Dabble, Google Video Search and Blinx and…

I’ve been looking at lots of video tools this weekend. I’m sure I haven’t made much of a dent in looking at everything out there, but here are some notes on a couple. I’ll try to add more notes as I look at more tools.

Dabble.com
I really like the idea of Dabble.com. (thanks to the Library Instruction WIki for suggesting it) According to the Dabble site, Dabble “tracks more than 600 video hosting companies, and thousands of independent video websites and video bloggers”. Sites like YouTube, blip.tv and LiveVideo. It lets you create playlists of videos and even gives you an RSS feed for each playlist. This could be a nice collection tool to add content to library web pages and feed readers. (I’ve added a test of the playlist feed on the Testing RSS tab at the top of this blog.)

Problem is, Dabble doesn’t seem to actually search those 600 sources. I did a search on a the word “basketry” that turned up 30 hits on YouTube and a few other video hosting sites. Only 3 turned up in Dabble. Dabble does provide some toolbar buttons for adding videos to Dabble, so I did add a few to Dabble. But to be honest I don’t want to do that much work to get them into Dabble. Maybe I’m just being lazy? Perhaps Dabble can’t actually draw in all the indexing from those sites? I hope they can do that someday. I love the idea of being able to gather and organiz video from many sources. I’ll be checking back to see how it’s going. Any other tools that do this?

Google Video Search
Google Video Search did a nice fast search and turned up over 30 results on “basketry”, most of which were the YouTube videos. And it provides an RSS feed for the search. That’s handy for keeping up on new videos that turn up. But it’s not a personalized collection that Dabble is trying to provide.

Blinkx.com
And finally blinkx.com. A search on basketry there found 11 videos from a variety of sources. Like Dabble, not all of the 30 from YouTube were there. Though I didn’t see a way to login and save playlists, blinkx does let you create a playlist that can be shared via email. There’s also a cool feature that turns the playlist into a wall of video that can be embedded on other web pages. I couldn’t embed the wall here, so I’ve put it on one of my wiki pages for testing.