ALA Videos

[Bill Drew]

I just discovered that it is impossible to add the videos that are on the ALA websites to Ning. None of them are posted to Google or to You Tube. Come on, ALA! Loosen up and make them available to the world!

[Bill Drew]

Sounds good to me. Let me know when it is available.

[Jenny Levine]

I just tested this, and it does indeed work if you click on "share" on the blip.tv site and choose the MySpace code. I'll see if we can display that code as well on the AL Focus site so that users can just grab the code from there.

Thanks, Bill!

[Bill Drew]

Thanks for doing that. The video about 100 years of AL magazine is great!

[Jenny Levine]

I went ahead and started delving into this, and according to some discussion in the Ning forums (http://networkcreators.ning.com/forum/topic/show?id=492224%3ATopic%3A34200&page=11, you can embed blip.tv videos in Ning by copying the code for MySpace videos and pasting it into the "share YouTube/Google videos" box in Ning. I'm off to try this now. If you see a video appear, you know it's working. :)

[Jenny Levine]

Bill, we would love nothing more than to embed our videos everywhere, and I've had trouble doing that here myself. The problem is not with ALA, but either with Ning or with Blip.tv, which is where we park our videos. There is something different about their embed code that works in most blogs (but not all) and in some social networking sites (but not all, and obviously not here).

We've chosen to put the video files themselves on blip.tv (http://alfocus.blip.tv/) because we ran into issues of length and file size on YouTube (they have a 10-minute limit and a 100MB file size limit), among other things. We do have a few videos on YouTube (http://youtube.com/profile?user=AmericanLibraryAssoc), but the quality on them isn't as good because of YouTube's rules.

Now that conference is over and we can all breathe again, we'll be following up with both Ning and blip.tv to see if we can figure out a way to fix this problem. Maybe we can get *them* to loosen up! ;-)