Dailymotion Blog

Dailymotion and VANS Shoes congratulate MotionMaker destin777 for his winning submission to the Halloween Trick-for-Treat skateboarding contest!

The three runner-up vids are:
1. Zombie Adventures for Dailymotion by user: mikedvideo

2. Best Thing Since Sliced Bread by user: dlakes

3. Vans Contest Vid by user: williecrespo.

And, of course, we thank MotionMaker stecker_show for making the awesome call-for-upload vids.

To check out all the Halloween Trick-for-Treat skateboarding videos, visit the contest homepage. There is some great stuff in there—thanks for all your uploads!

Today we bring you a fresh batch of functions. The goal of this update? To facilitate and reinforce interaction between our community members.

Exchange with Your Contacts

We have put in place an internal messaging system, which lets you send messages and share videos with your friends. As you may also want to voice your opinion publicly, you can now post comments on your friends’ profile, or on groups you belong to.

The Power of Friendship

In order to avoid undesirable messages in your inbox or on your profile, we have reviewed our contact management system. To add a user to your contacts now requires their confirmation, and vice versa. Only once another user has accepted your request will they be added to your contact lists.

To note this change, we won’t be speaking of “contacts” any longer, but of friends. Once a user is verified as one of your friends, you can send them messages through the Inbox, or post comments to their profile.

What Happens with Your Old Relationships

What happens with users you have already added to your contacts? If you are not already in their contact list, a request will be sent to their inbox. If you are in their contact list, they should already be verified as one of your friends. What if another user has added you to their contacts? If the member is not already in your contact list, you will receive a friend request from them in your inbox. You can also find sent and received friend requests on the “My Friends” page under “Users”.

You may already have friend requests pending in your inbox, so we invite you to check as soon as possible! You can access your inbox when you are logged in by clicking on the envelope icon in the upper right of the header.

As always, we invite you to send us your opinion of these new functions, and to let us know of any potential bugs or issues in the comments of this post.

Happy surfing!

We are pleased to announce the launch of our “Trick for Treat” skateboarding video contest just in time for Halloween. The competition, which runs until November 3, 2007, invites the skateboarding community to upload original videos showing their best tricks for a chance to win gear from Vans. This contest also coincides with the launch of our new Motionmaker category: “Extreme.”

Judging for the contest will be conducted by Vans and will be based on criteria such as trick originality, creativity and visual style of the submissions. The lucky grand prize winner will win skate gear from Vans, the leading lifestyle brand for the skateboarding community. Additional details, rules and instructions for entry to the contest are available at http://trickfortreat.dailymotion.com.

Also, check out the first call-for-upload video (http://www.dailymotion.com/Vansshoes66/video/x362mq_trick-for-treat). It was made by Motionmaker Chris Stecker (username: stecker-show).

After many long nights, this morning we are pleased to announce that a new set of functions is available on Dailymotion. We have done a lot of work on the back-end of the site lately, so that we can continue to bring you a fast and functional site, whatever the server-load may be. Today these modifications are visibile, and we hope that you appreciate the improvements.

Graphical Changes

The site header and footer have been, let’s say, refreshed. The new, clearer header makes it easier to find the most important pages of the site. As to the new footer - it has also received a bit of a face lift, and provides better access to additional information about the site.

The video list pages have been reviewed in depth. Now they offer more space for videos, and the sorts on filters in the left sidebar make it much simpler to navigate through the site.

Improved Tools on the Player Page

We have reworked the ergonomy of all the tools found just below the video on the player page. Don’t hesitate to use and abuse the “share this video” function, or the social bookmarking tools like Digg or Del.icio.us (just to name a couple). Notice that if a video is already on Digg, the number of diggs is indicated in brackets.

Player on Profiles and Group Pages

Previously, the Video Stars on user profiles and on group pages were simple images. But this didn’t satisfy us. Video Stars are videos, after all, and if they’re good enough for you to feature them, then they deserve special treatment. Thus we decided to swap out the still graphic for a video player, so it’s possible to watch them directly without passing onto a dedicated player page.

New Tool: Uploader

A new tool is available on Dailymotion: the Uploader. It enables you to place an upload form directly within your site. With it, your visitors can register or log-in to Dailymotion, then upload videos to their account - or record via webcam - without leaving your site.

Improved Comments

You told us that there was an issue with the comments feature, namely: they don’t appear as soon as they’re posted. We have fixed this issue and today, every comment appears just as soon as you make it.

That’s all for today. As usual, we invite you to let us know what you think of these changes, or to alert us to any possible bugs you may encounter by adding a comment to this post.

Good surfing on Dailymotion!

—-

You have spoken, and we have listened. Following the release of our latest version, you alerted us to a mistake we had made in serving search results: namely, that supplying “Featured Videos” at the top of those results was neither relevant, useful, or necessary. We are sorry for any confusion or inconvenience this may have caused, and have since returned the presentation  of search results to a simple list. Thank you for your input, and please don’t hesitate to let us know whenever something isn’t working on the site - we’re here to make your experience better.

Have you already sold a few things through internet classifieds? If so, you know how much easier it is when you have a few photos. Just as nothing sells a videogame better than a demo, and nothing sells a movie better than a good trailer, what could sell your vintage Vespa better than a well-presented video?

Well, now it’s possible to do this on Ebay, the world’s leading online auction site.
All you have to do is copy the embed code (which you can find beneath the player on each Dailymotion video page) and paste it into
the HTML description field of your Ebay item. It’s that easy.

We hope you find this new cross-platform feature useful…and profitable.

Cheers,

The Dailymotion Team

Today we have put a new feature in place: video geolocalization.
Before, you could only indicate in which city or country your video was
filmed. From today on out, you can place your video directly on a map!

How does it work?

For new uploads, you won’t have to do anything you didn’t before. At
the end of the upload process, you will find yourself on the video’s
information page. We have added a map to this page to let you
associate your video with a geographical location, either by clicking
a location directly, or by using the search field.

To localize your video:

-Use the search field to find your location. Double-click the map to specify more precisely.
-or-
Navigate the map and double-click on the location of your choice.

-A pin will appear on the map, as well as a list of cities in the area. Select the appropriate city, or confirm the city you found with
the search.

-Your video is mapped! Now you need only to save your changes.

What happens to your old localizations?

Obviously, nothing is erased. The old location data remains, but will not affix your video to the map. You must go to the video you want to localize and select “edit info” to put it on the map, verify that a pin has appeared on the map (or double click on the map to add one) and click “save”.

But this isn’t all!

When you watch a video, you can now click on the geolocalized info (for example: Wichita, Kansas, United States, or longitude and latitude) beneath the player to make a map appear. This map will indicate the exact location that the video was taken, and you can zoom in and out, pan, navigate, etc.

We have also created a page which allows you to find videos by location: http://www.dailymotion.com/geoloc. You don’t have to enter a city or country, but can simply navigate within the map and zoom in to view videos in a specific area. This page is still in beta, but you can already search geotagged videos of any user by adding their username to the URL www.dailymotion.com/geoloc/[USERNAME]
ex: http://www.dailymotion.com/geoloc/gabma.

In Conclusion

In spite of all the tests we have made, a few bugs may remain in this feature. If you come across any, we invite you to share them in the comments of this post. They will all be corrected by our crack team of developers, fueled by the joe of our new monster coffee machine.

We believe this new feature offers enormous potential which will be realized over time. We hope you appreciate it as much as we do.

Hey Everybody!

Dailymotion has two bits of interesting news for all you out there in Internet land.

First off - Dailymotion is available on the iPhone! This coveted device may not be available outside of the US (yet), but that doesn’t mean we aren’t looking out for the early adopters and gadget-heads across the pond. To check it out, simply point your iPhone to iphone.dailymotion.com. There you can browse by featured videos, channel, top-rated, or most recent uploads. Click a thumbnail in any of these lists, then tap anywhere within the player and, as we say over here, voilà! - Dailymotion in your pocket. The best part is, because our videos are Quicktime-encoded, they run on Safari without needing a Flash player. To see Dailymotion in action on the iPhone, take a look at the video here. Those of you already watching Dailymotion on your iPhones: Thanks! We’re currently in the top 20 Google results when you search “iPhone”. You can read more about this new feature over at Cnet.com.

Feeling Moody? Happy? Sad? In Love? A little Crazy, even? Those of you that know and love Skype, that wonderful Nordic VOIP software that lets “the whole world talk for free”, may have noticed that the new Windows version (3.5.0.202 - released August 7) allows you to share Dailymotion videos that match your mood. These videos are selected for each region, exclusively for Skype, with new ones featured each week. If you are a MotionMaker, your Creative Content is eligible to be featured to this new audience: 220 million Skype users wordwide! Soon, anyone will be able to submit their own mood videos to a special Dailymotion group for the chance to be featured on Skype. You can download the new version of Skype here.

More to come soon. In the meantime, be sure to watch, publish, and share.

Cheers,

The Dailymotion Team

We showed you a few months ago where your videos are stored, you can now discover our office in Paris, France, riding the bike of our Product Manager who wears shirts, Régis:

We recently told you that we were testing a copyright video detection tool. It is now online and we will continue to enhance it in the month to come and to benchmark other tools that detect copyright videos. We also told you that we were working on a tool that allows you to replace the copyrighted music in the videos you create with cleared music beds we have negotiated with our music partners. Well… this is also up on our site and ready to use.

This tool is named Audio Remix. When one of your videos is detected to have a copyrighted audio track, we will ask you to use Audio Remix to replace the audio track.

Audio Remix is very easy to use. Only three steps are necessary to change the audio track of your video:

1. Choose a genre and artist
2. Select the track you would like to use
3. Click “Publish” to insert the new track into your video

This process only takes a few seconds, plus a couple of minutes to reencode the video, and is an easy way to respect your favorite artists’ copyrights.

We just signed a deal with our friends at Jamendo to give you access to over 50 songs. In the future, we will constantly add new music to the Audio Remix library to give you the largest choice possible!

Attention all Obsessive Star Wars Fans!!!

If you think you¹re the biggest Star Wars Fanboy (or Fangirl) EVER, then get ready for an unbelievable contest on Dailymotion from July 25th to August 31st! You could win a walk-on role in the upcoming movie Fanboys, starring Kristen Bell from Veronica Mars, which follows fanatical, crazy, and wild Star Wars fans on a cross-country trek to sneak into a preview of Star Wars 1: The Phantom Menace.

To enter this contest, users (US residents only) can register and upload an original video no longer than 3 minutes showing why they¹re the ultimate Star Wars fan to the Ultimate Fanboys Contest Group at http://fanboys.dailymotion.com. Be creative, be funny, be yourself!

Check out the videos on the Group page and add the ones you like most to your favorites. The 10 videos that have been added to favorites the most will move on to the next round. Then, the producers of the movie will pick the winner!

Not only will you get a walk-on role in Fanboys, you’ll be featured in the Special Features on the DVD! George Lucas has already given his official seal of approval to the movie, so you’ll be a part of Star Wars history!

OK - start uploading your video and may the Force be with you!