video | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Blogging 363: Embed Facebook Videos in WordPress

Here’s another advantage of self-hosted WordPress over WordPress.com, particularly as Facebook has extended the functionality of its video player.

For each video you have uploaded to Facebook, you have an option to embed it in your blog.

When you click Embed this Video, you see a window pop up like this:

And then, when you’ve copied the code, you can just paste it into your WordPress blog post in the HTML editor,

so it looks like this:

Which is what I did below, and you see the results. I had not indicated any privacy protections on this video, so you should be able to see it. Please let me know if you can’t.

This is an Aase family classic, in which I discuss the ins and outs of our birdhouse project with my firstborn son. Jake demonstrates exceptional bravery in completing the conversation even after receiving a grave injury.

Christmas, The Little Mermaid and the Power of the Flip

SMUG has been observing our Christmas recess (although newer SMUGgles are certainly welcome to explore some of the existing curriculum) as the Chancellor’s family has been celebrating our Savior’s birth. The regular curriculum development will resume Monday.

We’re about to begin Day 3 of our Christmas gatherings, with Lisa’s side of the family joining us here at Old Main. Last night we were at my parents’ place with the Aase clan, and on Christmas night we had our six kids, our “adopted” son Jeff, and our granddaughter, Evelyn here to open presents. Here’s a picture of Evie and her Grandma Aase:

Evie’s Dad, my son-in-law Kyle, deserves a special mention, for many reasons. We’re glad he’s been brought into Rachel’s life (and therefore ours), and that he will be starting seminary classes next month. For SMUGgles, this relationship between Kyle and Rachel is an illustration of the power of social media, as they met through Facebook. So in some sense, Evelyn is here today because Mark Zuckerberg decided to start a social networking platform.

Kyle inadvertently demonstrated the power of another tool in social media, the Flip video camera, on Christmas night as Rachel unwrapped a gift — a Little Mermaid songbook — from her sister, Rebekah:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqO2rBlCepM]

As I’ve said previously, one of the main benefits of the Flip is that you can always have it with you, and so therefore you are much less likely to miss capturing that priceless memory.

This is Exhibit A!

This video may yet make its way to Facebook, where Kyle can be tagged so that all of his 926 friends can see his musical expression. Somehow, I think Kyle’s brothers and sisters-in-law will take care of that. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve uploaded some video highlights of their youth directly to Facebook so their friends can see them. And because Facebook now defaults to sharing video with everyone (although it lets you limit who sees them), I think you SMUGgles can see them too (and I’d be interested in having you confirm in the comments below.)

Here’s one of my son, Jake, in which he shows immense bravery (at least for a few seconds) after suffering a foot injury, and another in which he displays an interest in botany.

Here’s Ruthie giving her newborn brother Joe “a swoppy kiss.”

And here are Ruthie and Bekah (but mostly Bekah) singing one Sunday morning before church.

It’s time now to go make and capture some more memories, as the Wacholz clan is about to arrive.

Merry Christmas to all of you from all of us!

Yammer 202: Video Yammercasting

As I learned by trial and error, and as Keith from the Yammer team confirmed in the comments on Yammer 201, there is a limit on the file sizes you can share through Yammer: 20 MB. I had tried a 35 MB file, but that was rejected as being too large.

But there doesn’t seem to be a file type limitation. I did a 1:25 video yammercast (17 MB) yesterday and it worked well. I interviewed myself via Flip and then sent the QuickTime file via Yammer to one of my work teams.

It did take them a couple of minutes to download, so when you yammercast a larger file you may want to be sure to include some significant text in the Yammer post, so that in case the recipients don’t download the video they would still get the main point of the communication.

Keith included a helpful link to the Yammer blog that gives more detail on the file-sharing feature.

Yammer has built a lean, efficient platform for sharing. I like how photos that can be suitably displayed through the Yammer interface are embedded in posts, but larger, more complicated audio and video files can just be downloaded to be seen or heard in QuickTime or Windows Media Player.

If you want to share video with the world, YouTube is your great choice. But if you want to confine the distribution to your company, or to a work group within your company, try a yammercast.

Facebook 109: Uploading a Video to Facebook

Facebook‘s video player isn’t as popular as its photo sharing application (which is the most popular photo sharing site in the world), but it’s a great way to share video with a defined group of people.

In YouTube, you have the choice of sharing either with the whole world or with a group of up to 25 of your YouTube friends. There’s really no intermediate option.

In Facebook you can make the sharing much more widespread without sharing with the world. And you can “tag” your video with the names of your Facebook friends who are featured, which makes it likely that they and their friends will see it, because it will show up in their news feeds.

It’s also possible to share videos just with members of a group, whether its members are all friends of yours or not. So, for example, I uploaded some videos of my daughter’s volleyball team to a group I had created as an on-line “booster” club.

Here’s a video screencast for Facebook 109, demonstrating how you can upload a video to your personal Facebook profile:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PW1taSN0MjM]

Advantages of Facebook for Video Sharing:

If Facebook users see and like your video, it’s really easy for them to share it with their Facebook friends (assuming you’ve allowed either Everyone or Friends of Friends to have access).
As mentioned above (and as demonstrated in the screencast) you can limit who can see your video much more precisely. For example, you could customize the sharing so only friends can see, except those who are on your “Work Friends” list.
Given Facebook’s popularity for photo sharing, it’s nice to be able to share both photos and videos on the same site.
Users can comment on your videos, but they use their real names instead of relatively anonymous YouTube user IDs. This makes it more likely those commenting will behave themselves, and will reduce the potential crudity factor.
The quality of the player is really good, especially with the new H.264 encoding.

Some disadvantages of using Facebook instead of YouTube:

You can’t embed the Facebook player in your blog. People can only see the video on Facebook. This makes your content less portable. For instance, the screencast above was uploaded to my YouTube account and then embedded here. You could embed it in your blog if you’d like.
You don’t get traffic figures on how many people are watching your video.
People who aren’t in Facebook can’t see your video (at least I think not). If you don’t have a Facebook profile, please click this link and let us know in the comments whether you could see the video I uploaded during the tutorial. So if you want to share a video and don’t particularly care who sees it (and want it to be seen as widely as possible), YouTube is your best choice.

It isn’t, of course, an either/or proposition. You can upload videos to both YouTube and Facebook, but that’s double the work, double the upload time. An alternative is to upload your videos to YouTube, and then post the link to your video on your Facebook profile, page or group.

Assignments:

Create a video file. If you need help in how to create a video file, check out these posts about the Flip.
Upload the file to the SMUG group in Facebook.
Share the video link with some Facebook friends (as you saw in the screencast), or post it to your Facebook profile.