Vodpod Blog

Footage of Iranians protesting their elections on the streets of Tehran the past three days has been extremely moving. Unlike the uprising in China in 1989 and the massacre in Tiananmen Square, these scenes of unrest are captured on mobile phones and small digital devices and sent to the world.

We’ve tried to document some of the more recent and best footage and reportage here. Many other Vodpod members are collecting videos about the protests from web sites and news sources around the world, including Video Giornale Interattivo, Dheeruyadav, and Dandelionsalad. You can see all the latest footage collected by our members here.

Please bookmark videos you find, and tag them “Iran” or “Iran Election Protests” so we can help one another to stay informed.

Only six months ago we announced VodSpot, a way to turn your Vodpod video collection into your own video site with the push of a button.

Like so many things we do, VodSpot was an experiment. We put it out there to see what people might create with it and how it might be used. Six months in we see a lot of promise; so much that we’re investing a bunch of energy and time over the next few months to dramatically expand the capabilities of VodSpot, and to turn it into a more substantial publishing platform. Stay tuned.

The ways in which this new service is being used are quite diverse. One of our longtime partners, Talking Points Memo, launched a new video section of their site built on VodSpot in the spring. It is a compendium of recent videos they have produced, as well as relevant and interesting reportage, commentary and even comedy from other media outlets (MSNBC, CNN, The DailyShow among them).

We’re pleased that a number of prominent news and political blogs use Vodpod, and many have created VodSpots as well — among them Americablog and the Sayfie Review.

TechStars is a Boulder, Co.-based organization that provides both seed capital and mentorship for start-ups and entrepreneurs. They’ve created TechStars.tv, where one can watch videos about the TechStars program and the start ups in it, as well as speeches by and interviews with many of the mentors in the program.

Actual startups use VodSpots, too! One is Help Hive, a new service just launched in Seattle. It helps Seattle-ites find plumbers, gardeners, roofers, landscapers and more. They have created a Vodspot where they share very funny collection of DIY-gone-wrong videos — proof if any were needed why it’s better to hire an expert than to try to do it yourself.

A VodSpot can serve as an excellent companion to a blog. A perfect example of this is the NecoleBitchie.com blog, where the author casts a wry eye on the world of R&B and hip-hop stars. Ms. Bitchie’s video collection — named Bitchie TV, naturally — seamlessly fits into the layout and navigation of her blog, maintaining the same header and overall look and feel of the blog. It also shows the range of template styles VodSpot can support.

The ReelSEO blog, which provides in-depth coverage of the online video world, also has done a nice job building out a video section to their site. Again, the overall look and feel of the blog has been maintained, with a consistent and header on both the VodSpot and the main blog.

The most recent, and very intriguing, use of VodSpot comes from the Gawker blog empire. Just today they launched a microsite ad for the HBO show “TrueBlood” — powered by VodSpot. The microsite is linked to from the Gawker.com front door through a Vodpod widget. Cool, we think. And interesting.

There are over 3000 VodSpots in the wild, so we’ve barely gotten started with this post. I’d have to stay up a lot later to cover the full range.

I just pushed out some snazzy new user pages at Vodpod.  Now, instead of having a subdomain for each collection (i.e. http://spencerpod.vodpod.com), you’ll have a single user page showing all your recent activity.  This page will showcase all the videos you add on vodpod, as well as comments you leave on other videos.  You can check out my page at http://vodpod.com/spencer.

For those of you with multiple video collections, each collection will live under your user profile page.  For example, my “electronic music videos” collection is at http://vodpod.com/spencer/electro.

In your sidebar, we’ve added a couple of nifty modules, most notably the Stats module.  This shows a fancy little chart of your monthly video views.  Below that, you can also see how many videos you’ve discovered, meaning you were the first to collect, and videos you’ve made popular, which are those that you discovered, and 5 or more people went on to collect.

I hope you like the changes!