[Updated Apr 6th] Video may have killed the radio star, but will SplashCast kill the video star? Or at least broadcast TV? SplashCast – who have Marshall Kirkpatrick of TechCrunch as Director of Content – offer a brilliant way to collect a number of visual elements and present them as a slideshow embedded into a blog or MySpace page, or even into widgetized portals such as Pageflakes.
The difference is that each “slide” can be a document or an image you upload, or the video or images from YouTube or Flickr feeds. (You can’t have all simultaneously.) You can also apply background music to your SplashCast, or record voiceovers and webcam video.
While this is great in itself, it’d be nice if I could take an RSS feed and pipe it in. For example, here’s a mashup I’m trying to find a “slideshow” app for. Last month, I talked about a mashup feeding Twitter’s public timeline feed into Yahoo Pipes‘ Content Analysis module, and the results of that through Flickr to produce a sort of “life in pictures” for Twitterers. Now, what I’d like to do is have a mashup tool to take that Yahoo Pipes result and get a SplashCast-like result. That way, you get an automatic slideshow of the “Twitter through Flickr” feed.
The other problem is that you can’t eliminate items from the Flickr or YouTube RSS feed. For example, since Sharon mentioned the Alanis cover of Fergie’s “My Humps”, I created an Alanis SplashCast. [Start the player below, and click on the “Channel Guide” graphic.] But it’s full of multiple submissions of the same video. It’s also full of completely irrelevant video items – at least as far as I’m concerned. So it’d be nice if SplashCast let us remove selective feed items. Not to mention splice feeds. [Note: If you use the “search” feature to grab Flickr or YouTube content, you can pick and choose which items to add. But you cannot change the playlist order unless you do multiple searches on the same terms and pick one item each time, in the desired sequence.]
Still, what this means is that if you’re sick of the music videos on TV, you can create your own YouTube playlist, embed the player on your blog, and not take up a lot of screen real estate. And SplashCast hosts it for you. Brilliant. Bye bye MTV? Well, not yet – not until we have full control of the input RSS feeds in SplashCast, but it could be the next step towards a melding of vlogging and the million channels of TV we’ve been promised for about two decades.
Originally posted on April 3, 2007 @ 11:34 am
This is so cool Raj! It makes me wish I was more technically literate, so that I could actually get a YouTube video feed going on my blog. :)
Let me read over your post a few more times. Maybe I can focus my brain and figure it out…
Sharon, just drop me a line and I’ll help you set one up. It’s pretty easy using SplashCast. You can either use the contact form on my personal site or PM at Performancing.
Thank you Raj :) . It’s so sad–David Krug even had to install the Performancing Metrics thing on my blog for me. I love tech, but my mind doesn’t process the intallation part of it. This is why I’m on TypePad. Would SplashCast work on a TypePad blog?
I’ll send you a message–maybe you can give me some simple instructions. Thank you :)
I believe it should work. I can always test it on some of my typepad blogs.
It’s quite annoying to have a YouTube feed starting automatically without me pressing anything. I don’t know if I’m the only one, but I’ve mentioned before that your RSS feed is over a week behind in Bloglines. To get your current stuff I have to click on your header link into a new tab in one of my browser windows, with already 10-20 open tabs. Then I had to find where that noise was coming from – and it was from this post.
You should really look at your Bloglines feed .. Isn’t anybody else noticing this error?
Hi Hart, you’re right. The auto-play was annoying the heck out of me, too. I only just realized that there was a way to turn it manual start and I’ve changed that. Apologies to everyone it annoyed.
As for the bloglines feed, i don’t know. I don’t seem to have any problems in Newsgator, but haven’t tried Bloglines for this site. I’m not sure but I know other sites have a problem in Bloglines. So it might be an issue with them. It has been in the past.
Raj .. not only is that MUCH-O better .. and, there’s lots of neat things on the toolbars of that video box now.