Embeddable video is getting pretty cool. Static preview images seem to be a thing of the past. Blinkx, which is showcasing its service today at Demo 2007, is announcing a new widget called 'Blinkx It' that crawls your blog or Web site to deliver contextual video content. Think of it as Google Ad Sense with videos and no advertising. For example, clicking the 'Blinkx It' widget below will bring up videos related to News.com stories:
This is nice and unobtrusive, but the results aren't necessarily pertinent. In most cases, I was unable to get a smattering of relevant videos with URLs from CNET, Apple.com, and even the NFL. There are some options to tweak how well the widget scrapes for data, but this involves changing code on your Web site, or giving your posts metatags.
What's far cooler--and pulls up slightly more relevant results--is Blinkx's embeddable video preview 'walls.' These let you group together several pieces of video content in one embedded array. Clicking any of the motion thumbnails will take you to the site where the video is located. I've put together one for CNET-related results at the bottom of this post
It's easy to create walls like this. You can quickly choose how many rows and columns you want right from the Blinkx search results. Clicking these thumbnails takes you to the video's source. Also neat is the ability to scroll through pages of content, letting you pack more videos into one embedded array. When using Blinkx's search engine, you can watch the first 30 seconds of each video without leaving the results.
For another multivideo embedding tool, check out SplashCast which we covered yesterday.
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