Boing Boing Video gets a website makeover, a guest tweet-blog, and a new url: boingboingvideo.com
I'm very happy to blog that our two-year-old, Webby-honored video project has undergone a web makeover, thanks to the fine design talents of Boing Boing Gadgets' Rob Beschizza. We have a new url shortcut that's a little easier to remember, too: boingboingvideo.com.
You'll notice a large Flash video embed at the top of the new layout -- yeah! A big fat 962 pixel doublewide, baby! This is what video on the web is all about! And, a number of new video-centric, visually pleasing ways to search through our archives. You can sort by category, too: "animation," "sci-tech," "music video," and so on.
The new UI is still under development, and we're sorting out some kinks here and there, so feel free to provide feedback in the comments or by email: boingboingvideo@boingboing.net. By way of that email address, we also welcome suggestions on stuff you'd like us to cover in future episodes, content submissions if you've created something yourself, and, (gotta pay the bills, y'all) -- sponsorship inquiries.
Here's a feature I'm super excited about: We've launched a guest-curated sidebar blog, @BBVBOX, where people whose taste in internet video we dig can tweet short pointers to web clips they like. The team right now: Sean Bonner, Susannah Breslin, Andrea James, Richard Metzger, R. Stevens, Jesse Thorn, Robin Sloan and Laughing Squid, aka Scott Beale. The @BBVBOX archives are here.
Huge thanks to all who made the makeover possible -- Rob Beschizza, Dean "mustardhamsters" Putney, Joel Johnson, and our tireless and awesome sysadmin Ken Snider, among them! Big thanks also to our hosting and distribution partners, including YouTube, iTunes, Miro, Plex, Boxee, Dotsub (where we'll begin uploading daily videos soon for foreign language subtitling!), and Episodic.com.
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Oh man, now I've got that tune stuck in my head!
i love the big video player--awesome.
Lookin' good. No zany Web 2.0 gradients or fancy effects.
I've been working on the design for a video website too, and we've come back from the 'full size' video on top. We replaced it with a slightly smaller Hulu-like banner-ish thing with a high-quality photo (not a low res video still).
In our experience, having a really large video on top is mostly a waste of screen real estate. The quality of the video still is mediocre at best, it has very little context except for perhaps a title, and if you make the 'full screen' button easy to find, people will maximize the video anyway.
Having hi-res digital photos taken together with the video is a huge advantage in my experience, since those image look a lot crisper and are a lot more compelling.
I don't know if this comment will get through but the recent remake of bb gadgets was so bad I've stopped going to the site. something about it, maybe all the black, just makes it painful to read.
Looks great!
I wish you would have a special section about regulation of the Internet and broadband by the FCC which you posted about a couple of weeks ago. I have commented about this at length.
Fun! And he has a passing resemblance to young Patrick McGoohan. The long lost Prisoner Workout Video!