Vodpod Blog

We considers ourselves incredibly lucky to have two stellar outside advisors here at VodPod: Philip Rosedale and Toni Schneider. And it’s not a coincidence we’re fans of their companies here at VodPodHQ.

Philip is the founder of SecondLife. None of us here would pretend that we’re advanced SecondLife residents (my avatar is definitely pathetic looking, yet still better looking than it’s real life creator I am sad to say). But it’s pretty easy to see that the residents of Second Life and Linden Labs are building an incredible and awesome new creative platform and marketplace wrapped together. Linden has provided powerful tools where digital artists of many stripes (we do mean many) can create some unbelievable (we do mean unbelievable) new experiences, and a way to earn a living from their craft — if they want.

Those were guiding principles for us as we planned out VodPod, too. We wanted to build a place that would support self-expression — either through uploading your own video, or curating a collection of video made by other people (think Jordan McDeer)– and to build a marketplace where filmmakers and video producers could make money from their work. We didn’t build a pure marketplace because we didn’t think it would work. Instead, we’ve built an innovative premium video service — where 70% of the subscription revenues flow back to our members who create that content. And we’ll add further ways pod founders and video makers to earn money from advertising on their pods — if they want — in the coming months.

Toni works at WordPress (company is called Automattic), where he is the self-described “band manger” (i.e., the CEO). The three of us here at VodPod are each WordPress users (Scott and I are on WordPress.com, Spencer is on a self-hosted WordPress blog). And you’re reading this on a self-hosted, open source version of WordPress. Our love of WordPress isn’t back-scratching. We were WordPress users before Toni joined Automattic, and long before he signed on to be one of our advisors.

As with Second Life, we admire WordPress first and foremost as a really powerful, but simple-to-use tool for self-expression. We also admire the passionate, devoted community working on the open-source WordPress platform. With VodPod, we wanted to build a service where filmmakers, video producers, and Pod curators would feel as passionate and involved as the WordPress community (both coders and writers).

We’re also inspired by WordPress’s unique (and perhaps accidental?) combination of a centrally-hosted platform (WordPress.com) and an open source, self-hosted product. We’re thinking about that combination a lot these days, stay tuned.

We thought it would be interesting to occasionally post here about some of the sites we really love, and that have influenced our thinking as we developed VodPod.

For me, there is no better place to start than Last.fm , a site we use extensively here in the office (ok, two of us use it, our third partner uses Pandora which is a fine service as well). Indeed, as I type this I’m listening to Last.fm’s radio player (playing now — Neko Case, Runnin’ Out of Fools ).

I was turned on to Last.fm by a friend in late 2004, while still living in London, and started using it in early 2005. It builds a music profile for you based on your listening habits, tracking what you listen to in iTunes (or similar software) while online. Once you’ve built your listening profile, you can meet others who have similar tastes (or not), visit their profiles, and listen to radio feeds built from the result of all this human activity (stations that play music related to your profile, based on “tags” or based on artists you like).

My usage of the service is relatively modest compared to my friends’; according to my Last.fm profile, I’ve listened to about 3700 songs since January 2005. That works out to about 25-30 minutes of usage a day on average, probably about one-third the amount of my friends’ usage on average.

What’s important about Last.fm is that it has totally changed the way I listen to music. At the office, I now rarely play any music from my collection, on my hard drive. Rather, I’ll tune into a Last.fm station (usually telling it to play music similar to three or four artists I like, or to play music by a specific tag such as “alt-country”). The amount of new music I’ve been introduced to in the past year has been astonishing. When listening to Last.fm, about half of the music I hear is new; either a new artist, or a new song by an artist I know. The ratio of “hits” to “duds” is almost always high. Of every ten new songs I hear, there will usually be 5-6 that I really like. In just the past 10 minutes, I’ve heard songs by two artists I’ve never heard before — Jesse Malin and Ariel Borgna. I liked both of them, and I’ll now keep an eye out for them in the future.

And wait, there’s more. The other great thing about Last.fm is that it captures the essentially social experience of listening to music. You and your friends can see what you’ve each been listening to. And in the past few months, Last.fm added a feature that allows me to see, in real time, what your friends on the service are listening to from your own profile. It’s a small, subtle change, but fun, addictive, and surprising and sometimes even revealing.

Nat Torkington today wrote about homophily — the tendency hang out with people just like you — and how social software can cause this in, perhaps, a bad way. Happily, Last.fm somehow manages to avoid this. Through people who have music tastes similar to mine, I’ve discovered a slew of artists through them (and my “neighbours” online) that I probably wouldn’t have found otherwise.

In building Vodpod, we’ve tried to create a service where people help people to find videos that are interesting, relevant, and fun through and with others who have similar tastes and interests; and where the experience of both finding and watching those videos is essentially social. Last.fm has provided a lot of inspiration along the way, not to mention many hours of good listening. Playing now: Wilco .