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 is still a video would’ve liked to have “recovered” in all this, but I can’t find it anywhere. It’s Alan Kay’s presentation to a group of teachers called “What is Squeak?”
Tekkie 