Saturday, February 24, 2007

Multi-link comment from Google Video

I am trying to find a way to improve access to streaming videos. Yesterday, I showed that I could create two links in a single comment. That demonstrated the potential to create an index or table of contents for a video in a comment. So here, I test a longer list of annotated time codes and whether it is possible to include special characters.

Results at Google Video: The Google Video comment tool accepted both the longer list and the copyright symbol in my comment. The links that the tool added automatically work very nicely. The video jumps quickly to each of the time-code anchors. Looks like we have a way to develop table of content tools for videos at Google.

Transferring from Google Video to Blogger: Now, can I resolve the complications that I encountered yesterday when I tried to move the links from Google Video to this blog? I copied the text from the Google Video comment and pasted it directly into the "Compose" editor of Blogger. Then I switched immediately to the "Edit Html" tab and inspected the links. The first three links all contained only ampersands between the end of the docid number and before the #. The last url contained the & code instead. Since Google Video does not require/expect the ampersand, I removed all of them in the html editor.
This comment tests multiple links and embedded special characters:
2:03 ReadOnly vs. ReadWrite cultures
4:30 Sousa's concern for loss justified
5:10 Free labor movement
1:00 © War on RW- How to resist?
Analysis: Apparently, the Blogger editor was able to identify the need to url-encode the last of the four links but did not make the substitution for the other three cases. So when I saved the text in yesterday's experiment, the processor got to the ampersands and expected to find one of the standard codes for a special character. Since the Google Video time code is not a standard code, the processor truncated the url. So the url still links to the correct video but starts at the beginning rather than jumping to the desired location. Google Video tolerates the ampersand in the terminal url so it still worked.

Note that it retained the copyright symbol even in the "Edit Html" view.

2 comments:

SC Spaeth said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
SC Spaeth said...

The links to specific time-codes in the lessig video now go to spots in a World of Warcraft video. It seems as if Google is modifying their tools on the fly (as we should expect for this type of development) so we need to go back and make adjustments to account for the changes.