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September 26, 2008 • 2:13 pm 0

Introducing Newswire!

We’ve built a new little product to help you out over the next 40 days until the election (and to keep you informed after that). It’s called Vodpod Newswire.

Newswire gathers the latest videos from over 40 different sites — from news organizations like MSNBC, ABC News, and CBS News to top news and political blogs like Talking Points Memo, Ben Smith at Politico.com, Mark Halperin’s The Page at Time.com, Daily Kos, and JedReport.

We scan these sites every fifteen minutes, looking for their latest videos. We use collecting behaviors on Vodpod.com, as well as data from the sources we track, to help us organize this stream of videos into clusters, so that it’s easier for you to browse.

You can browse videos by source, to see what has been most recently added from your favorite news site or blogger:

Finally, when on a video you’d like to watch, we’ll provide summaries from bloggers and websites that have posted the video and trackbacks o their posts so you can read what they have to say. We also make it easy to collect the video on Vodpod.com or post it to your blog or favorite social network with a click.

Newswire is brand new, it’s not perfect (yet!) by any means, but we hope you’ll enjoy it and find it useful and we’d love your feedback.

Filed under: News

September 5, 2008 • 5:31 pm 0

Myspace Widget: Vodpod Goes All Open Social

Our Myspace widget was pretty clunky and old, and we’ve finally gotten around to building a new one.

It’s a new-fangled “Open Social” widget — way better than our old flash widget, with more powerful ways to fully customize the look and feel of the widget.

The widget itself is a simple video wall, that makes it easy for your Myspace friends to browse through and watch your Vodpod video collection:

The real power of the new widget is that it has many more powerful customization features:

You can “skin” your widget by styling the CSS, and adding custom headers and footers. Or, if you want to do something simpler, you can pick custom background and text colors for your widget (by default, we leave it transparent so it will have the same look as your page).

You can also set what videos you want to show in the widget. Not only which video collection you want to use (if you have more than one), but the set of videos from that collection — by tag, or sorted by recency and other filters.

Get the widget here, give it a try, and let us know what you think.

Filed under: News, Publishing Tools

VodTweet

  • Vodpod DB maintenance done, you should be able to add videos without a hitch. Thanks for your patience.....just about...1 day ago
  • We're doing maintenance on our databases this morning, so Vodpod is "read-only" for the next couple of hours. Thanks for the patience.....just about...1 day ago
  • A little Vodpod maintenance tomorrow AM to fix our Mysql bug. 8am-11am PT. http://bit.ly/8vBgA6....just about...2 days ago
  • Apologies for our 20 min outage today. Our database software (Mysql) has a bug that brought down our database.....just about...2 days ago
  • Vodpod currently "read only" due to a database glitch, we're working to bring it back up. Hope to have everything working again in a moment.....just about...2 days ago
Watch videos at Vodpod and other videos from this collection.