January 22nd, 2007
Using YouTube to Determine Popularity
By Chief Gadgeteer, Gizmos for Geeks
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews.
While at CES, you couldn’t help overhear or be part of conversations discussing the coolest or most popular gadgets and/or announcements. So I wondered if there was a more structured way to determine what indeed were the most popular products/topics, and I hit upon using YouTube to give me at least a rough idea. YouTube also ranks items based on a few factors: View Count, Rating and Relevance, although I have no idea how YouTube calculates relevance based on your search.
YouTube’rs do a decent job of describing their content, as the first frame of most videos is hardly appealing enough for viewers to want to watch them, and I made this assumption when I used the search term of ‘CES 2007′. What I felt was interesting was that there was significant overlap in the top items when ranked by View Count, Rating and Relevance.
While I realize this is purely non-scientific and probably only applicable for certain subjects, it seemed to fit this one nicely. What other types of things would you imagine this could be used for? What could we call it? The ‘YouTube Thermometer’ perhaps?
Source: Gizmos for Geeks.
steveking says:
YouTubeRobot.com today announces YouTube Robot 2.0, a tool that enables you to download video from YouTube.com onto your PC, convert it to various formats to watch it when you are on the road on mobile devices like mobile phone, iPod, iPhone, Pocket PC, PSP, or Zune.
YouTube Robot allows you to search for videos using keywords or browse video by category, author, channel, language, tags, etc. When you find something noteworthy, you can preview the video right in YouTube Robot and then download it onto the hard disk drive. The speed, at which you will be downloading, is very high: up to 5 times faster than other software when you download a single file and up to 4 times faster when you download multiple files at a time.
Manual download is not the only option with YouTube Robot. You may as well schedule the download and conversion tasks to be executed automatically, even when you are not around. Downloading is followed by conversion to the format of your choice and uploading videos to a mobile device (if needed). For example, you can plug in iPod, select the video, go to bed, and when you wake up next morning, your iPod will be ready to play new YouTube videos.
Product page: ww w.youtuberobot.com
Direct download link: w ww.youtuberobot.com/download/utuberobot.exe
web-site: w ww.youtuberobot.com
E-mail: support@youtuberobot.com
July 6th, 2008 at 9:00 pm