Rounding out a recent trilogy of YouTube-related posts, today I’m going to explain a little bit about finding and making RSS feeds for YouTube content. These tricks can free content that you’ve uploaded and subscribed to, from the confines of the YouTube Universe.

Importing All of Your YouTube User Subscriptions

There are some useful RSS feeds that YouTube doesn’t publicize as much, some of which have been compiled by the Google Operating System blog. Most interesting among them is one which actually required a Yahoo! Pipe to set up. By subscribing in Miro to (plugging in your user name for [YOUR USER NAME]):

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?YouTubeUsername=[YOUR USER
NAME]&_id=58e4f59f9e5e3282aaffdcbaf05ba68d&_render=rss&itemLimit=50

you can get all your YouTube subscriptions in Miro! For those longtime YouTube users who have accumulated a ton of subscriptions in YouTube, this can consolidate everything into one automatically downloaded and open place.

Subscribing to a YouTube User

First, YouTube has explained some of their most basic feeds in a slightly hidden guide on their site. This has some useful tips, like how to subscribe to a given YouTube user’s output (plugging in the user name for [YOUR USER NAME]):

 feed://www.youtube.com/rss/user/[YOUR USER NAME]/videos.rss 

It also includes links to some meta-categories, like the Featured Videos, which can definitely be interesting.

If you have any favorite RSS tricks, in YouTube or any other video hosting service, let us know in the comments!

Last week, I talked about the most popular channels on YouTube, but that’s only part of the story. As I said then, an unfortunate consequence of YouTube’s overwhelming market dominance is that content producers can feel compelled to publish there first, and sometimes use it as their only means of distribution. It’s fortunate, then, that YouTube has RSS feeds built in for each of their channels AND that Miro can download YouTube vids direct to disk, because there is some really great content up there.

This week, we’ve picked our favorite channels that use YouTube as their only distribution channel, and added them to the Miro Guide. These range from hilarious original series, like Drunk History or You Suck at Photoshop, to extremely talented, if not quite “mainstream” musicians like Ronald Jenkees, to simply bizarre and fascinating spectacles like the musical animatronic performances of the Rock-afire Explosion (with props to Christopher W for suggesting that one!) If these kinds of things sound interesting to you, there’s plenty more where that came from.

So, if you want to see some really great stuff that until now has been largely confined to streaming on YouTube, you can subscribe to all our favorites here:

If we missed any of your favorite YouTube channels, let us know in the comments!

Professor Lawrence Lessig reports on a ruling that protects “open source licenses.” The opinion was rendered by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (they have the final say on US Intellectual Property disputes). The the provisions outlined by the Artistic License were upheld as legally binding.

The precedent set here should also protect other open licenses (GPL, Creative Commons, BSD, etc). The case is a nice legal affirmation of the values we’ve all been putting into our free and openly licensed works for so long!

Last Thursday night, protesters projected human rights images including: monks being arrested, olympic rings turning into handcuffs, and so on, onto the side of the Chinese Consulate in Manhattan. Video of this event was uploaded to YouTube, and has since been removed at the request of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). The video is a crystal clear case of fair use —it’s 100% legal and non-infringing— and the IOC has absolutely no right to force the video out of view.

The public sometimes takes notice when high profile political videos like this one get censored, but in most cases videos just quietly vanish from YouTube. More decentralization in online video and accountability from YouTube are the keys to avoiding this type of censorship.

Making internet video more decentralized is a first step. Decentralization makes it less likely that people will go directly to YouTube to for their video fix; they’re more likely to be looking across sites, which means they’re more likely to find the mirrored version of the above protest video, which is currently available on Vimeo. We can achieve this goal by supporting open standards (such as Media RSS) and making video files available for download (Nicholas and I even put together this page, advocating a more open and decentralized online video space).

A second key is to keep the pressure on YouTube — they have automatic video scanning software that highlights videos that may be infringing a copyright, and offers to remove the potentially infringing videos for content owners. So big copyright holders have great tools to make sure that YouTube doesn’t use their material illegally, but the rest of us don’t. We should pressure YouTube to put up a form for accepting DMCA takedown counter-claims (and making that last link easier to find).

I’m working to advance both of these issues (officially with Miro, and unofficially with YouTomb). Feel free to join me — you can start by choosing video services and publishing tools that promote openness (check out Show in a Box, blip.tv, and MakeInternetTV), making noise about incidences where legitimate YouTube videos are taken down, and of course recommending Miro as a way to aggregate video from all over the web.

Please comment if you’ve got an interesting takedown story to share.

Update: The IOC withdrew their DMCA request and the video was reinstated, after YouTube took extra measures to contact the committee.