GlitchNYC

I just noticed that Digg now allows you to specify thumbnails that will appear next to Digg stories pointing to videos hosted on your site!

Digg already has cool video thumbnails at the right for youtube videos, but I use blip.tv to host my videos, and I’d actually rather have my videos dugg right from FeltUpTv.com. To make it easy to specify thumbnails for each video, I’ve hacked together a quick wordpress plugin so I can do it right from the “write post” page.

This means that anyone running a videoblog on wordpress can install this plugin, get in touch with Digg, and start seeing thumbnails of their videos show up next to their Digg stories. I’ve just submitted Felt Up TV, so hopefully Digg will include thumbnails from there soon!

This is my first publicly released wordpress plugin, so please let me know in the comments if you find any bugs or need help with it, and I’ll do my best to get it working for you.

Download the Digg Video Thumbnails wordpress plugin.

Remember, you have to let Digg know that you’re including thumbnails before they’ll start picking them up!

Installation procedure:

• Download the Digg Video Thumbnails plugin.
• Unzip the file and upload the plugin to ~/wp-content/plugins/
• Activate the plugin on the plugins page
• Specify a thumbnail for each video by editing the posts. You’ll see a Video Thumbnail URL field where you can put the URL.
• Get in touch with Digg and let them know you’re providing thumbnails using the “link element” method.

Continuing my round-up of the speakers at last night’s Video 2.0 meetup, Cruxy presented second, and were touted as the first ever official launch at a one of our events.

Cruxy allows people to upload any type of digital content and then offer it for sale. The guys up on stage were wonderfully anti-DRM and very hip to Creative Commons (literally wearing the t-shirt!). Even though this was the Video meetup, they were also quick to show that although you could sell your indie movie using their service, you could also sell PDFs, 3dsmax files, mp3s, and even group content items into “albums”.

Working to be completely straight with their content producers, they’re incredibly transparent about their fee structure. When you offer an item for sale, you enter your price, and they tell you how much goes to them, and how much goes to paypal right there on the page. My first thought was “CD baby, but for downloads”, and I’ve been waiting for years for this to show up! I’m glad to see if finally coming to fruition, especially from a bunch of guys who are independent themselves and really “get it.” I got a chance to talk with Nathan a bit afterwards, and they seemed much more excited about helping empower content creators than about making a buck.

They went on to show all the ways that they’re giving people to embed their sales engine, so that you don’t have to point people to your cruxy page, you can simply use your existing website, blog, or myspace page to generate sales. In the same way that you can embed youtube videos on your blog, you can drop in their sales widget and people can preview and buy your content right there using a credit card or paypal account. Bands can even use their tool to create an replacement music player for myspace that allows sales.

It looks extremely cool, and they’ve certainly got a clear revenue model. The final piece of their puzzle is that promoters (including podcasters, which made my ears perk up) will also be able to establish relationships with content creators and potentially get a cut of any sale through they system that they generate.

As for my opinion, well, let’s just say I’ll be recommending Cruxy to many of the bands we work with on The Alternative Music Show. If you’re an artist struggling with how to sell your content online, you owe it to yourself to check Cruxy out.

Last night I attended the 2nd Video 2.0 Meetup here in NYC. The audience was a mix of startup companies in online video and content producers. Among the notables that I recognized in the audience were Andrew and Joanne from RocketBoom and some of the folks from Blip.tv .

The event is held in a screening room for the Tribeca film festival where greats like Scorsese routinely hold private screenings (there were even rumors of Scorsese himself breezing in and out of the projection room, but that may have been a joke.)

I took some pretty decent notes on each of the presenters, and surprisingly, each of these companies had something new and different to bring to the table. In my next few posts, I’ll summarize each of the services and then talk a bit about why I found them interesting.

Motionbox

Motionbox opened the night, and were quick to differentiate themselves from other video hosting sites by working to solve the “unproduced content problem.” With photos on flickr, you can easily scan through thumbnails of your friend’s vacation, and zoom in on the few great pictures, but with video, you’re stuck watching the whole thing.

Motionbox allows you to highlight sections of videos, and even creates permalinks to those selected clips. It’s quite cool, and they hinted that “more cool stuff was coming in the fall.

They’re already partnered with NBC5 in Chicago, and if you go to nbc5.com you can see where “viewers” are submitting content, and that can be integrated into the broadcast news.

Once questions began, we got the nitty-gritty on their back end. Their service is programmed in ruby on rails, and their custom player is written in FLEX on top of Flash 9. They’ve got about 20 folks on their team and have outside investors, although they didn’t specify who or how much. I believe they mentioned that they were hiring, but I could be mistaken. It can’t hurt to shoot them a resume if you’re interested.

As far as monetization, they’re planning a pro-product as well as ads, and you know that deals like the NBC5 partnership can’t hurt.

My opinion? I was just about to tune out and pass motionbox off as a yaytc (Yet Another Youtube Clone… it sounds like “Yahtzee!” when you say it out loud) when I heard them mention “something cool coming in the fall” a second time while talking about their ability to highlight clips. They started to taking about permissions that you can grant to your file, such as giving different people the permission to highlight and link to clips, or mix and mash it up with others.

Aha! Mix and mash?! Now this is starting to sound cool, and you can understand why they’re hesitant to announce this formally until they’ve got it ready. This is of course just my speculation, but how awesome would it be if I could go on Motionbox and create my own “America’s funniest home videos”, complete with music track? Or create a full on music video using footage other people have uploaded? My ears certainly perked up at the end there, and if they’ve really got this up their sleeves, I don’t think I’ll be the only one excited about it.

There were 4 more presenters, and there’s four more pieces to this round up coming, just as fast as I can type them! Stay tuned!