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September 29, 2007

All Videos Uploaded by a Google Video User

One of the reasons why YouTube became successful and Google Video didn't is that YouTube built a community around videos. Each registered user has a profile, a list of uploaded videos and favorite videos. You can subscribe to the videos uploaded by a user and send him a private message.

Google Video doesn't have any of these options: the only thing you can see about someone who posted a video is a list of other uploaded videos. But what if you want to get notified when this unknown person posts other videos? In Google Video, each user has an unique alphanumeric ID. To find all the videos posted by a user, you need to search for: [source:USER_ID]. The ID can be retrieved from the page's source code, but I made a bookmarklet that gives you the URL of a feed which contains all the videos posted by a user, sorted by date.


GVideo Author Feed


How to add the bookmarklet?

1. Make sure the link toolbar is visible in your browser. You can enable it if you go to the View menu in your browser, click on Toolbars and check:
* Bookmarks Toolbar in Firefox
* Personal Bar in Opera
* Links in Internet Explorer

2. For Firefox and Opera, drag and drop the blue box above to the toolbar. For Internet Explorer, right-click on the blue box, select "Add to Favorites", ignore the security warning and choose "Links" from the list of folders.

A good example of interesting Google Video channel is "Google Tech Talks", that shows presentations on different topics from Googleplex. If you go to this tech talk and use the bookmarklet, you'll obtain a feed for all the tech talks uploaded by Google. You can subscribe to the feed using any feed reader, but Google Reader is a good choice because it lets you play videos without opening a new page.

13 comments:

  1. I am obtaining this feed long since for the iGoogle page. But instead of using 'uploaded by Google' I used the key word 'Google endEDU'. Indeed the feeds provided for Video search and News search have great usability and I think has reasons to extend to other services aswell!

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  2. There are other ways to obtain that feed (for example, search for [type:google engEDU]). But this small trick should work for any author.

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  3. You can see the image of my iG page with this content at Picasa Web

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  4. You can also search for "Google Tech Talks". These videos have the nice property that their descriptions contain patterns. But there other channels that don't have this property.

    * Videos for web designers
    * Classic movies
    * History documentaries from Discovery Channel (copyright breach?!)

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  5. Thanks for this great button. I did some modifications on your code to support YouTube as well (Hope you don't mind). Subscribe to Video RSS. The modified code shows rss page instead of a dialog for copying the rss URI.

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  6. You're right. I replaced the prompt with a redirect to the feed.

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  7. really thanks for that hint "how to discover my identity" :))

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  8. Feel of having a profile online is what gvideo has missed to give its users.

    Is it not a kind of psychological thing that G missed.

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  9. and if you search for source:author-id( like source:006183997411625089175) then it will list all video posted by that author.

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  10. how do you know the username or account name of the person who uploads the videos on google video?

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  11. It doesn't work. At all. I can click at it all I want. Even if I disable NoScript, it doesn't enter anything in the search line, it doesn't open a new tab or window, it does NOTHING.
    I tried it with Firefox 3.6 and Internet Explorer 6.0. No luck.

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  12. Google Video has changed a lot since 2007, so I'm not surprised that it no longer works.

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  13. It also has changed a lot since 2009, it seems, because it still worked then.
    Well, that's... not particularly groovy, especially because I wasn't able to find a working thing yet.

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