oEmbed is a brand-new spec, announced by Cal Henderson (Flickr), Mike Malone, Leah Culver (Pownce), and Richard Crowley (OpenDNS). oEmbed is an open format for standardizing how images, videos, links, or other media get embedded, and for sidestepping media providers’ APIs (or the screen scraping you’d need when they don’t have one). When a user posts a link that points straight at a specific media resource, it lets a site embed that media quickly and painlessly. Here’s how it works: it converts the link accordingly — that is, it turns the image or video into XML or JSON that tells you how to embed the media.