channel through Boxee.
So for example, here’s my ‘Hovercrafts” channel for Ryde on the Isle of WIght:
(Hmm, I wonder, should these be sorted by relevance or recency? I think the default is relevance?)
If you want to define a variety of different topic channels around a particular location, or a set of channels on the same topic from different locations, bookmark each channel to delicious and subscribe to them all through the same DeliTV pipe :-)
See also: Deli TV – Personally Programmed Social Television Channels on Boxee: Prototype
One of the many RSS related feature requests I put in when we were working on the JISCPress project was the ability to get a page level RSS feed out where each paragraph was represented as a separate item the page feed.
WordPress already delivers a single item RSS feed for each page containing just the substantive content of the page (i.e. the content without the header, footer and sidebar fluff), which means you can do things like this, but what I wanted is for the paragraphs on each page to be atomised as separate feed elements.
Eddie implemented support for this, but I didn’t do anything with it at the time, so here’s an example of just why I thought it might be handy – paragraph level search.
At the moment, searching a document on WriteToReply returns page level results – that is, you get a list of search results detailing the pages on which the search term(s) appear. As you might expect with WordPress, we can get access to these results as a feed by shoving feed in the URI, like this:
https://ouseful.wordpress.com/feed?s=test
Paragraph level feeds, as implemented in the Digress.it WordPress theme we were developing, are keyed by URLs of the form:
http://writetoreply.org/legaldeposit/feed/paragraphlevel/annex-c-online-content-to-be-published/#56
That is:
http://writetoreply.org/DOCNAME/feed/paragraphlevel/PAGENAME/#PARA_NUMBER
So can you guess what I’m gonna do yet…?
First of all, grab the search feed for a particular query on a particular document into a Yahoo Pipe:
Rewrite the URI of each page liked to in the results feed as the full fat, itemised paragraph feed for the page, and emit those items (that is, replace each original search results item with the set of paragraph items from that page).
The next step is to filter those paragrpah feed items for just the paragraphs that contain the original search terms:
We need to rewrite the link because (at the time of writing) the page paragraphs feed doesn’t link to each paragraph, it links to the parent page (a bug report has been made;-)
You can find the pipe here: Double dip JISCPress search
Note that at the time of writing, there’s also a problem with the paragraph number reported in the link (again a report has been made), a workaround patch for which is included in this pipe.
What this means is that we now have a workaround for indexing into individual paragraphs using a search term. If we tag content at the paragraph level, (e.g. by running a page-level paragraph feed, or double dip search results feed through OpenCalais), we can generate related search links into the document, or other documents on the platform, at a paragraph level, increasing the relevance, or resolution (in terms of increased focus), of the returned results.
Just by the by, the approach shown above is based on a search, expand and filter pattern, (cf. a search within results pattern) in which a search query is used to obtain an initial set of results which are then expanded to give higher resolution detail over the content, and then filtered using the original search query to deliver the final results. If a patent for this doesn’t already exist for this, then if I worked for Google, Yahoo, etc etc you could imagine it being patented. B*****ds.
PS here’s a trick I picked up from Joss’ blog somewhere for reversing the order of feed items published by WordPress:
http://writetoreply.org/legaldeposit/feed/?orderby=ID&order=ASC
I assume these parameters also work?
I don’t often do posts where I just link to or re-present content that appears elsewhere on the web, but I’m going to make an exception in this case, with a an extended preview to a link on Martin Hawksey’s MASHe blog…
Somewhen last year, I started to explore how we might use a Twitter backchannel as a way of capturing subtitle like commentary for recordings of live presentations (e.g. Twitter Powered Subtitles for Conference Audio/Videos on Youtube, Twitter Powered Youtube Subtitles, Reprise: Anytime Commenting, Easier Twitter Powered Subtitles for Youtube Movies). Further progress toward freestanding subtitles stalled for want of a SMIL like player that could replay timestamped text files.
Anyway, whilst I was watching Virtual Revolution over the weekend (and pondering the question of Broadcast Support – Thinking About Virtual Revolution) I started thinking again about replaying twitter streams alongside BBC iPlayer content, and wondering whether this could form part of a content enrichment strategy for OU/BBC co-productions.
I had a little more luck finding text replayers this time, for example here: Accessible HTML5 Video with JavaScripted captions and here: smiltext-javascript (I found that “timed text” is a handy search phrase), but no time to explore further…
…and then this:
which leads to a how to post on Twitter powered subtitles for BBC iPlayer in which Martin “come[s] up with a way to allow a user to replay a downloaded iPlayer episode subtitling it with the tweets made during the original broadcast.”
This builds on my Twitter powered subtitling pattern to create a captions file for downloaded iPlayer content using the W3C Timed Text Authoring Format. A video on the Martin’s post shows the twitter subtitles overlaying the iPlayer content in action.
AWESOME :-)
This is exactly it’s worth blogging half baked ideas – because sometimes they come back better formed…
So anyway, the next step is to work out how to make full use of this… any ideas?
PS I couldn’t offhand find any iPlayer documentation about captions files, or the content packaging for stuff that gets downloaded to the iPlayer desktop – anyone got a pointer to some?
– iPlayer accessibility: turning on subtitles
PPS Twitter backchannel cubtitle files for episode 3 and 4 of Virtual Revolution available here: The Virtual Revolution: Twitter subtitles for BBC iPlayer
OUseful.Info, the blog... 