Most of the ocularium.org website is self obvious. Browse around. Find interesting videos. Share links with your friends. While most of the ocularium.org site is "read only", the tagging tool can be used to add videos and tags to Ocularium once you log in. Please feel free to add videos to Ocularium and create tags for those videos. If you have a large body of videos hosted on-line and you would like to make them available for tagging, send us e-mail and we will see what we can do.
All video metadata and tags are stored in Freebase, a collaboratively created database of general knowledge. Beyond the interfaces at ocularium.org, you can access stored metdata and tags through the Freebase API.
That has two good answers: (1) Everyone! Since all tags are stored in Freebase, they can be used, copied, or modified by almost anyone. (2) You do! The tags you create are attributed to you in Freebase so everyone can know of the great quality and importance of your contribution.
We don't want to own your data and we don't want to own you either! The only reason you need an account is to add videos and create tags because both actions add new data to Freebase, which requires that you log in to contribute. Thus, you don't log in to Ocularium; you just log in to Freebase through the Ocularium interface. Currently this requires a Freebase account which you can get here, or because Freebase has partial OpenID support, you can also login with your Google or Yahoo account credentials. Ocularium will not have access to these credentials-- that's the magic of OpenID!
There are many reasons why a particular video may not load. Sometimes the site that hosts the video may be experiencing technical problems. In this case, you should wait a little while and try again. Other times, a video hoster (e.g. YouTube) does not allow external players (like Ocularium) to play a particular video. If you are still having problems. please send us mail, with as much information as you can give us, including the URL you were trying to load and the error message if Ocularium gave you one.
Not yet. We have to scrape/extract/parse the metadata from the source site order to include a particular video, and currently we only support the Internet Archive and YouTube. We plan to add others in the future as fast as we can. Some sites have terms of service that prohibit Ocularium from operating with their content, but we may be able to include others. Send us mail if there is a particular site you would like us to include.
Our belief is that tools are replaceable, but that data retains its value over time. We used Flash because it's currently the best tool for the job. It just works for every major browser for every major OS, and we didn't have to code anything platform-specific. In a year or two, HTML5 may be settle as a standard and replace Flash for Web-based video applications. When that happens, we will have HTML5 tools ready.
If you have ideas, questions, concerns, want to report a bug, would otherwise like to engage us in conversation, please send us e-mail.