January 31, 2007 • 5:21 pm
As PR-man-in-chief, I have more great write-ups and demos to share with you vod:podders.
First, a great piece in this month’s Business 2.0 magazine by Om Malik called Aggregating the Aggregators. Unfortunately it’s not up online (yet), but Om starts by noting that “some of the smartest new companies on the Net are those that are doing the content collectors one better” and says of vod:pod that:
[it] was born in San Francisco in June and so far shows a lot of promise. VodPod allows consumers to build their own “pods,” which is Hall’s rather fancy term for online video channels. The idea is that you grab the videos you like from any of the 100-odd video-sharing sites already online — say, every bird-watching vid you can get your hands on — and build a channel called the Birding Pod.
…
This is one of the hot opportunities in new new media: hyper-aggregation. If aggregation is what we’ve seen so far on YouTube and Flickr, hyperaggregation is aggregating the aggregators.
There was also a nice writeup on vod:pod in the current edition of Filmmaker Magazine.
Finally, Robert Scoble just posted an interview he did with me back in December. vod:pod looks great, but I wanted to run in horror looking at myself on camera.
As I posted on Scoble’s blog, I clearly have a face for radio and wished he was a podcaster instead!
Filed under: News
January 30, 2007 • 5:21 pm
We’ve made a series of changes to vod:pod today, and wanted to take a moment to explain them on the blog in this entry, and the previous two entries.
Next time you log in to vod:pod, you’ll see big changes on the home page.
You can now manage your pod (or pods!) right from your home page. You can search for, upload or add videos to your pod; invite people to join you pod; start a top 10 list; and change your pod settings.
Just click on the “+” sign to open the module, and the “-” to close it.
You can also monitor the most recent activity on your pod from this new module.
We’ve also added something we’re calling the “Video Inbox.”
This lets you keep track of what your friends are adding to their pods, the latest activity on pods you’ve joined (more on that in a second), and the latest or most watched videos added to vod:pod. Customize the feeds (just click to select the feeds you want on your home page), or change the order (just drag and drop the boxes). We’re very excited about this new feature, you can imagine lots of ways we might push this forward. So stay tuned!
Filed under: News , How VodPod Works
We want to make vod:pod the best and easiest way for friends to show friends videos they’ve found on the Internet. We’ve tried to mover closer to that goal with today’s update.
It’s now much easier to invite friends, and we have made changes that make it worth your while.
When you invite friends, you can track your invitations, see who has responded — and who hasn’t.
When your frends join up we’ll create a pod for them automatically (a separate “start a pod” step is no longer necessary for our new members). And you’ll be able to track when they add video to their pod (so long as it’s public) from the new Video Inbox on your home page (see the post about the new home page for members).
You’ll want to invite friends not just to show them videos you’ve found, but the see what they turn up!
And remind the friends you invite to get the bookmark button for their browser (make sure you’ve got yours, you can get it here). When you and your friends have this magic little button, you just need to give it a click when you see a video on YouTube, MySpace, Google Video or literally hundreds of other sites to let each other know when you’ve found a cool video.
Filed under: News , How VodPod Works
January 8, 2007 • 6:31 pm
As we’ve written before, we do our own PR work here at vod:pod. Since it’s now 2007, it’s high time I provide a recap of some recent coverage in the blogosphere of our service.
The BlogHerald wrote a nice, detailed review over the holiday break. Here’s the summary:
OVERALL: vod:pod has a rich feature set that is easy to use. You can make your videos public or private; consequently, could see people using it to share home movies, weddings, or travel logs. For others it will be a convenient way to collect and share interesting videos that they find online. The pod videos widget alone is worth the site registration, and the future plans for domain mapping and subscription services make it an interesting choice for anyone looking to monetize their own content.
RATING: 8.5 out of 10
Today, we found saw this gem on WidgetsLab :
VodPod.com is an easy to use, free service that allows you to save your favorite videos to “Podsâ€. There is also a social network to VodPod that allows you to see what is popular in the community and add friends if you want.
…
VodPod.com is still in beta and they list under 1000 members as of 01/08/2007 but I can see VodPod growing very rapidly in the near future.
We appreciate those fine sentiments.
Finally, we also noticed a mention on the BeekerIdeas blog today via our trackbacks:
I’ve been faffing around a bit with vod:pod lately after spying their logo on a video here and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m a bit in love with it.
Thanks for that!
Now admidst all the good news, we should note that we did lose one user. HuggyBear wrote in his Vox blog that vod:pod was on his “cull” list (along with del.icio.us, iLike, and Digg came close) as we “aren’t able to offer anything that’s already in Vox.” We wrote HuggyBeat to tell him we were disappointed, but understood. We think the clear differences between vod:pod and Vox (and basic blogging services) will be much more apparent in the coming weeks — and we intend to win HuggyBear back as a regular user of vod:pod. Stay tuned!
Filed under: News
