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I'm a developer at Yahoo's Brickhouse, and have been designing better ways to browse live internet video broadcasts. Currently the best way to find interesting live content is to flip through channels and sites one-by-one, I'm convinced there must be a better way.

One of the approaches I've been working on involves storing periodic snapshots of all the indexed streams. I've been using these snapshots in different interfaces to explore the current and past broadcasts visually, as well as to illustrate search results. Taking image and metadata snapshots at approximately five minute intervals of all the broadcasters on Yahoo! Live, I've accumulated close to a million snapshots.

As a small fun side project, I've used a portion of the collected snapshots and some of the simpler metadata to put together two simple visualizations of the activity on Yahoo! Live. The first visualization is in the form of a grid of broadcasters which shows all the simultaneous broadcasters at once:

Grid

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The first thing that struck me on watching the grid visualization was the transitions people go through as they host their broadcasts. Some people change clothes, quite a few fall asleep, and plenty more start to get visibly tired. Looking at the grid as a whole, I also see some interesting trends. Night and day are pretty clear from both the number of broadcasters and the lack of natural light late at night. As an extension to being able to see the collective night and day I am guessing that most of the broadcasters are in similar timezones. I've also noticed that most of the broadcasters on the grid look like they are under 30, and are broadcasting from a private place.

The second visualization is a chart displaying broadcasters by the time they've been broadcasting versus the number of viewers they have:

Chart

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The most popular broadcasters float to the top of the chart, while those with very few stay near the bottom and get lost in the crowd. As the most viewed streams tend to have exponentially more viewers than the average stream fitting all of them on the screen at once required a logarithmic vertical scale. This difference in viewers might correspond to the distinction between a broadcast environment, and a chat room environment. The broadcast environment would have one primary broadcaster who is the primary focus of viewer attention and interaction. A chat room environment would have a small number of user all interacting with each other.

It's interesting to see the trends that become apparent when visualizing the broadcasters viewership over time. While observing the top broadcasts in this view, I noticed two. The first is that viewership for popular broadcasts tends to rise very quickly at the beginning of the broadcast, and then stabilizes within a limited range. The second was that most of the top broadcasters tended to be female, which is an interesting contrast to regular television.

So how did I achieve these visualizations? The snapshot collector uses Yahoo live's API to discover broadcasters and then instantiates a browser for each broadcaster to grab a shot. When it grabs the shot, it also collects some simple metadata, and stores it in an SQL database. This metadata along with the snapshot is pulled out by the visualization code, which was created using ruby-processing, an API to the Processing framework for visual programming in Ruby. Eventually, given some time I would like to clean up the visual design and also experimenting with auxiliary information displays, such as trace lines on the paths of the chart to visually show more history information.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Come join us at Brickhouse as we host Wordpress this Wednesday, July 2nd, at 7pm. We'll have pizza and beer, and there'll also be an appearance by Wordpress' founding developer, Matt Mullenweg. Sign up on Upcoming if you'd like to attend.

Popularity: 36% [?]

A couple of weeks ago we released a new IMVironment which lets you listen to music from popular mp3 blogs while you’re chatting with your friends on Yahoo! Instant Messenger. As you encounter tracks that you like, you can save them as a playlist in the IMV and send your “remix” to your friend over IM so they can check it out.

Music blogs have become increasingly popular over the last year both for consumers and advertisers as “Fortune 500 companies are waking up to the fact that young hipsters are congregating on MP3 blogs”.

The theory goes that, “the people who troll for music on MP3 blogs tend to be tastemakers who wield considerable influence over their peers.” Why are these kids digging on music blogs so much? Well – you’ll have to try for yourself. Check out the IMV to start exploring music blogs for yourself. When you do – you’ll encounter a pretty amazing place where “BlogJs” like Aurgasm’s Paul Irish are working to “scout out music you've never heard and deliver only the finest."

The IMV is the latest chapter of a web music story we’ve been telling all year long. It's an initial foray into making the web music discovery process a truly social experience, something that you do together with a friend.  If you use YIM, you can give it a spin by clicking on the IMVironment drop down next time you’re chatting with someone and selecting the “Honda Fit” IMV. Check it out and let us know what you think!

Popularity: 43% [?]

Don't be frightened, but evil and frustration lurks in your web browser. Yeah, that same seemingly benign and ultra flexible tool that you're using to read these words has a dark side. Something you probably don't think about much, because you're numb to it. It's hidden in plain sight, so hard to see because it's everywhere, filling your day on the web with a nameless angst. Lest you write me off as a nutty zealot, I cease my babble and reveal the little bugger:

Looks innocent, doesn't he? Melodrama aside, it's really a terrible experience using browse boxes to upload 20 pictures. My pictures are usually named IMG_4087.JPG or something equally descriptive, and furthermore they're usually tucked away in one or more places that I'm not used to browsing -- but often I can click over to them pretty fast. It's even worse when they stack these guys 10 deep and expect us to spend more time finding the photos than it takes to upload them!

A proposed solution

About a week ago Yahoo! proposed a solution to this mess. The PhotoDrop application lets you upload pictures to Flickr by dragging and dropping them into your web browser. You can drag any number of pictures at once, and without any delays you get a preview of the pictures you've selected. Furthermore you can rotate, scale, crop, and apply filters to these pictures all right on your desktop without talking to any servers or watching a spinning beachball (or rotating hourglass, if you're so inclined).

This solution is based on a new technology released by Yahoo! called BrowserPlus™. The cool thing about the technology is that it will soon be open for anyone to use, so that regardless of where you spend your time on the net, the folks who build the websites that you use will be able to make your uploads faster, and let you do a whole lot more right there in your browser.

Finally, BrowserPlus is a piece of software that you have to download and install, and a lot of us are weary about installing plug-ins. That's the bad news. The good news is that you only have to install it once. Having done so any number of sites that use it can run without interrupting your browsing. We're focused on making this first time install as painless as possible, and at the same time keeping BrowserPlus lightweight and secure. So check out the prototype and let us know what you think! till the next, lloyd

Popularity: 51% [?]

Almost two and a half years after it was released, the ZoneTag prototype from the group formerly known as Y!RB is still out there. ZoneTag remains some people's favorite application for geotagging photos and uploading to Flickr (owners of Nokia phones, feel free to try). Interestingly, since launch, ZoneTag had been used on numerous cross-country trips - at least one done on motorbike, and one with a truck - yeah, that one was me.

However, there's a new outstanding achievement in the ZoneTagging-coast-to-coast category. Joe Rehana, aka Joe Trek, has been ZoneTagging his way from San Francisco to Maryland on his bicycle inline skates. No "motor" there. We've been following him since the start of the trek as we noticed (thanks, Rahul) his photos in the ZoneTag stream. Now, Joe is still in California (see his picture map), but at this pace, he's likely to make it to Maryland long before the Democratic primaries are over beginning of the fall semester.

Yes, the future of travel photos is almost here. This is just what Scott Adams wishes for, complete with easy annotation of the photo's content based on your location (click on Joe Trek's photo below to see the tags). The nature of consumer capture and sharing of media is changing these very days. One on hand, the Nokia N95 and other high-end cameraphones and location-enabled cameras now merge high-quality imaging (and video), location awareness, text-input capabilities, and, most importantly, network connectivity (did anyway say Eye Fi?) in a device that's in the hands of millions of, you know, regular people. On the other hand, Flickr and other services offer APIs for posting and adding metadata to photos that help disseminate as well as archive all this content. At the end of his trip, or even during, Joe Trek will have the set of photos geotagged, annotated, explained, and archived till the end of time on the Flickr servers. This should be the experience of every vacationer out there. Why wouldn't it?

p.s. Joe, if you're reading, may I suggest using Fire Eagle to have your location automatically updated on your blog?

[updated: Joe is not biking, he's inline skating with his gear in a baby jogger - holy @$%*!]

Popularity: 50% [?]