Quite a while ago we added support for oEmbed in both 23 Video and 23 Photo Sharing. This makes it easy to turn a URL from either service into a piece of HTML which is can be embedded into a web site or a blog. For example, this makes it easy to embed video into a WordPress blog post by simply pasting a link to a video into your editor.

I won’t dig too deeply into the technical stuff since there isn’t much to say: oEmbed allows a URL or a link to be turned into a full piece of HTML in a structured fashion. On 23 Photo Sharing the oEmbed endpoint is http://www.23hq.com/23/oembed and on 23 Video it is http://your.domain.com/oembed.

Now, from WordPress 2.9 and onwards you can use oEmbed in your blog posts. For example, you can put in http://www.23hq.com/steffen/photo/5672108 into your editor and have it be displayed not as a link, but as a photo scaled to fit your design. For administrators of WordPress sites this trick is also a way to control which content can safely be embedded into posts — even if you don’t allow <embed>, <object> or , <img> tags in posts.

To set this up, you’ll need to add a little piece of code to your WordPress installation; for example in the bottom of .wp-includes/media.php. For 23 Photo Sharing this line is:

wp_oembed_add_provider(‘http://www.23hq.com/*’, ‘http://www.23hq.com/23/oembed’ );

For 23 Video the code line varies with the domain you’ve chosen for your video site, but something like this would do the trick:

wp_oembed_add_provider(‘http://tv.dmi.dk/*’, ‘http://tv.dmi.dk/oembed’ );

After this a video from the site you’ve set up is embedded simply by inserting a link into your blog post.

On June 3, at Videoday, we launched the redesign of www.23video.com and we have been really happy about how it turned out. However, that is not the only website we launched.

Since we introduced 23 Video a year ago, we have helped launch more than 130 sites and that number keeps growing. We believe that over 90% off all video sites launched in Denmark in that period are running 23 Video, and we want to show them off to the world.

Having a showcase with 130 sites on our own website would be a bit excessive, so we gathered ’round the good old whiteboard and tried to figure out how we could approach this in the best way.

We came to the conclusion that we are not the only video platform provider out there, and what matters immediately is not whether organizations use a free or paid service to reinvent their communications strategy visually. What matters is that in most situations, those on the verge of getting started with video have no idea where to get started and how to approach the task.

This is where Act Visually comes into play.

We wanted to have a place where we could show the world how we help organizations act visually, but also make it a community-driven collection of cases that share a common trait of being visually oriented.

The site already has a number of cases that we have put in to get it off the ground—both some of those running on our platform, but more importantly, also a range of sites that we think are inspiring.

If you are interested in how you can get started, you should go to www.actvisually.com and have a look. If you already have a case you want to show to the world, you can easily add it by creating an account and filling out the submission form. It should show up on the site right away.

You probably didn’t notice this, but in the mad rush to get VideoDay up and running last Thursday we also managed to relaunch the 23 Video product site and our company web site with a new design and a some nice new information.
First, the 23video.com has been upgraded with much more information about the platform’s features, about our many wonderful partners and some of the best examples on how organizations are using 23 Video (if you’re not on the list, go to our new inspiration site, Act Visually, and tell us what you’re up to…).

We’ve also revamped the support section of the site. It now includes video guides to the most important administrative tasks on 23 Video along with succinct instructions on how to prepare, upload, track and organize your content.

For the developers, designers and creatively inclined people out there, we’ve set up 23 Developer. Here you’ll learn how to style, mash up and extend 23 Video sites. We’ve added introductions, detailed guides, examples, sample code and detailed API documentation on the site — and a forum where you can ask the community for guidance when our documentation falls short.

The future of video on the internet changed yesterday when Google launched The WebM Project and open sourced the VP8 codec. Effectively this puts us on a trajectory where broad support for browser-native video (usually called HTML5 video, which is a terrible term) will be a reality in about 6-9 months. That is huge.

For the geeks in the audience, Robert Nyman has a nice recap of the current state of things and Jason Garrett-Glaser goes into exhaustive detail with the codec.

Can I upload WebM and VP8 to 23 Video?

Yes, we have already added support for WebM and VP8. So you can upload the new format to your 23 Video site and it’ll work perfectly.

Will you switch all your content to WebM?

No, but we’re committed to bringing video to the web, and we’re committed to HTML5 video (see, terrible term). Today, this is achieved with H.264 and Flash combined with HTML5 where Flash isn’t available (for example, on the iPhone and iPad).

As the web and the world of web video evolves, 23 Video will too — so today we’re committing to extend support for WebM and browser-native playback.

(This project internally, by the way, is called Eingebaut and we’ll be doing a Request For Comments-type session in June for developers to ensure its technical foundation. Also, I’ll probably be showing off the prototype at VideoDay, which is shaping up nicely.)

Two simple take-aways

First, 23 Video now supports WebM and VP8: You can upload .webm files and have them played and distributed with 23 Video. Second, we’re committing to support video playback in both H.264 and VP8 very soon through the mysterious Eingebaut project.

Businesses and organizations are embracing online video like never before, but untill now there hasn’t been a place for people to come together and share ideas and learn from each other. So in 23 we’ve decided its time to gather all the people in Denmark, who are working with or have an interest in online video to a day filled with inspiring cases and conversations.

Videoday is the first event of its kind in Denmark, and we’re really looking forward to have people come and share their experinces within such different user cases as Campaigns, Events, Product Service, E-commerce, Communites, Media, Video Section, Brand Channels and Intranet. On top of that the day will include workshops for video production, production concepts, UI design, site design, how to develop program format and guidelines to what kind of videoa that actually works online.

Videoday will take place on june the 3rd 2010 and is made in collaboration with FDIM, Kommunikationsforum and FDIH.

We’re just back from a nice week in Berlin where we visited the re:publica conference and met with nice people. We shot a bit a video (with berliner backgrounds) showcasing some of the geeky stuff we’re working on for 23 Video. Here I am talking about some of the challenges of purely browser-based video playback (and of course, how we’ll solve that in an awesome and timely fashion):

Mark said it on Friday: We absolutely adore HTML5, and the prospect of delivering great-quality, speedy video directly in your browser without using Flash has us thinking unpure thoughts here at 23. (There are plenty of reasons why we’re not quite there yet. I won’t dive into the details, but if you want me to drag you in to that vortex, just ask…)

We’ve actually used HTML <video> for a while in the mobile version of 23 Video, but today we’re beginning to test wider adoption of the possibilities. To do this testing, we’ve enabled HTML5 video on a few sites including Reboot and Madbio. In practice this means that you will be able to play video in most modern browsers and mobile devices even if there’s no Flash installed — this includes Safari, Google Chrome and the iPad.

We’ll be beta testing these new features for a few weeks before rolling it out to all customers — but if you want iPad and HTML5 video support now, drop us a mail or ping us on Twitter.

You can already make your 23 Video site run on iPhone, Android and a whole bunch of other mobile phones that support H.264 encoded video, but we’ve just got our hands on a rather promising device…

We present to you: Obligatory Blurry Pic Of Beta Service Running On Cool Hardware:

We don’t have a timeframe on when this will be wider available, but watch this space, and you’ll be the first to know.

Congratulations to Normann-Copenhagen who was awarded for their use of social media last night at the Danish e-business award. We are of course very proud of the fact that the danish design company is using 23 Video as part of their online presence.

But 23 Video is only one of many platforms where you’ll be able to meet Normann-Copenhagen. I had a short chat with online sales & brand manager Michael Rying about why they have embraced social media.

“A lot of companies are talking about getting on facebook, using twitter or getting a videosite. What sets us apart is the fact the we’re doing something about it instead of talking. We’re not waiting for a great master plan or social media strategy. Our approach is to try things out and learn from the experience. We had no idea what it would lead to when we started to blog, got a twitter account and a facebook page. So if we have a strategy it’s the fact that we allow ourselves to fail and learn from our failures. That wont give you a perfect result to begin with, but you’ll end up with a practice and most importantly you’ll actually get something done,” he says.

Behind the “just do it” attitude there’s also a great belief in the fact that social media will bring the company closer to both customers and retailers. That motive has recently led to a videosite where people can get a glimpse of the work in the workshop and meet the designers behind their great products.

“Video is really close to my heart. No matter how good you are with words or how great your photographer is, you simply can’t communicate how a great craftsman is going about is daily business in his workshop in the southern part of Sealand. But with video you can capture the experience and pass it on to your customers. We also use it to communicate to our retailers in Tokyo, Sydney, Italien, Finland. US and the rest of the 80 countries we’re exporting to. And we have videos running in a loop from a couple of mac’s when we’re exhibiting. So to us video has become essential.”

So, I’m sitting in Chicago O’Hare airport, trying to think about what has happened at SXSW the last few days.

SXSW is a web conference in Austin, Texas, and has bumped the number of attendants this year with 50% so now there is 15,000 people in the Convention Center. It is an amazing combination of thinkers, doers and makers with strong focus on interaction and development of all kinds.

The best part of it all, was how smoothly it went. The WiFi worked perfectly 95% of the time, and the remaining time it was just a bit flaky – nothing major. AT&T even managed to set up a network that did not break down (as it did last year), but most important; every single session went as planned. No delays, no cancellations (not for me at least – a lot of people were bummed when Quentin Tarantino cancelled his appearance at a panel).

It just runs smoothly – and that might be the biggest problem as well. Unlike Reboot and other smaller conferences, there is not much of the action that happens when 600 people or less are gathered. It is not a big problem in any way – it is just the difference that is bound to be there when so many people are at the same place.

For Austin, I must say that I was really impressed with the vibe of the city. It must be a pain to live there when so many geeks get out and get in party mode simultaneously, with the lines that follow (the line for every major party counted several hundred people).

Because of the party hubs that are pre-planned, a lot of people choose to make their own as well. I had a lot of fun at several other venues that were not part of any major, official parties. Austin is known as the live music capital of the world, and everywhere you go, there is a band playing. From Dirty Dog to Headhunter and Emo’s – there’s rock’n'roll everywhere.

I will definitely be going again, but the experiences from this year will come in handy next time around.

- Live as close to the Convention Center as possible (preferrably Hilton or Marriot – both right across the road)
- Bring more sandwiches for eating during the day – there’s no lunch break, so you tend to forget to eat for a lot of hours.
- Bring better shoes. Doesn’t matter what they look like – they just have to be fantastically comfortable.
- Plan less. Everything goes havoc anyway.

Over the next week, I’ll post video post cards and a few write-ups of what I attended during the conference – this post is just to grab a bit of the feeling from the interactive festival and share it with you guys.

(And yes, I know this blog post is very non-visually oriented, but check back soon…)