Why Embed Code Matters
John Mahoney over at The Digital Edge has a great post about politicians and how blog savvy they are (actually how blog savvy their campaigns are). He points out that all of them have video on their websites, but only a few have videos with embed code on them.
Why is that important? Because embed code is what makes video go viral. I didn't need to visit Obama's website to get this video. I got it from John's blog. Wake up Hillary.
Yes, and how many of them are using Facebook "Share" tags or Blogger's "Blog This" buttons? The sharing of code is one way of help things go viral -- in this case campaign message in video format -- but I'd like to extend your argument to encompass all tools for sharing, be it email, social networks, news aggregation and voting sites, or autonomous blogs.
(PS: I left this same comment on John's blog. I great tool would be something that allowed me to only submit this comment once!)
Posted by: Nate Westheimer | February 03, 2007 at 04:00 PM
I totally agree. See my blog post "YouTube on the campaign trail"
Posted by: steve | February 03, 2007 at 05:33 PM
I came to the same conclusion about Hillary's use of video. The candidates who understand how to use the web the best are Obama, Edwards, and Brownback. Surprisingly, Kucinich doesn't seem to get it, and he is one of the candidates who needs the web the most.
Brightcove's video quality is far superior to YouTube, so I can see why some candidates went that direction, although YouTube has the audience.
Posted by: Ed Kohler | February 04, 2007 at 02:43 AM
"Continuing our conversation." This Obama guy gets it.
Posted by: Mike Abundo | February 04, 2007 at 08:45 AM
Your blog today is an ad for the new version of Flash, which I will not download out of spite.
Posted by: jackson | February 05, 2007 at 12:10 PM
Wow that post looks horible in Google Reader.
Posted by: Dustin | February 08, 2007 at 08:38 PM
The ability of content to go viral is one of the most important goals of online marketing. Hopefully, the people handling politicians’ campaigns will figure that out soon and content will be readily available. In the meantime, TheNewsRoom.com allows webmasters to find relevant content and embed it into their sites – and most importantly, for that content to be mashed elsewhere. The more people mashing, the easier it’ll be to spread info.
Posted by: NicoleS | February 09, 2007 at 03:36 PM
Hi Fred, I'm sorry I took so long to understand what you're getting at here... I associated your word "embed" with the actual EMBED tag in the markup.
Are you saying "Campaign sites with videos should include sample markup so that other sites can easily copy/paste it into their own pages, to display the original site's hosted video in many new sites' web pages?"
If so, then I'd urge caution on copying markup from other sites willy-nilly... you don't want to host someone else's interactive content on your own site unless you know and trust that code's intentions.
(We first saw problems five years ago with discussion forums which allowed SWF signatures, which could then communicate with the browser within the host's domain... the discussion board accepted code from strangers, and cookies were swiped.)
There have been many security improvements in the Adobe Flash Player over the past few years, but you still need to enable them, and if you copy HTML from other sites then those safeguards may not be used.
I'd like to think on this some more, but at minimum it may be good to check, when copying someone's HTML, that both OBJECT and EMBED tags have "allowScriptAccess=never" within them. This would prevent their Flash file from talking to your page's JavaScript. The first link below is a technote about this tag; the second link is a longer reference on Adobe Flash Player security.
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=50c1cf38
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/fplayer8_security_print.html
jd/adobe
Posted by: John Dowdell | February 11, 2007 at 12:20 PM