We finished our new office decorations today, with chalk on blackboard paint. It covers the hideous wallpaper very nicely.
Check the YouTube video below, or go to Vimeo for a high-def version.
Yes, we cheated, shamelessly, by using a projector, but it looks rad!
Based on:
Recently we launched our new product at Strutta, a 'create your own contest site' web service. In each contest, users submit and vote on each other's videos, pictures, songs or writings.
As part of the research we did for the development, we wanted to examine our competition. So, I dove into YouTube to try and figure out some of their ideas and algorithms. For me, this wasn't entirely new: when I posted my Line Rider videos to YouTube, I followed up each video with manual statistics tracking and gained some insight into how a video becomes popular on YouTube. However, that only gave me a very narrow view of the community and its dynamics.
Since then though, things have changed a lot. YouTube now has a public API as well as pre-made libraries to use. With these, it becomes very easy to collect statistics and perform your own analysis. So, armed with Python, I set out to investigate YouTube's ubiquitous 'related videos' feature.
