About This Site

toob is animated, anyone-edited annotations for YouTube videos. It's a site where you can add time-coded annotations to videos and then watch them swoop in and out as the video plays. To start adding a set of annotations to a video, click here.

History: In 2009, I made a fan website for an album by the mashup artist, Girl Talk. The album was "Feed The Animals", and my website was FeedTheAnimalsSamples.com. The whole point of the site was to let you listen to the album while a readout below the music player showed what songs Girl Talk was sampling at the current playback position. At the time I made the site, the Wikipedia article for the album contained detailed data about what songs were being sampled to create the music, and I cleaned up that data for my site. (Since then, some hard-line Wikipedians have ruled the sample data "original research" and removed it from the article, but another site sprang up to house it. The Internet!)

In 2010, Girl Talk released his next album, "All Day", and I made AllDaySamples.com. The site was way more popular than I expected. I did an interview about it for ology.com, and another great site, Mashup Breakdown, even borrowed my data for a similar player.

So all this got me excited to make toob, the goal of which has been to address the shortcomings I saw with the first two sites: First, there are awesome videos out there for the Girl Talk tracks, and so toob ties them into the player, with an all-new animated data readout. Second, people had been sending me data corrections for the original websites, but what I really wanted was a wiki, where anyone could create or edit annotations instantly.

While it was originally made for music and video mashups, it's really just a wiki of video annotations. While viewing a video, you can click "Edit" to edit the annotations. To start annotating a new YouTube video, click "Annotate a video" on the front page. To assemble several video annotations so that they play in sequence, click "Create a playlist" (the playlist is only editable by you). And in case you haven't already found them, here are playlists for Feed The Animals and All Day.

I hope you enjoy the site.

Travis