All Videos Uploaded by a Google Video User

One of the reasons why YouTube became successful and Google Video didn't is that YouTube built a community around videos. Each registered user has a profile, a list of uploaded videos and favorite videos. You can subscribe to the videos uploaded by a user and send him a private message.

Google Video doesn't have any of these options: the only thing you can see about someone who posted a video is a list of other uploaded videos. But what if you want to get notified when this unknown person posts other videos? In Google Video, each user has an unique alphanumeric ID. To find all the videos posted by a user, you need to search for: [source:USER_ID]. The ID can be retrieved from the page's source code, but I made a bookmarklet that gives you the URL of a feed which contains all the videos posted by a user, sorted by date.


GVideo Author Feed


How to add the bookmarklet?

1. Make sure the link toolbar is visible in your browser. You can enable it if you go to the View menu in your browser, click on Toolbars and check:
* Bookmarks Toolbar in Firefox
* Personal Bar in Opera
* Links in Internet Explorer

2. For Firefox and Opera, drag and drop the blue box above to the toolbar. For Internet Explorer, right-click on the blue box, select "Add to Favorites", ignore the security warning and choose "Links" from the list of folders.

A good example of interesting Google Video channel is "Google Tech Talks", that shows presentations on different topics from Googleplex. If you go to this tech talk and use the bookmarklet, you'll obtain a feed for all the tech talks uploaded by Google. You can subscribe to the feed using any feed reader, but Google Reader is a good choice because it lets you play videos without opening a new page.