Google often tests variations on the search engine results page locally before releasing them to all users. Today I noticed one such variation with ’searches relating to’ appearing at the bottom of the search engine results page.
Others have reported seeing this earlier in the year, but it’s the first time I’ve come across it as a UK user.
The results are not the search suggestions that Google provides on the likes of the browser toolbar, but contain some tangents, e.g. ‘dogpile’ under a ’search engines’ query.
I’m not signed into Google, which was my first thought, but clearly Google has records of users searching for ‘x’ who then search for ‘y’, possibly due to failing to click on a search result. This would explain why the results are found at the bottom of the page and highlight yet again the importance of being on the first page of results.
Great reminder of some of the video gems to be found in user generated content, starring a highly creative street performer in Germany using a combination of skis and bottles filled to various levels…
Mashing is heading for the mainstream. YouTube are set to rollout their Adobe-powered remixer, Photobucket released more Adobe-powered functionality in early 2007, not forgetting of course Jumpcut’s purchase by Yahoo last year and a number of start-ups, including Eyespot and MuveeMix.
Even with MySpace’s (FIM) purchase of Photobucket earlier this year, they still also invested in the more advanced functionality offered by Flektor, no doubt wanting their own in-house software to complement the existing Adobe deal with Photobucket.
Despite all the activity from the big players in the market, start-ups are still emerging and innovating. Among the new entrants are JamGlue (tutorial here) with an intuitive music mashing tool, similar to SpliceMusic mashing tool. It’s a familiar mixing interface, with layered timelines and drag and drop editing points, plus some handy right-mouse options in Flash to repeat and cut layers.
The community is slowly establishing itself with a reasonable level of user generated clips and samples up there to embed into your remix, plus evidence of rights management.
It’s fun and relatively easy to use, albeit sometimes frustratingly slow to load, and offers more advanced music-mashing functionality than the more video focused offerings above, suggesting it may have enough of a niche to survive.
Either way, mashing is heading for the mainstream.
Interesting to see that BBC News is trialing the use of a Flash player which will allow users to embed video clips into their web pages (T&Cs plus code for the video below here). So, in the spirit of a trial, let’s give it a go using a report on the current UK alternatives to the ‘i-Hype-Phone’.
Easy to do for anyone familiar with embedding code and works fine for me in Wordpress and on MySpace. Work OK for you?
Another oh-so-handy reference list from the recently list obsessed Mashable, profiling the increasing ‘How to’ video niche.
While YouTube and its many clones try to be all things to all people, these How To sites are proving that there is a market for niche video communities. The best of these sites are more focused, easier to navigate and are proving themselves able to co-exist alongside the traffic phenomenon that is YouTube.
This trend carries over to the series of niche social networks that cater to every topic from the environment, to pets, to writing and everything in between, some more successfully than others, alongside the traffic giants of MySpace, Facebook and Bebo.
Let me be (ahem, among) the first to categorise this sector: social nicheworking. Let’s see how well that phrase catches on…
