{"id":661,"date":"2014-03-22T06:32:32","date_gmt":"2014-03-22T11:32:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/?p=661"},"modified":"2014-03-22T06:32:32","modified_gmt":"2014-03-22T11:32:32","slug":"openlayers-still-popular-on-youtube-years-later","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/archives\/661\/openlayers-still-popular-on-youtube-years-later\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenLayers: Still popular on YouTube, years later."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In 2007, I posted a video to YouTube; it was just a 5 minute, silent how-to video showing how to load data that you had in a shapefile, open it in QGIS, style it, export it to a mapfile, and load it into OpenLayers. I&#8217;ve given pretty much this exact presentation to groups around the world: from Cape Town, South Africa, to Osaka, Japan, but at the time it was just a quick demo I put together, related to a wiki page: <a href=\"http:\/\/trac.openlayers.org\/wiki\/MappingYourData\">Mapping Your Data<\/a>, in the OpenLayers wiki.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/WJt0rAyD2xU\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I hadn&#8217;t paid attention to it in forever &#8212; I uploaded it to YouTube back in 2007, and I haven&#8217;t really thought about it since. So as I&#8217;m using YouTube a bit more recently, I actually looked at my analytics&#8230; and realized that this video still gets *400 views every month*, with an average of two minutes watched per view.<\/p>\n<p>This means that 20 minutes gets wasted watching this video every day (on average); that is more time than I spend on YouTube in an average week. (Given my new employer, I can imagine that changing somewhat in the near future.)<\/p>\n<p>Amusingly enough, for a long time this wasn&#8217;t my most popular video; the OpenLayers video is a bit long, and with no sound, can be a bit of a drag. (The pace of it, even 7 years on, still impresses me though; I spent a whole weekend just going through the motions to get the flow down. It really does work nicely.) My most popular video for a long time was an N95 Accelerometer Demo:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/zqZeANFBmis\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>This demo showed the use of a Python script to use the accelerometer and simple 2d graphics to move a ball around the screen. (The Symbian Python APIs for interacting with 2d graphics were terrific, and I wish modern phones had something similarly easy.) In the week after that video launched, it had *1500* views; but it was a flash in the pan, and hasn&#8217;t maintained its popularity, getting only 2 watches in the last 30 days. (This video was popular enough that I was invited to join the YouTube monetization program, unlike the OpenLayers video, which was never &#8216;viral&#8217; enough to get there.)<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve never been much of a video guy before &#8212; another thing I can see changing &#8212; but I&#8217;m now putting together some of the videos from my quadcopter flights. Last night, I published my bloopers from the first couple days of flying: <\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/PhbsHUvZdTg\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>But I guess I can never expect, based on my current views, that anything I do on YouTube will be more popular than a silent video I published about OpenLayers back in 2007.<\/p>\n<p>I guess this really just goes back to: OpenLayers was a unique experience, and is probably the most impressive thing I will actually work on for the benefit of the internet at large&#8230; ever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In 2007, I posted a video to YouTube; it was just a 5 minute, silent how-to video showing how to load data that you had in a shapefile, open it in QGIS, style it, export it to a mapfile, and load it into OpenLayers. I&#8217;ve given pretty much this exact presentation to groups around the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54,117],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-openlayers","category-youtube"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=661"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}