In three easy steps, you can rip flash video from a good majority of tv station websites.
Ethically this may be out of bounds. Well, it depends on your relationship with local agencies, and of course the end-use of the videos in question.

My use is limited. Often we’ll want to collect and catalog our media hits for internal use in presentations and powerpoints.

My current method.

1. Go to the website or page where the video clip is displayed. The large majority deploy flash video players and the .flv format.

2. View Source. Find the url for the .flv file.

3. Paste the flv video url into the converter tool at vixy.net.

And you’re done. You can choose from several output formats.
Just trying to spread the wealth. This method has saved me alot of time.

Another alternative is using screen capture software to rip straight from your monitor to a video file, but I’ve yet to find something that captures the audio very well.

When I was a sophomore in college, mired in pencils, paintbrushes, darkroom chemicals, and exacto-knives, there was ONE book that ultimately served to jump start my career in web design. I carried that book in my big red car for an entire semester, highlighting and sticky-noting and referencing it like a sacred text. That was the year 2001.

Now that book is available as a free pdf.

Jeffrey Zeldman on Taking Your Talent to the Web:

“I wrote this book for four people:

For Jim, a print designer who’s tired of sending his clients to someone else when they need a website.

For Sandi, a gifted art director, who’s hit a wall in her advertising career, and is eager to move into full-time interactive design.

For Billy, whose spare-time personal site has gotten so good, he’d like to become a professional web designer—but is unsure about what is expected or how to proceed.

And for Caroline, a professional web designer who wants to better understand how the medium works and where it is going.

I did not make up these names or descriptions: These are real people. I knew the book was finished when it had covered everything they needed to know.”

So I’m bookmarking things with my Delicious account, having fun with my twitter thing, uploading photos to my flickr account, and occasionally logging into facebook and wondering why the heck I even have a facebook account.

not to mention Youtube, Vimeo, my blog, my design portfolio, ….all this stuff of mine scattered over the internet.

So if you’re like me, you begin to say to yourself: “Self, I’d really like for lurkers and stalkers to be able to subscribe to ALL of my internet activities and get summaries of them on ONE page, or ONE FEED.”

Well, say hello to “Lifestreaming: a chronological aggregated view of your life activities both online and offline.”

You’ll notice that I’ve decided to use Friendfeed to accomplish this. (added it to my sidebar) Apparently it’s one of the best tools of many to do this sort of thing.

In all honesty, I’d been wanting to pull everything together like this for awhile, but only caught on to the concrete idea when I saw the “lifestream” on Matt Herzberger’s site. Thanks for clueing me in, Matt.

My online worlds can now coalesce and inbreed. Maybe a better analogy would be Trail Mix. Let the stalking, lurking begin.

There’s a great conversation going on at EduGuru on the topic of “outliers”.

Reining in the outliers for a university-wide cohesive Web presence

…Along they way they bounce through three additional department Web sites, but the prospective student feels like they’ve been to three completely different university sites. Each step along the way they have to figure out where the navigation and search bar have moved, how their content is organized, what lingo they use, and likely have a completely different experience on each site. Sound familiar?

Developing a university-wide Web design template that is flexible enough for all departments, programs and units to use is one behemoth of a challenge.

The “5 steps to reign in outliers” are very good.  It’s a great post, the the comments are a great read too.  There are many sides to this argument. And multiple points of view depending on WHERE you are in the University food chain. A top-level branding/template czar? A department level web designer?

Nobody likes to be pigeonholed into a box. And this is especially true of web designer types.
A noteworthy example being Douglas Bowman quitting google in frustration over his inability to coexist with their limited design philosophy.

I’ve posted quite a bit here on my blog about the struggles I’ve had in working to create flexible templates. And only recently have I started to get over the hump. It’s tough.

In particular:

University Web Template Hell, or Variation within Constraints?

and

Did he say “Balkanized”? What a Great Word.