I was on YouTube looking at amateur radio videos when I came across this message; “YouTube Groups will no longer be available starting December 1, 2010.”
YouTube already screwed up the groups feature a while ago and it crossed my mind that maybe there was another way. The SOTA Group on YouTube had over 300 videos at one time. It was great because unlike a general search for SOTA you did not get unrelated garbage and the group admin (Richard G3CWI) could filter out anything irrelevant and ban undesirables from posting to the group.
I have started SOTA TV ( http://sotatv.wordpress.com/ ) which is basically a video blog linking the hundreds of Summits on the Air videos that people have posted to YouTube. This is not an official SOTA site and there is no content stored on this site. If you object to your content being included on this site it will of course be removed, but you should consider in the first instance disabling the ‘embed’ feature on YouTube. The purpose of this site is to bring together videos from YouTube and elsewhere posted about or by SOTA Activators, Chasers and others, covering Summits on the Air activations and related subjects. Videos relating to amateur radio, antenna design and hill walking may be included. The site is hosted on Wordpress rather than on Blogger or whatever simply due to it being easier to embed the videos using their system, just one line of code. Here hoping it is well received, I hope everyone likes it. There are already over 100 videos on the site for you to watch.
If anyone has a problem with this, feels they can help or if Richard or the MT would like to be given admin rights please email me. (mycall at gmail dot com). The same goes if you have anything that might make a post at CQHQ. I am particularly looking for reviews of new gear and kits. You will be given full credit for anything I post.
Looks good to me Steve. The Youtube one has been broken for ages and I never found anything else that seemed quite the same. Perhaps the MT will make yours the sotawatch link?
Hi Tom, If I don’t find it then send me a link to it on YouTube and I will include it. Once I have finished finding all those on YouTube at present it should be easy to check every few days and add new ones, particularly if people let it be known on here that they uploaded something new. I can link to videos elsewhere as well but I will investigate those later.
One thing I find fascinating is the amount of views the videos have had. There are some fairly low quality ones with massive viewing numbers and some really brilliant ones hardly anyone has watched. Some of them are very creative as well as showing some stunning scenery. Just a tip don’t be put off because the video is in a language you don’t understand or the activator is doing the wrong mode, there are some gems hiding in there and they keep getting better.
Personally I would like to see more videos that show the route up summits. I always check for these before tackling a new one. These don’t need to be great quality to be very useful.
Thanks for collecting the links. While the embedding looks good, a plain link is easier for folks who use an alternative viewer (rather than their web browser) for viewing video, and a long list of plain links with no embedded versions might be easier to skim if someone’s looking for a particular report they (say) vaguely remember seeing a while back…
Probably not a bad idea. Once I get it up to date I can probably use a program that will extract the links and sort them. Then I can include them on a separate page that could be used to create play lists.
This looks like a good project–good to navigate about (and maybe now I’ll finally be able to post comments…my youtube acct still doesn’t allow me to! and browse–
Perhaps in aiding along these lines, to change your “uncategorized” and add other tags not only pertaining to the activator calls, but also simply maybe call area (if I want to “tour” Austria, for example, I can click on OE in the sidebar or tag cloud, and see all the OE videos), or mode, etc. (or even rig models that you may see appear in the videos, since you mentioned gear, those pondering over future purchases could easily see these rigs in action).
So, I think the right tags would be a good option to augment the navigation in an easy “set and forget” kind of way.
You’ll probably want to thump me for this idea, but might I suggest that every video includes (at least) the following tags:
Callsign
Summit name
Summit ref
…as a minimum standard?
It’s a great site, and in all probability the way forward for SOTA Videos, but I think the search facility needs to work better, which I presume it would if those three items were always amongst the tags for the vids. I also agree that an website function for users to submit their video links, rather than emailing to you, would be of benefit - and would save you a load of work.
The procedure is that any video tagged ‘Summits_on_the_Air’ will be picked up when an admin scans YouTube for new videos. At the moment I am the only admin which is why I made the offer to allow yourself or members of the MT admin rights. Anyone who wants to help by tagging etcetera will be considered for admin rights.
There are 309 videos on the site now. That took me three days to find them all and weed out unrelated ones tagged ‘Summits_on_the_Air’ such as freebanders and Italian SOTA, which is not in the program.
I have yet to check for videos tagged ‘SOTA’ but not ‘Summits_on_the_Air’ and cross check any I find to make sure they are not duplicates. Certain people have posted the same video up to seven or eight times to try and keep it as the top video in the SOTA group. That cannot happen if they cannot post to the site but they can still do it on you YouTube.
The tags will be updated over time, but may concern was getting as many videos in one place before the group facility made it even harder to find relevant ones. One of the problems with the tags is to get all the information in a lot of case means watching the video right through, some have no info on YouTube and are not in English which makes it difficult. If I had stopped to tag and categorise each video I would have still been there next year.
If anyone has extra info they want including they can put it as a comment. I will then add the details to the posting and delete the comment. Suggestions of videos to include can be emailed to me (See QRZ). If anyone cannot get on to YouTube or does not know how to upload their video if they email me it I will upload it myself.
Regards Steve GW7AAV
Tom - Agreed. Problem with a web up loader the site would get swamped with porn in days.
This one of Richard’s somehow escaped the initial search. I only found 17 out of 22, which if that is anything to go by means there are a lot more videos out there.
…that tags should include call/summit/ref, or that you want to thump me???
Hmmm, I don’t remember Richard shooting a video of me trying to get up SP-001 when I started feeling ill. Will check that out later to see how embarrassing it is. Cheers mate.
In view of the thread “Combined SOTA / WFF report” where a video contained copyright material. What are you planning to do about similar things on your site?
Steve should do absolutely nothing about copyright issues. He is simply providing people with a more convenient version of data which is already publicly available. If there are copyright issues then they are matter for the copyright owner and the person/company HOSTING the infringing item.
Ditto what Andy says. None of the material is hosted on the site. This sort of thing is a YouTube/Google videos/ etcetera issue. As my trying to find all the SOTA videos is proving it is a heck of a job to find them on YouTube. Today I even found some videos with a SOTA tag that had zero views and they were posted about 3 to 4 years ago (not on the site yet).
There will not be much done over the weekend as I am working and cannot view streaming video from work.
Ditto what Andy says. None of the material is hosted on the site.
That doesn’t seem to be enough of a defense any more. See:
Where the US Gov seized some domains that had links to links to Copyright material. The UK Gov is apparently about to give the police similar rights here.
That link is nothing to do with this subject. Anyway, YouTube being a US company, is subject to the provisions of the DMCA which copyright owners can and do use on a regular basis to get offending material removed.
However, Colin, as this appears to be a subject you hold dear I hereby appoint you SOTA Copyright Tzar. You can watch all the videos and then provide the details of all those containing offending material to the copyright holders worldwide. That way you are doing your moral duty to stamp out copyright violations and Steve can continue to collate the links knowing full well that any violations will be reported. Everyone will be able to sleep easy!
Colin, it’s a non-issue as the copyright holders are well served by existing legislation.
and browse–