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Flickr Goes For a Little Video

And by a little, I mean 90 seconds. Flickr recently announced that Flickr would be hosting video. But only up to 90 seconds, and only for Flickr Pro users — those who have paid for the service, in other words.

This may seem like a very conservative way to get into online video, and it is. And considering the intellectual property headaches Google is still going through, the continuing evolution of how people are watching video online, and the core mission of Flickr in the first place, it was the right thing to do.

If you want to see what’s being offered, you can view a video pool at http://flickr.com/groups/video/ . If you pick one, like this video of a cat getting a bath, you’ll see that it’s embedded and has comments, tags, and pools like a photograph.

If you want to search for these videos, look to the advanced search. You’ll see that you can limit your search to photos/videos, or to CGI/animation. (Why there isn’t one option that allows you to limit your search to moving images is past me.) You’ll also want to check the option that allows you to filter your results by media type. Choose videos. (Does this include animation or not? Not clear.)

I couldn’t search videos, filtering video content only, and get search results without a keyword. So I did a search for the and got over 7000 videos. Sorting by most recent found a variety of things, including what looks like very short vidblogs, travel videos, and pet videos. (There’s one video of a Welsh Corgi puppy attacking a stuffed rabbit that made my computer explode in a cloud of cute.

I know that you can get RSS feeds for tag searches on Flickr, and the Flickr sites indicate that video results can show up in Flickr RSS feeds. But I couldn’t find any way to get just the latest videos as RSS feeds. It’s possible that I’m missing something very obvious.

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