Toluu : Google, the World, and the World Wide Web, Weblogged

Google, the World, and the World Wide Web, Weblogged

Start YouTube Video At Specific TimeYesterday

When embedding a YouTube video, you can add a “start” parameter to define the number of seconds at which the video should start, as Google Operating System explains. Here’s a sample snippet:

This parameter works when embedding but Ionut says it won’t work when linking to a URL at YouTube (though one could create a generic wrapper site for that purpose). Google Video made this possible once, but the feature there is flaky and currently doesn’t seem to work.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Start YouTube Video At Specific Time | Comments]

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CBS Series On YouTube USAOctober 10

YouTube is adding full-length content from the CBS network, Advertising Age reports. For instance, MacGyver and episodes from the original Star Trek are supposed to be part of the mix. Visiting the CBS YouTube channel and clicking through to a video here in Germany, all I get is the increasingly more frequent message “This video is not available in your country.”

CBS content on a Google property is not new, in fact, this is a bit like a move of the content. Now-mostly-meta-search-engine Google Video already had a store with CBS shows like MacGyver in 2006.

[Via Ionut.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: CBS Series On YouTube USA | Comments]

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Google Employee VisionsOctober 9

Google put out a promotional video interviewing a couple of Google employees (update: the video’s new location), like Marissa Mayer and Craig Silverstein. In the first part of the video, people are looking back (mostly at fun things, perhaps the message is that the giant Google dog “just wants to play”). In the second part, they’re contemplating the future. Here are two quotes (edited for clarity where necessary):

<<The grand vision, you know, to think way out there, is ... wouldn’t it be nice to have all the information stored in one place. Whether where you place your house key, to where is your socks to wear in the morning, to where is your, you know, blouse, and what are you going to do on the weekend. All those things that you can find from Google, so that you don’t need to remember them.
– Dora Hsu, Google Director of Partner Solutions Organization >>

<<My colleagues and I at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory this year will be testing an interplanetary protocol to extend the internet to operate in the neighborhood of Mars. ... So by the end of this year we’ll have some confirmation that we’ve got protocols that will really work over interplanetary distances. And 10, 20, 50 years from now, when we have lots of robots out there exploring the solar system – and maybe even people out there �

Associate Email Links With Gmail in Firefox (Natively)October 9

The Google toolbar already provided a feature for this, but you can also do it right in the latest version of Firefox*: associate “mailto” links in web pages with Gmail, so that when you click on e.g. info@blogoscoped.com you’ll be instantly forwarded to create a new message in Google’s email client. Open Tools -> Options -> Applications, and look for the entry titled “mailto”. In the dropdown box, pick Gmail. Note this didn’t work here, but it worked for some of you.

[Thanks Adrian L.!]

*I’m not sure when this was added to Firefox and whether it’s completely new.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Associate Email Links With Gmail in Firefox ( ... | Comments]

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YouTube Comments Audio PreviewOctober 8

YouTube’s comment box now has an Audio Preview button – like on this video – which reads the comment back to you using text-to-speech technology. YouTube’s comments are known for being spontaneous/ flaming/ low-quality, so perhaps the YouTube people read the Xkcd cartoon, as Mrrix32 in the comments points out:

On the other hand, YouTube restricts comments to 500 characters. But let’s see if too much parental care might scare some kids away from using the site. Or, as a real live comment by magneto518 on YouTube put it 51 seconds ago, “wtf.. audio preview?”

[Thanks Mrrix32! Comic by Randall Munroe, CC-licensed.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: YouTube Comments Audio Preview | Comments]

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