Thursday, April 2, 2009

Clearing Up Yesterday’s Jokes

As “Internet Jackass Day” is over, I wanted to resolve the Blogoscoped jokes:

1. In a couple of places I mentioned that the flipping of YouTube videos did not work with all videos. Well, that wasn’t true, as the video I pointed to was itself flipped for the purpose.
2. No, there was no Burning Man video involving Marissa Mayer, Matt Cutts and others! I simply did a screen recording of a still image which I blurred a bit, uploaded it to YouTube, grabbed the embed code, and then deleted the video. This way, during the time of embedding the video was showing the (not too uncommon) message “This video has been removed by the user”. Ionut Alex Chitu – perhaps no surprise there! – was the first to find proof against my hoax in the comments... by digging up 3 distinct URLs which show thumbnail stills from different parts of the video, yet they were all showing the same scene.*
3. I’m not sure if you noticed a confusing system “ding” sound coming from your speakers yesterday**. If you did, that was a Flash included in the Blogoscoped template which would keep silent for a couple of seconds, and then play that sound. I turned this off after midnight with some relief, as it started to confuse me, too!

*Yep, YouTube does not delete thumbnails, despite what a deletion of a video might suggest. Note I had removed Ionut’s comment to keep the hoax and contacted him via mail.
**Thanks Tony for sending over the Win XP sounds. On a side-note, Ionut also found that Flash code quickly!

Clearing Up Yesterday’s J ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (5+4)

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