WebProNews

Tag: Videos

  • Why Google Can’t Answer All Of Your Questions About Your Site

    In a new Google Webmaster Help video, Matt Cutts talks about why Google can’t answer all of your questions. He responds to the following question:

    When will there be official Google support for webmaster questions? I only ever receive automated responses after submitting reconsideration requests despite going to length to write in detail with regards to my issues and what I have done.

    “The problem is fundamentally a scale issue,” Cutts explains. “There’s 250 million domain names. I think the most recent data that we’ve provided says that we took action on 400,000 sites to the degree that we sent them a manual message in January of 2013. And we get about 5,000 reconsideration reports each week, so about 20,000 a month. And the problem is, our primary goal has to be returning the highest quality set of search results, so that’s what we really need to work on. And then our secondary goal is to talk to webmasters about actions that we’ve taken on sites. So the problem primarily is that there’s so many webmasters on the web, and our index is really big, and we get over two billion queries a day, so we don’t really have a great way to talk one on one with individual webmasters.”

    “So we try to come up with scalable ways like webmaster videos like these that can get several thousand views, but it is really tricky to have a conversation – especially a prolonged, detailed conversation – about a particular site,” he continues. “We’ll keep looking for new ways to do better. We’ll keep looking for new ways to communicate scalably, but that’s the fundamental dilemma. That’s the issue that we face. And so the reconsideration request process, for example, you’ll typically get back, ‘Yes, you’re doing okay,’ or ‘No, you still have work to do,’ or in some cases, we process your request, which might mean, ‘Hey, you had multiple issues, and maybe one is now resolved, but there’s still more issues that need to be resolved.”

    This seems like an example of where a one-on-one conversation would be of tremendous help to the webmaster. As we talked about earlier, one webmaster was complaining in the forum that Google warned him about a natural link in a reconsideration request, leaving him wondering what he’s supposed to do with that.

    But it’s hard to argue with Matt’s point about scalability. Google is huge, but do you really think the search team could thoroughly go through every site’s issues with the webmaster individually?

  • Patrick Stewart Masters the Rare Quadruple Take

    Patrick Stewart, consummate actor, wants to teach you a thing or two about performing the rare quadruple take – which is “in a different category altogether” than the other, more “naturalistic” acting of the single, double, and triple take.

    In this masterclass in acting uploaded by his girlfriend Sunny Ozell, Sir Patrick Stewart demonstrates the difference between the takes. He also (likely) demonstrates what’s it’s like to be so stoned you’re talking about quadruple takes. Either way, it’s classic Stewart.

    Image via YouTube

  • YouTube Kills Video Responses, Cites Terrible User Engagement

    Starting September 12th, you’ll no longer be able to leave a video response as a comment on a YouTube video.

    Google is sunsetting the video response feature, and according to them, it’s because nobody ever used it. In fact, the YouTube team says that video responses currently sport a click-through rate of just 0.0004%. To put that into real life numbers, only 4 YouTubers out of every million will click on a video response if they see it.

    YouTube says that creators should now focus on titling, hashtags, and descriptions to get their videos seen.

    “In the meantime, you can continue to encourage fans to upload videos with specific titles, hashtags or descriptions (e.g., Video Response To Taylor Swift’s Video “22”), so you can find these by searching for them. If you want to highlight them, you can use playlists and channel sections instead of displaying these videos below yours. Any video responses you or your fans have made will still be available and discoverable,” says YouTube.

    In the future, YouTube says that they will let video creators share video links in comments, which they say will add context to videos and in turn drive engagement.

    The post on the YouTube creators blog is receiving quote a few responses, and some of them are from pissed off creators.

    “You have got to be kidding me? Video responses is what made youtube. You know how many close friends I have made just by video responses alone? What are you doing youtube? The site us original posters knew has officially been killed. How about working on your mobile app and being able to comment back to a viewer. Arrrrgh, soo frustrating,” says one user.

    “A disgusting lack of vision and understanding about the community aspects of your site. Video responses are not intended for general consumption but rather are geared towards conversation that extends beyond the ridiculous character limits imposed by your comment system. The feature (when used at its best) is used by creators to connect with their audiences not for self promotion and spamming. Algorithmic number crunching should not be the factor that ends this feature,” says another.

    What do you think? Were you a fan of YouTube’s video responses?

  • Breaking Bad: Go Inside Last Night’s Explosive Episode [VIDEOS]

    Thar be spoliers ahead…

    Wow. That episode. It seems like Breaking Bad, a show that gained an early reputation for careful, deliberate exposition, is now hurdling toward some insane conclusion at a mind-bending pace. So many things are happening, and it’s just a thrill to be on the ride . You know, other than the fact that my nails are in rough shape. Relaxing, that show is not.

    Anyway, if you’re not ready to give up Breaking Bad for another week, AMC has kindly released a few bonus looks at the powerful “Confessions” episode.

    First, here’s AMC’s inside look at last night’s episode:

    And here’s their “making of” featurette:

    And of course, here’s a sneak peek at what’s coming up in the next episode, entitled “Rabid Dog”:

    [Image via YouTube]

  • Vine Tops 40 Million Users, Thinks Y’all Are Amazing

    Twitter launched its 6-second video-sharing app Vine back in January, and today the company is sharing a milestone. Vine has just crossed 40 million users.

    And they think you are all amazing:

    No doubt aiding in their user climb was their March update that allowed Vine videos to be embedded across the web, upping their exposure, as well as their June launch on the Android platform. When Vine announced their availability in Android, they also announced 13 million users. That means that in 2.5 months, Vine has more than tripled its user base. Not too shabby.

    It’s a good growth tally for Vine, who many feared would succumb to the mighty Instagram’s attempt to capitalize on the video craze. But it looks like Vine is holding its own, and making news with some of its user-generated content:

    For context on that crazy Vine, check here.

  • Crazy I-96 Accident Caught on Vine; Truck Jumps Guardrail, Flies into Creek

    Here’s some social media-aided citizen journalism for ya.

    A 59-year–old Kentwood, Michigan man has been taken to the hospital with serious injuries after the truck he was driving crossed the median and flew a guardrail on I-96. The truck, which was also towing a riding mower on a trailer, landed in Sycamore Creek, according to the Ingham County Sheriff’s Office.

    Spectacularly, Vine user Alex Stack caught the whole thing on the 6-second video app. You can clearly see the truck jump the railing and fall out of sight into the creek below. It’s some crazy stuff.

    “Did I just fucking witness this no fucking way,” she said.

    …And the aftermath of witnessing something crazy and posting it online:

    The man was reportedly talking to police at the scene – which means he was conscious at the scene. That’s almost as incredible as the video, plus the fact that someone happened to catch it on Vine.

  • Take a Look Inside Breaking Bad’s Latest Episode

    Still reeling from Sunday night’s incredible episode of Breaking Bad? Feeling like you want to have strong words with Vince Gilligan over that painful cliffhanger? Wondering if Jesse has actually lost all ability to speak? Shocked by the actions of Lydia and Meth Damon?

    If you’re still obsessing over “Buried,” episode 10 in Breaking Bad’s final run, AMC has you covered with a couple of new videos that take you inside the episode.

    Take a deeper look inside season 5B, episode 10, “Buried”:

    And here’s AMC’s “making of” featurette:

    And while you’re here, you might as well check out the teaser for next week’s episode, entitled “Confessions.”

  • Kevin Spacey Defends House of Cards’ Emmy Noms on the Colbert Report

    Kevin Spacey appeared on The Colbert Report last night, and the two spent most of the time talking about Spacey’s popular Netflix original series House of Cards. Colbert grilled Spacey on how the show could be up for an Emmy, considering it’s not really a TV show.

    “Nominated for 9 Emmys,” said Colbert. “Ok, I got a beef about this though, Kev. It’s not a TV show. It’s an internet show…you are admittedly the Jackie Robinson of the internet. Why should you get an award for TV when you’re not on TV? What do you want next, a Heisman? Defend yourself!”

    Here’s what Spacey had to say about it:

    “Look, it’s where things have been going. If you look at the last 8 years, the way in which people are watching, binging on shows – it all really started with box sets. And the truth is I think that what’s been kind of remarkable about how the audience has responded with House of Cards coming out all at once…is that they are in control. They can watch it how they want to watch it.

    Check out the full interview below:

    Netflix made history in July by snagging 14 Emmy nominations – the first non-traditional platform to be rewarded with any noms. House of Cards led the pack with 9, including nods to Kevin Spacey, Robin Wright, and David Fincher for direction. Eli Roth’s horror series Hemlock Grove came away with 2 nominations, and Arrested Development grabbed 3.

  • Decapitated Snake Bites Itself in Your Daily WTF Video

    Warning, this may creep you out – depending on your tolerance for nature being freaky as hell.

    I’m going to let you guys in on a little secret about my phobias. I really, really hate spiders. I also really, really hate centipedes. Basically, my rule is that if it has 8 legs or more – screw that. Anything that has fewer than 8 legs, I’m cool with.

    By my own rule, snakes are a-ok in my book. No legs – awesome. I ain’t scared of you, snake.

    But this is just…what the hell? Ignore the slightly annoying commentary and witness nature at its most WTF:

  • Watch John McAfee Sweetly Play The Piano For His New Puppy

    John McAfee is just putting out awesome videos left and right now.

    The McAfee antivirus founder, who earlier this year, returned to the States after a highly-publicized manhunt beginning in Belize, recently put out a funny video responding to all the emails he gets about uninstalling the software (which he no longer has anything to do with). Then, he posted a video of himself playing piano in the middle of an airport.

    Now, McAfee treats us to his “lullaby” to his new puppy. Once again, McAfee is at the piano playing a soft tune while a dog sits in his lap.

  • Got An Hour To Spare To Get More Out Of Your Google Search Ads?

    Google thinks you can be getting more out of your search campaigns with Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA).

    Google launched RLSA out of beta in June, making the feature available to all advertisers using Enhanced Campaigns. Now, the company has released an hour-long “Learn with Google” webinar about using it.

    RLSA, Google says, “brings together intent, context and audience to help you get more sales and leads with great ROI. With RLSA, you can modify bids, ads, and keywords for past site visitors.”

    The webinar provides a feature overview, tips for usage strategies, and a set-up walkthrough.

  • Drunk Driver Does Not Give a Damn, Dances for Cops

    Don’t drink and drive. Just don’t do it. But if you’ve already made the bad decision and have been caught by the police, I guess you might as well go down with funky dance moves, boasting about cougars, and some simulated motorboating.

    Dale Bentley of Gahanna, Ohio will go down in internet infamy as that dancing DUI guy. Sorry, Dale. you may have plenty of other life achievements – but to the internet you’re always going to be this guy.

    Police pulled Bentley over for speeding, and proceeded to give him a variety of sobriety tests. Exasperated by the whole process, Bentley eventually gives up and just admits to it. He then begins to put on a show for police – and lucky for us it was all caught on the officer’s dash cam.

    Oh, Dale. Dale, Dale, Dale, Dale.

    He’s been charged with operating a vehicle while impaired, speeding, and failure to comply. He’s due in court on September 5th.

    [WTAM]

  • Here’s an Epic Slow Motion Water Balloon Massacre

    Here’s how I feel about the recent “let’s film everything in slow motion” thing that’s happening on the internet. Every single time I see a video about some sort of “super slo-mo” or “2500 FPS” anything, I think to myself, “eh, seen it, whatever.” And then I watch it and I’m vomiting rainbows.

    It’s just cool. This is a water ballon fight massacre filmed at 2500 FPS, and it’s awesome. Created by theslowmoguys for YouTube’s Geek Week, here’s what it looks like as thousands of water balloons rain down on two poor saps – complete with epic battle music.

  • Learn More About Ecommerce And Goal Tracking In Google Analytics

    Google recently held a Google+ hangout discussing how to utilize ecommerce and goal tracking. it’s actually the second part in a series of hangouts about Analytics, if you’re selling online, this one might be for you.

    The next part in the series will focus on the multi-channel funnel, event flow and visitors flow. You can keep an eye on the Learn With Google YouTube channel for more videos from the series.

  • Roku Now Lets You Stream Video to Your TV from Your Mobile Device

    Roku Now Lets You Stream Video to Your TV from Your Mobile Device

    With a small update to its iOS app, Roku has just turned your Apple device into a video beamer.

    Last September, Roku launched “Play on Roku,” a feature that allows users to stream photos and music from their mobile devices directly to their TVs via a wide range of Roku devices. Today, they’re pushing an app update that will incorporate video into the mix.

    Starting today, Roku for iOS will let users stream video from their devices to their TVs. This functionality supports iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch, and you can stream to your TV with the following Roku players: Roku 3, Roku 2, Roku HD (model 2500) or Roku LT (models 2400 & 2450) player or the Roku Streaming Stick.

    This means that you can take a video with your iPhone, and easily stream it on your HDTV. It’s kind of like Roku’s answer to Apple’s AirPlay, except it doesn’t support third-party apps – meaning that you can’t just stream any type of video from your phone to your TV using a Roku box (for instance, no Netflix streaming). Of course, with Roku’s family of apps, this probably wouldn’t be necessary anyway.

    There are a few other minor tweaks shipped alongside the new video streaming:

    “In addition to video streaming from iPhone and the usual minor bug fixes and performance improvements, the 5.1 update also adds support for audiophile-requested FLAC and WAV audio file formats. The USB Media Player channel has been updated to support these formats,” says Roku’s Tom Markworth.

    You can download the new Roku app over at the App Store today. Android users – your update is coming.

  • Here’s 11 Minutes of 2013’s Funniest (and Dumbest) Vines

    Some internet hero put together an 11 minute-long compilation of the best Vines of 2013 – which would also be the best Vines of all time, since the service didn’t debut until late January.

    As you’re probably aware, Vines are only 6 seconds – maximum. So that means that this Vine compilation features quite a few Vines – some hilarious, others kind of stupid. Ok, most of them are stupid – Vine is rather silly, don’t you think? But all around, it’s a fun way to spend 11 minutes.

    [Eric S, YouTube]

  • MixBit: YouTube Founders Launch New Take on Video Mixing and Sharing

    We’ve known since March that YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen were cooking up a new video-sharing service, and today it finally launches.

    It’s called MixBit, and its creators describe it as a “new app that helps people create dynamic videos together.”

    On the surface, it may look like a simple Vine or Instagram video competitor. MixBit allows users to create their own 16-second videos (take that, 15-second Instagram) and share them to various social networks.

    But the defining feature for MixBit is the ability to make longer videos using mashed-up clips from up to 256 other videos. Hence the “mixing” of the “bits.”

    “MixBit lets you record, edit and publish videos as short as one second or as long as an hour – right from your mobile phone. You can also create videos without needing to shoot original content. Touch your screen anywhere and hold to record. Videos are taken in multiple clips, or “bits,” as long as 16 seconds each. A video can include as many as 256 clips. Clips are stored as independent elements but play as one seamless video. Drag and drop to rearrange, cut or delete clips, as well as save or publish, right from your phone,” says the app description.

    MixBit differs from Instagram and Vine in that it lets users take from any publicly shared video on the service and mix it to their liking. In theory, you never even have to shoot your own video to get a quality experience out of MixBit.

    “The whole purpose of MixBit is to reuse the content within the system,” Hurley told the NYT Bits blog. “I really want to focus on great stories that people can tell.”

    As of right now, the only available version is for iOS. But you can expect a web app and an Android version to launch soon.

  • Cutts Talks Web Spam Fighting In International Markets

    In today’s Webmaster Help video from Google, Matt Cutts discusses the search giant’s efforts in web spam fighting around the world. Many of us are very used to hearing about the efforts surrounding web spam in the United States, but efforts in other countries aren’t discussed quite so frequently.

    Cutts responds to a question from an anonymous user, who asks:

    Is the Webspam team taking the same measures to counter spam in international markets like India like they do in the US market? It just seems like there are a lot of junk sites that come up in the first page of results when searching on google.co.in.

    “Remember, the web spam team has both the engineers who work on the algorithmic spam,” says Cutts .”We also have the manual web spam team, and both of those work on spam around the world. So, Google.co.in, you know, India…we want the algorithms, whether they be link spam or keyword stuffing or whatever to work in every language as much as we can. And so we do try to make sure that to the degree it’s possible for us to do it, we internationalize those algorithms.”

    “At the same time, we also have people, including people in like Hyderabad, who are fighting spam not only in English, and on the .com domains, but also in India, you know, .IN as well,” he continues. So we have people who are able to fight spam in forty different languages based around the world. At the same time, I would agree that probably English spam in the United States on a .com definitely gets a lot of attention because not every single engineer can speak French or German or a particular language, but it is the case that we put a lot of work into trying to make sure that we do internationalize those.”

    He adds, “Definitely if you see any results that are sub-optimal or that are generally bad, either do a spam report or show up in the webmaster forum, and drop a notice there. Feel free to send a tweet. That’s the sort of thing that we’re interested in, and we’d like to make sure that we do better on.”

    Cutts notes that they use the feedback they get to try to improve future iterations of their web ranking algorithms.

  • YouTube Adds New Play Icon to Browser Tabs to Help Alleviate a Very Annoying Problem

    YouTube has just made a small tweak that makes me very, very happy – and it’ll make you happy too if you’re the type of person who consistently browses the web with dozens of tabs open at the same time.

    Now, when a video is playing, YouTube will indicate that with a new play icon that appears in your browser tab. Check it out:

    You know when something starts blaring in your headphones and you don’t know where it’s coming from, so you have to click through all of your tabs to find the culprit. Well, as long as the culprit is a YouTube video, this new feature should eliminate the guesswork.

    And let’s be honest, the problem is usually YouTube. The site autoplays all videos when you click the link – and that leads to a bunch of confused audio when you’re a tab-happy browser.

    The new play icon also shows up during ads – so that’s a huge bonus.

    Sometimes it’s the small things, you know?

    [h/t The Verge]

  • Here’s What Happens When You Park Like a Jerk

    Instead of keying his car or something like that, one YouTuber decided that the best (non-violent) way to deal with a habitually awful parker was to block in his driver-side door with his own car. This is a great tactic if you find yourself out of those “hey, nice parking job asshole” cards that people like to stick on windshields nowadays.

    “Sick of this guy taking up two spots every day, so we showed him you actually can still fit another car beside his,” says user crisp330.

    Most of the fun of this video comes from the justice-seekers cackling at our crappy parker’s futile attempts to access his drivers seat. Check it out:

    “The guy in the Porsche was probably there early in the morning or something and parked like that because nobody was there…I think the asshole is the dude in the Toyota,” says one YouTuber who has been spam voted into oblivion.

    “I think we’ve found our jerk driver,” says another commenter in reply.

    [via crisp330, YouTube]

  • Laugh with SNL Actors As They Break Character [VIDEO]

    Sometimes, the bit itself isn’t quite as funny as seeing a funny person laugh at another funny person or laugh at themselves. It’s infectious. If something is so hilarious that the actors themselves can’t contain their laughter, you know it’s good. And watching them struggle to keep it together is half the fun.

    So, prepare to laugh as you move through this compilation of SNL actors breaking character throughout the years.

    [via Slacktory]