Playing with the idea of making a video blog of locally trending videos that pulls from Youtube’s API and posts trending videos related to Houston.
If I simply query for recent videos with the word Houston, I get a mix of car videos no one has seen, some Whitney Houston videos and some interesting local uploads.
Any suggestions for better paramaters? Could I get more specific with Youtube Trends? The Youtube Trends blog lets me search for trending videos in Houston, but there doesn’t seem to be an API…
I’m not sure that there’s currently a way to get videos via the API recently trending in Houston or the Houston area, but one idea for getting recent videos about Houston would be to use the topicId field in v3 of the API — using Freebase topics yields much more semantically relevant results than a simple keyword search. For example, this query (you’ll have to be oAuth authenticated to make this call):
GET https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/search?part=snippet&topicId=%2Fm%2F03l2n
(/m/0312n is the Freebase Topic ID for the city of Houston) will return videos of live concerts in Houston, the Houston coffee & cars series, etc. If you were to collect a series of Freebase IDs that you think your viewers would be interested in (sports teams, local cuisine, etc. etc.), you could then aggregate your results and sort them by date or by view count.