Curating YouTube and other Video with MyCurator

Video has to be a part of any content curation practice.  It is the preferred medium for many these days.  It is also the focus of much new content.  In this post, we will show how to set up a Topic in MyCurator to specifically target video discovery.

Google Video Alert

Your first step is to create a new Google Alert.  Make sure you are logged in to your Gmail account and go to http://www.google.com/alerts.  Create the alert with the search keywords for your topic.  The key is to set the Result Type to Video.  Only web pages that primarily contain video will be found.  Obviously, this will include a lot of YouTube videos!

Now use the Source It bookmarklet to add this to your sources.  Make sure to click on the rss symbol  for your new alert, and then click on the Source It bookmarklet.  You should probably create a new link category, using the word video in the title to keep these alerts separate from your other sources.  You can create more alerts, or if you know of some sites that have an RSS feed of video pages, you can add them to your video sources too.

New Video type Topic

Now create a new Topic that will focus just on Videos.  Make sure to set the Topic Type (about halfway down the page) to Video.  Most web pages focused on video do not have a lot of text with them, especially YouTube.  Because of this there are some key things you need to be aware of when you set up a video topic.

1. Use no, or very few, Search 1 Keywords.  If you are using Google Alerts, let the alert do the filtering and don’t use any Search 1 Keywords.  If you have feeds from video sites, use as few Search 1 Keywords as possible, unless you know the sites include a lot of text with there videos (such as transcribed text).
2. Use no, or else a lot, of Search 2 Keywords.  No Search 2 Keywords will match any article.  If you do want to filter your results, it is best to use as many keywords as you can think of.  This will give you the best chance of matching whatever text does appear with the video.
3. Set the Minimum Article Length to zero or a very small number.  Again, you don’t want to filter out possible video pages just because they have very little text.

Embed the Video as your Excerpt

For a Video topic, you can tell MyCurator to embed videos that it finds on a page as the excerpt for the post on your Training page.  Choose the Curation tab in the Options menu and click “Embed Video in Post for Video Topic?”.  You can also set the standard size of the Iframe that will be inserted into your post.  Typically you want to keep a ratio of 4 width for every 3 height, so for example 400 by 300 or 200 by 150.

Because there are so many ways to embed video into an article, MyCurator will not always be able to find a video on the page.  You will still be able to see it in the link to the original article, and sometimes even in the readable page.   You can usually use the share option from the original page video to capture the video and insert it manually into the post in the WordPress editor.  If MyCurator can’t find a video it will create an excerpt from whatever text is available.

Finally, when you go to your training page you may find that some videos start playing automatically.  It can sound a little chaotic, especially with a few that start up at the same time!   MyCurator tries to disable any auto-play tags it can find, but some videos (especially flash based) have no obvious tag.

If you run across some videos you think MyCurator could do a better job with, or have some comments or questions about video curating, please Contact Us!