Thankee TechCrunch for the pointer to the new YouTube Music Discover Project which lets you use YouTube to explore music videos and possibly pick up on some new artists.
Enter a music act on the front page. (If you can’t think of one YouTube will give you some suggestions.) YouTube will take your artist and make you a list of videos by that artist sprinkled with some hopefully-related artists.
I did a search for Flogging Molly. YouTube gave me the screen you see here, with a tab that has a list of Flogging Molly videos available on YouTube. There’s also a mixtape tab that has the video playlist that you see on the left side of the screen. (The videos start playing automatically when you get the results page.) Then there’s a related artists tab that opens up to other lists of songs. In the case of Flogging Molly, YouTube recommended ten related artists, only two of which I had heard of.
The playlists that the Music Discover Project generates can be saved or opened, or songs removed on the fly. The songs in the related artist tab can be dropped into the playlist as well.
The site took most of the artists I threw at it, though sometimes there were only a few videos available and no related artists. Sometimes I was a bit surprised by the related artists it turned up and sometimes it seemed spot-on (do a search for Michael Hedges.)
Just two complaints: if you want to do a new search, it looks like you have to reload the page to get rid of your old search. And when you’re looking at music videos in that fairly small area on the results screen, the Google ads are about three times as annoying. Good thing you can minimize ‘em…
The Library of Congress has announced that it has a new channel on YouTube. Though the films are going to be available at LOC.gov and American Memory, you definitely want to check out the official YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/LibraryOfCongress.
At the moment the LOC has 74 videos available, divided into several playlists including videos from the 2008 National Book Festival and “Kluge Center Series: Prominent Scholars on Current Topics”. But I suspect the playlists that’ll hold your attention are the 21 early (1904) films from Westinghouse and the 20 early (1890s) films from Edison Companies. The Westinghouse videos range from a minute to six minutes long and tend to feature industrial machinery in action. The Edison Films are much shorter (between 30 seconds and a minute) and feature everything from Native American dancing to boxing cats to a strongman named Sandow doing a 56-second posedown.
If you’ve used YouTube at all, none of this is going to look unfamiliar to you. The videos are organized into easy-to-use playlists and a lot of them have gotten serious numbers of views even though the announcement for the new site was only ten days ago. Unfortunately, while this collection has reach through YouTube it doesn’t have much in the line of community — every video I looked at had comments disabled. I was very much hoping that comments would be used like they are for Flickr Commons — folks with historical information supplying background that the LOC doesn’t have in its description (or perhaps doesn’t even know about.)
The Library of Congress is also using brief bumpers before and after featured video. This is okay — they’re not really long enough to be intrusive or annoying — but they can give a surreal quality to what you’re watching, especially as the old videos are silent. “From the Library of Congress in Washington DC.” (30 seconds of boxing cats in a silent movie ensues.) “This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.”
Worth a look, but I am missing the comments.
This blog post from Matt Cutts is a couple weeks old but I still wanted to mention it here so I’d have it filed away in my brain. YouTube has a way for you to link to the exact minute
and second within a video by messing with the URL a bit.
Take for example the YouTube video of Beaker from the Muppets singing Habanera: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDFgtFXfnv0 . Of course you can view and enjoy every second of that video, but if you want to go to a particular minute/second just add to the URL in this format:
#t=xxmxxs
Where xx is a minute and second number, of course.
So if you wanted to capture Beaker just as he’s about to hit his massive high note, your URL would look like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDFgtFXfnv0#t=01m09s
There are a couple of disadvantages to getting to YouTube videos this way. If you’re looking at a fairly large video getting to a spot later on might take a few seconds to load. And I noticed when I wanted to go backwards on the Beaker video that too took a little while for YouTube to load up.
On the other hand, I can see this as a potentially really fun browser gadget. Have an extension that randomly generates an anchor tag between 10 and 30 seconds and applies it to all the videos that you browse through YouTube. It would be like flipping through TV channels.
