From the category archives:

Movies/Videos

In a previous post I covered how to link to a specific timestamp in a YouTube video. The short version looks like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjDw3azfZWI#t=31m08s

The “#t=31m08s” takes you to 31 minutes and 8 seconds in a video. I just found out that you can also start embedded videos at a certain timestamp.

To do it on an embedded video, use the “start” parameter. Note that start takes seconds as a parameter, not minutes and seconds. For example, to start an embedded video 31 minutes and 8 seconds into a video, 31*60+8 = 1868 seconds, so you would use this code:

<object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/PjDw3azfZWI&hl=en_US&start=1868"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/PjDw3azfZWI&hl=en_US&start=1868" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" width="640" height="385"></embed></object>

and it would look like this:

That’s all there is to it. :)

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This year we’ve been making and posting videos on an official webmaster video channel, and earlier today we hit our one millionth video view. Making these little movies has been a ton of fun and we’ve covered dozens of topics for site owners.

We decided to celebrate in a couple ways. First, we added captions to all 150+ videos (over 11 hours of information). That’s important because for movies with captions, you can translate the captions into different languages. Now if you want to watch my videos but see the captions in Portuguese or German or Turkish, you can!

The second way we celebrated is with a fun video. As you may know, I recently lost a bet with my team and they shaved off all my hair. Click to see the 30 second explanation of why I’m bald. But you may not know that my team recorded a video as I lost my hair. Now you can watch and laugh along too:

I hope that you enjoy the video! You may want to subscribe to the webmaster video channel to see more free webmaster videos in the future.

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One of my goals for 2009 is that when I do a substantial presentation at a conference, I want to recreate that presentation for the people who couldn’t make it to the conference. As part of that effort, we just did a post on the official webmaster blog with the video and slides from when I spoke at PubCon Las Vegas late last year.

Through the magic of embedding, you can watch the talk here too if you want:

and you can view my slides online or follow along below:

This video runs a bit longer than the in-person presentation did (a little over twenty minutes); if you decide to watch it, feel free to leave it going in the background while you get other things done. You can also get access to this video in high-quality — just click on the triangle near the bottom-right of the screen, and look for the “HQ” option.

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If you need a search fix, we just posted a video on the official Google webmaster blog. Essentially I recreated a talk I did for Web 2.0 and posted it online. You can also watch it below if you’d prefer:

and you can also view the presentation slides I used or watch the slides directly below:

I’m making a resolution this year that when I do a substantial (not just Q&A) presentation at a conference, I’ll try to recreate a version of the talk later on for the people who couldn’t attend the conference. I’d like Google to communicate more and more this year, so this is another step to help with that.

Hat-tip to Jonah Stein; he was one of the first people to highlight the phrase virtual blight and how that blight makes the net a worse place.

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Another day, another video interview. This one was with Greg Jarboe at SES San Jose. You can watch it on the Search Engine Strategies channel on YouTube, or I’ll embed it below:



Some of the things we discussed:
- a quick story about interviewing at Google in 1999
- the opportunities of cell phones and mobile platforms (3 billion of them!) vs. personal computers, as well as hyperlocal information.
- cloud storage servers and storing your data in the cloud
- how it’s cheaper than ever to start an internet business, with a choice of platforms ranging from Facebook, iPhone, Android, OpenSocial, to Google App Engine.

In my last video I got rickroll’ed in the background. This time the background was psychedelic, because the main conference stage was behind us.

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