I discovered this week that a bunch of videos I had embedded in past posts had “broken.” They were all from Google Video. Some of them were ones I had posted to it.
Many times the videos I embed in my posts are crucial to their meaning, so I was wondering what I was going to do with the posts that used them. I wanted to be able to work on them without my incomplete edits going “public,” so I took down the following posts for a few days:
The death of certainty and the birth of computer science
I’m not a scientist, but I play one on TV…
“Reminiscing” series, parts 1, 2, 3, and 4
Saying goodbye to someone I never knew
I have revamped them, getting rid of videos that have disappeared, and dead links. I found many of the same videos I had used before, posted somewhere else. I also revised some of the text. I’ve re-posted the above articles.
I frequent YouTube, and I remember seeing an invitation on there a while back to merge my Google videos into my YouTube account. YouTube didn’t mention a thing about Google Video going away. From what I remember, I didn’t take their offer, because I had assumed YouTube limited the length of most videos to 10 minutes. The whole reason I had posted videos to Google’s service was they didn’t have a length limit.
Doing some research on this, I discovered that Google had totally shut down its video service this past May, and had been disallowing anyone from posting new videos to it since a few years ago. There is still a “Google Video” service now, but it functions like a normal Google search. It just isolates its results to other video sites, like its blog search.
As I was working on my posts, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the videos I had posted to Google’s service had in fact been merged into my YouTube account, as private videos, and none of them had been truncated. I don’t recall being notified of this. Even so, I was thankful to see they were still around. One less thing I had to think about.
There were a couple videos I would’ve really liked to have “recovered” in all this, but I can’t find them anywhere. One is Alan Kay’s keynote address to the ’97 OOPSLA conference. Fortunately, I had transcribed everything I had wanted to get out of it a few years ago into my post called “Redefining computing, Part 2.” Still, I’d like to include the video for this in my post, as there are probably concepts in it that I missed at the time. I’ll keep a lookout for it. The other is Alan’s presentation to a group of teachers called “What is Squeak?” I haven’t been able to find that one, either.
