Blip.tv Figures Out How To Serve Ads In iTunes Videos

Earlier today at the Beet.TV Online Video Summit (which I co-moderated with Cnet’s Dan Farber and Beet.TV’s Andy Plesser), blip.tv CEO Mike Hudack revealed that his company has found a way to dynamically insert ads from DoubleClick into video downloads on iTunes and elsewhere.

Blip.tv is a video publishing platform that claims about 50 million views a month across many different Websites and distribution channels. (Last week, it raised a round from Bain Capital). Hudack estimates that 15 to 18 percent of blip.tv’s traffic comes through video downloads, mostly from iTunes.

The meat of it is here:

For the past six months or so, blip.tv has been experimenting with placing pre-roll, post-roll, and overlay ads in some iTunes videos. These ads are served by DoubleClick and have hyperlinks that make it easy to track when somebody clicks on an ad. This measurement only works when someone is actually watching the video on their computer inside iTunes, which Hudack estimates happens 50 to 75 percent of the time. For the rest of the videos that are watched on iPods, iPhones, and Apple TVs, whatever ad that was inserted at teh time the video was delivered will be shown, with no tracking capability.

Download Farbtastic 1.2 – 8 January 2007 (License: GPL).

Farbtastic: jQuery color picker plug-in | Steven Wittens – Acko.net

Jim Groom, who administers the UMW group of WordPressMU blogs has placed a whole slew of videos online, which help users with WPMU, as well as migrate from WPMU-1.3.3 to WPMU-2.6.

The inimitable Andy Rush (a.k.a. EduRush) and I have been working diligently to create a whole slew of screencasts documenting the new interface for WPMu 2.6. We’ve finished a whole bunch of them over the last week or so and published them on the now official UMW Blogs Screencasts site, so below is a list of the screencasts we have created. All of the screencasts are Creative Commons and while they’re currently published as SWF files, we will be uploading them all to Blip shortly. Keep in mind that these screencasts are specific to the UMW Blogs installation, but they still may prove useful for anyone who wants to point people to a quick overview of the administrative backend, the changes between versions WPMu 1.3.3 and 2.6, and a very tab-specific discussion of the how to manage a WordPress blog.

FAQ WPMu 2.6 – UMW Wiki

• The Child Selector

• This selector uses a “>” symbol as a “combinator” that is placed between two parts of a CSS selector, and indicates that the target of the rule is the element on the right side of the “>” combinator, but only when that element is a direct child of the element to the left of the combinator. Thus, the selector table>td can never target any element, because TD’s are never direct children of tables, only of TR’s. On the other hand, the selector tr>td would select every TD on the page, since all TD’s are direct children of TR’s.

  The main difference between the Child combinator and the familiar space combinator is that the space combinator is a “descendant” combinator, meaning that the element to the right of the space only needs to be between the tags of the element on the left to be selected. So with the selector table td, all TD’s will selected, since TD’s always fall between the tag pair of one table or another.

  The Child combinator is quite useful for targeting rules to direct children of an element, without also targeting the more deeply nested descendants as well. Unfortunately, up until IE7 there was no point in using it for its intended purpose, since so few of the viewing public would get the benefits of the styling.

• The Adjacent Sibling Selector

  • This selector is a “+” combinator symbol placed between parts of a selector, and is very similar to the Child combinator. The only difference between the two is that while the Child combinator points to direct children of an element, the Adjacent Sibling combinator points to an element which directly follows another element in the source.
    

    Thus the selector tr+td cannot select anything, because no TD ever directly follows a TR. Instead, TD’s are contained inside TR’s, and that is not considered to be “following” the TR. However, the selector tr+tr would select any TR that directly followed another TR, which means that every TR within a table would be selected except for the very first TR in that table.

    Get it? An adjacent sibling element not only follows its previous sibling, but is also completely separate from it. Further, if two DIV’s are in sequence and each contains a paragraph, those two paragraphs are not considered siblings, because they reside in different parent elements. The fact that one follows another means nothing unless the following sibling starts at the same point where the previous sibling ends.

• Star HTML

Oh, you want to know about that structural thing? Well, the hack that uses it is called the star-html hack, and it works by taking advantage of an oddity in Explorer’s treatment of the Document Object Model, or DOM for short. Simply stated, all web pages start with a root element called html, which then contains two children, the head and the body elements. Those two then contain other children, and so forth.

• Most browsers obey this arrangement, but Explorer for both Win and Mac do not. They seem to think there is a mysterious element enclosing the html element! It’s pretty strange, but in fact this extra outer “root” element has no apparent ill effects on web pages, and remained unnoticed for years, until Edwardson Tan began experimenting with CSS selectors. He found that a selector written as * html  .targetelement would apply the styles to .targetelement, but only for the IE browsers.

  Think about it. That star is the “universal” selector, so it points to any element, but it comes before html. Therefore, the full selector in effect says: “Select .targetelement when it is contained within html, and when html is contained within any other element”.

Nice little tutorial on creating 3-tier/MVC JavaScript…

A List Apart: Articles: ALA’s New Print Styles

The only little oddity here is position: relative. I included that because IE/Win has a tendency to make elements disappear if you pull them upward like this. The cure is to position them, which I suspect triggers the hasLayout flag. I don’t pretend to understand all the nuances of hasLayout, but recent information from Microsoft and third-party sources has shed quite a bit of light on the subject–it would appear that many of the layout problems that bedevil us in IE/Win are the result of an element not having hasLayout.

Reuters CEO sees “semantic web” in its future

This is an interesting article on the Semantic Web, and where news feeds appear to be going.

Pretty nifty! …and this looks pretty cool too:

http://www.fusioncharts.com/free/LiveDemos.asp

Growing Pains: Can Web 2.0 Evolve Into An Enterprise Technology? — Web 2.0 — InformationWeek

Wikis, mashups, social networking, and even Second Life can have a place in business, but they need to improve legacy interoperability–and IT needs to overcome its skepticism.