Viddler

For anyone asking themselves, “Who’s that girl with the guitar who was on the front page playing Andy McKee the other day?” I wanted to share yet another really great musical performance (this time with vocals), and give everyone a heads up that by friending Lise (username: Flindis), you’re much more likely to catch wind of future video performances.

If she already sounds this great at 15, I can’t wait to see what more practice and hard work brings… maybe our first Viddler-turned-famous-musician-starlet? I hope so!

The Community Spotlight is for featuring special content by members of our community. Do you have a special video you’d like to share with the rest of the community?

If you would like to suggest a video to be featured in our Community Spotlight, feel free to send me a message or just comment on this post.

Alexknowshtml is the mastermind behind Philly’s coworking movement, manifested in the very cool Indyhall.

Check out this really great tour of the facility, because it’s a pretty amazing video tour of what a great coworking venue is all about. Whether you’re considering joining a local coworking location or you’re starting your own coworking facility and want ideas on how to do it right, this is a really great and very informative tour.

Thanks to Alex for the look around and congrats on the recent Indyhall milestone!

The Community Spotlight is for featuring special content by members of our community. Do you have a special video you’d like to share with the rest of the community?

If you would like to suggest a video to be featured in our Community Spotlight, feel free to send me a message or just comment on this post.

imanto is not only rocking a pretty awesome lookin’ customized player (I love the colors and the player logo), but it seems as if he can do some pretty fun acrobatics as well.

I strongly suggest NOT running to the nearest playground and attempted these flips on your own unless you’ve had some sort of practice or training, please. I know I would totally break my neck attempting these flips. Ton of fun to watch though, so thanks for sharing, Anto!

WARNING: Music for this video contains profanity. If you’re offended by strong language, turn your sound off or check back for tomorrow morning’s Community Spotlight feature instead.

The Community Spotlight is for featuring special content by members of our community. Do you have a special video you’d like to share with the rest of the community?

If you would like to suggest a video to be featured in our Community Spotlight, feel free to send me a message or just comment on this post.

OwenJJStone let off some major steam this past Thursday after the President’s speech on our economic crisis (you can read the text here). This is exactly the kind of emotional, “where’s the money coming from?”, “why aren’t we feeding our destitute population with this 700 billion dollars?” kind of reaction that I was feeling the next day. Like Owen, I don’t necessarily understand how this whole thing would work, but it doesn’t mean I’m not very opinionated on where our economy is headed, and I’m sure a lot of your are too.

If you’d like to, make a response video of your own whether it’s directed at Owen’s thoughts or directly at the President’s speech, and add the video to the comments for this blog entry. I’m interested to hear what Viddler thinks about the state of the current American economy.

The Community Spotlight is for featuring special content by members of our community. Do you have a special video you’d like to share with the rest of the community?

If you would like to suggest a video to be featured in our Community Spotlight, feel free to send me a message or just comment on this post.

This morning we did one of the largest updates to Viddler in recent months.  This update included a new beta of our advertising service (hint: click “Revenue” on Viddler.com), a new way to count statistics, and the first version of Viddler’s support for iTunes subscription and playback.

Since both our advertising service and iTunes support are still getting flipped over and tested, I thought I’d take this opportunity to explain what the new statistics mean.  But rest assured you’ll be hearing more about the other parts of this update soon enough.

You may have noticed that the number of views on your videos seemed to drop off dramatically this morning. This is on purpose, so don’t get nervous.  We’ve decided to begin to count views, impressions, and embeds the way that the industry has already standardized.  We’ve always done this, actually - but now we’re actually displaying them correctly to you.

So what is a view, an impression, or an embed?

An impression is when your Viddler video player is loaded, but the video itself is not “played” or “streamed” at all.  You may notice that your video player does not typically begin playing a video until someone actually clicks play.  So, someone saw your video in your video player, but they didn’t watch it.

A view is when your video has been played for a certain amount of time.  They may not have watched your entire video of you cutting your nose hair in the sink this morning, but they did watch some of it.

An embed is when your video player has been placed on someone else’s Web site other than on Viddler.com.  An embed can be counted as an impression or a play depending if they watched your video or not. 

So where can you find all of this information?  You will see these statistics on the “Your Videos” page and on each video page (as well as in the player itself).  To see the specific Web sites that embedded your video, click on one of your videos and choose the “Embeds” tab below the video.

We hope this makes better sense now and we’re excited to now be on par with the rest of the industry so that you’re statistics are as clear to you as possible.

We’re very excited about the other parts of this release, and we’ll be explaining those here on our blog just as soon as they’re ready. If you have any questions, you can ask them in the comments.

If you’re reading this, then that means our new blog is in place.  We’ve made a few changes to the design, upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress, and made some changes to increase the stability of our blog.

Whenever we experience any downtime on our site, we’ll typically post an update for our community here on the blog.  Our new setup will help keep the blog up and running even if we have some of our critical systems down for repairs, upgrades, or they just feel ill.

Thanks to everyone that works hard on WordPress and thanks to you for subscribing.

Viddler Postgreen is the first of what will be many featured 15second videos, because they perfectly timed a promo for their upcoming groundbreaking (check out their site for the full scoop) and they did some darn enthusiastic digging, all in 1/4 of a minute. Well used time, sirs!

Where’s your 15second update today? Keep ‘em coming!

You can learn more about Post Green from their recent interview here on the Viddler blog.

The Community Spotlight is for featuring special content by members of our community. Do you have a special video you’d like to share with the rest of the community?

If you would like to suggest a video to be featured in our Community Spotlight, feel free to send me a message or just comment on this post.

Evan Sims (friend: evansims) is a game design student at the University of Advancing Technology from “the cornfields of Illinois”. He blogs on his own Weblog about gaming, design, movies, and just about anything else that interests him.

Evan’s player is simple, clean, matches his site nicely, and is the one we’re choosing for this week’s featured customized player. Here is an example video of his family’s new home they are renovating.

Evan is also responsible for something else I’m quite fond of; the Brightkite Location Wordpress plugin. I use it on my blog to keep people up-to-date on where I am. If you use Brightkite, I suggest giving it a whirl.

Thanks Evan for customizing your player so nicely!

Have a favorite Viddler player?: If you would like to suggest a Viddler player to be featured on our blog please send me a message.

Continuing our interview series this week is an interview with Viddler Jennifer DiDonato of Brides Made Fit (friend: bridesmadefit).

Jennifer is a certified personal trainer who has a weekly podcast dedicated to brides all over the world that want to get fit and in shape for their big day. We asked her a few questions about Brides Made Fit.

1. What is Brides Made Fit, and where did the idea come from?

Simply put, Brides Made Fit is a weekly video show dedicated to brides and getting them in shape for their weddings. Each week I present different workout routines, give fitness tips and try and answer questions. The show is supplemental to my own personal training business here in Metro Detroit, Michigan.

The idea for my training business came about 7 months ago, when I got a call from a client who just got engaged. She was so happy about the engagement - then reality set in. She got fitted for her dress and completely fell apart - then, to make matters worse, she started thinking about the honeymoon and fitting into a swimsuit.

After that, I realized that everyone who gets married knows, for one day, all eyes are on them. It was important to look good. I created a company and away I went.

I found that there were a billion trainers out there, but not many that focused on brides. I needed to find something that they weren’t doing. My fiance is a huge fan of Diggnation, TRS, and Wine Library TV and as a content producer himself, he had an idea to make a show to separate myself from others so, I turned to social networking, blogging, and video podcasting (and viddler)!

2. How are you using video with Brides Made Fit?

Video is starting to play a huge part in my business. Since I am a newcomer, I realize that patience is a virtue. In my experience, I’ve found that fitness training is a very personal subject. Before people will hire me or take my advice, they need to trust me. Video has allowed me to make a personal connection with people. They see how I talk, how I look and that makes a difference. So, once a week I produce this show to help anyone and everyone. I am growing my audience to a point where we want people to write in and ask us for free advice. So, if anyone has fitness questions - I’m right here!

Here is an example episode of Brides Made Fit with Jennifer’s sister Nicole as a guest-star.

3. As someone who has lost weight in the past I know it can be tough to stay motivated. What is your best advice for people trying to stick with it?

First, congrats on getting motivated enough to drop the pounds. I know how hard it can be to stay motivated. As I read over your diet blog posts I noticed a few things. Your schedule sounds very similar to my fiance. He works on my video production/graphics/website/marketing, so he is always behind a computer screen. He gets into these ruts where he is so focused on his work that he loses track of time, doesn’t eat, then binges on fast food “cause he’s gotta get back to work”.

Unfortunately, this work ethic takes a toll on the body. You’re basically slowing your metabolism to a crawl. My advice is to understand that it’s a mental thing. When you break down and get fast food, are you doing it because you need to eat or are you doing it as a “reward” for all the hard work you’ve been doing?

Three quick tips:

1. Don’t eat healthy foods you don’t like. You’re only going to resent yourself eating poorly, that’s when you get the yo-yo effect. Find healthy foods you like and stick with ‘em.

2. Make smart(er) choices. If fast food is a sheer convenience/time issue and you have to eat it - make smart choices at the drive thru. A grilled chicken & small chili at Wendy’s is damn good. It makes you feel full and is much healthier than high fat burgers and empty calorie fries.

3. Metabolism is king. Think about it. You may workout for an hour a day, 5 days a week. Sounds great, right? Well, that’s still only 5 hours a week. What about the other 163 hours? You need your body working for you during those other 163 hours and that’s why you need to keep your metabolism running hot. There are tons of ways to do this and I can’t go over all of them here, but the main way is to eat small meals, 5 times a day…and not fast food. Nutrient rich foods, proteins, complex carbs and so on. Also, build muscle. Cardio is great for killing calories, but muscle does it for you while you sleep. So, concentrate on resistance training first.

4. What tools do you use to create your videos?

The tools I use to create my videos change depending on location. Right now, on set, we use a Panasonic AG-DVX100B with Shure wireless mics, and a Smith-Victor 1000w lighting set. When we’re on the road we just use a Canon 7.1 pixel digital camera that takes video! We edit in Adobe Premier Pro CS3 and export to h.264 mp4’s using Quicktime Pro (Thanks to the Chris Mott forum post on compression.)

5. Why is your sister so much taller than you?

She is older than me. - I’m a whole 4′10″ and she’s 5′3″.

Thanks to Jennifer for taking the time to do this interview. We here at Viddler can all take her advice to heart when it comes to our health, being geeks and all.

Whether you’re a bride-to-be or just want to shed a few pounds; check out Brides Made Fit.

Do you have an interesting story to tell? If you would like to suggest a Viddler to be interviewed, or maybe you’d like to be interviewed yourself, please send me a message.

You may have noticed that we now have site sponsor ads showing up all over Viddler.com. We’re really excited about these new ads for a number of reasons, the first of which is that it gives us an opportunity to help our friends spread the word about their products and services.

Know How Cafe, the new startup by Roxanne Darling (friend: roxanne) and Shane Robinson (friend: ShaneRobinson) of Beach Walks with Rox (subscribe: beachwalks) and Barefeet Studios, is one of this week’s site sponsors and we couldn’t be more excited about their service.

Both Roxanne and Shane have a collective experience in social media that incredibly impressive. They’ve helped countless clients leverage the power of the social web to bring their products and services to market. And now they’re offering this service to you through Know How Cafe.

Here is Roxanne explaining the service through a really great video ad:

It means a lot to us that Know How Cafe sponsored Viddler for the week. They even created the “viddler” promo code so that all of our community members have the chance to get the most out of their new service with a lifetime discount. Wow.

If you’re a professional looking to learn more about how to use social media with your next project; I’d strongly suggest you begin by standing on the shoulders of those that have done it before.

Mahalo to Know How Cafe.

Want to become a Viddler sponsor? If you would like to sponsor Viddler for a week drop by our advertising page to see what is available.