Vodpod Blog

GigaOm, PaidContent and the Cheezburger Network All Launch VodSpot-Powered Sites

We’re excited to announce this morning three leading websites have launched VodSpots, joining TechCrunch (who reported news of our VodSpot service and their VideoCrunch launch last month), Talking Points Memo, TechStars, Gawker and many others in adopting our VodSpot platform.

If you’re here,  it’s very likely you read Om Malik’s GigaOm regularly; his network of sites are among the most respected in the the technology business.   Om and his team have created a new video section for GigaOm.com using VodSpot (at video.gigaom.com) that pull together videos from their various conferences.  Videos are automatically brought in using our importer from their accounts at blip.tv, Vimeo, Livestream, WordPress and YouTube. Om and his team plan to supplement these videos with others from around the web that they feel are relevant and interesting, using our bookmarklet.

Those who follow the media business, especially the online media business, can’t live without Rafat Ali’s fantastic site, PaidContent.org, now part of the Guardian UK media group.  Rafat and his team have assembled all of the various videos they’ve been posting to their network of blogs in one place — videos.paidcontent.org — using VodSpot.  Videos featured in their posts are automatically added to their Vodpod collection using our importer; Rafat and his team, like Om’s, plan to supplement those videos with others they find on the ‘Net.

Oh, by the way, notice the horizontal scrolling of the video sections on the main page, and vertical scrollers next to the video on video pages. All made possible by our Laminate templating engine that operates under the hood of VodSpot. You can build that kind of stuff with VodSpot if you know a little jQuery.

VodSpots are for fun, too. And what’s more fun than Lolcats — in pictures and video. Ben Huh and his team at the Cheezburger Network have built the ultimate Internet comedy empire, anchored by the legendary I Can Has Cheezburger? and including the insanely popular Failblog.

They have created VodSpots for both I Can Has Cheezburger? and Failblog.

Videos are aggregated on the Cheezburger Network account at Vodpod using our importer (again!) from their various accounts at Viddler and YouTube. Because VodSpots are fully customizable, their sites maintain the same design, look, feel and navigation — even though the video site is hosted by Vodpod, and powered by our VodSpot service.

One of the visions we’ve had for Vodpod all along is that there shouldn’t be just one video destination — there should be thousands. It probably sounds a little corny, but we’re proud to work with so many great partners and to see them use our new VodSpot service. And we hope their efforts, and ours, make the Internet a little more fun and interesting and informative.

We’re launching three new things today.

VODSPOT
The first is VodSpot, which we released as a bit of an experiment nine months ago.

During this period of gestation, Talking Points Memo, TechStars.tv , Gawker and many other partners built and launched VodSpot-powered sites.

We had a hunch that the combination of VodSpot (your own video site) powered by Vodpod (your Web video bookmarks) might produce some chocolate-meets-peanut butter awesomeness. But these initial efforts exceeded our expectations, and we decided to turn VodSpot into a full-fledged product and service.

VodSpot launches today with these significant new capabilities:

• A new template engine (Laminate) that enables VodSpot publishers to build their own templates
• A template editor that gives VodSpot publishers complete markup and creative control over their templates
• Stock templates rebuilt from the ground up with Laminate
• Ability to build your own VodSpot template using jQuery, Prototype, Yahoo! UI, etc.

In short, VodSpot has evolved from very good way to create your own video site to the very best way. Publishers can now easily customize VodSpot templates from head to toe (er, header to footer). They can build their own innovative templates from scratch. They can use expressions to make their templates programmable. Interested? More here.

LAMINATE
Also today: the release of Laminate as an open source project under an MIT License on GitHub. Developers can take the Laminate source code, adopt for their own publishing services or products, and point it at their own data stores.

Now, we’re not going to claim that a new open source layout engine is game-changing. We’ve followed a path blazed by others, as Scott notes: “Laminate isn’t very revolutionary – we’ve purposely tried to learn from existing template systems like the the WordPress one and Smarty templates.”

But, we have added to Laminate one new thing which should be very interesting, and quite useful, for developers; Laminate supports dynamic language for generating dynamic content on each or any page. It’s a programmable templating engine. We’re excited to see how people use it, and hope that we’ve made a valuable contribution.

API 2.0
Third, we have a brand new, built from the ground-up, API.  Publishers and developers used the first version of our API to build their own video sites  (NewTeeVee and 101GreatGoals); integrate videos into their existing service (SecondLife); and create new widgets and tools.

The new API is faster, better, and supports a much wider variety of services and calls.  Here’s a simple and easy way to understand what the new API does: you can build the same kinds of things you might with the YouTube API, but using 3,000,00 videos collected by our 600,000 members from over 10,800 sites. It’s so good, the new VodSpot service is built and runs on top of it.

We hope to see people build cool new apps using it, for services like Boxee, or Android phones that support Flash, or new, rumored tablets that come into existence.

One last thing.
Several months ago, Scott noticed a comment made by Kathy Sierra on a blog post about building community.  She wrote:

Our job as community builders is to not so much to connect with our users, but to give them more and more compelling reasons to connect with one another. And the best way to do that is through helping them learn and grow and ultimately–kick ass. The “at what?” doesn’t matter nearly as much.

We adopted Sierra’s “help users kick ass” mantra while working on VodSpot, Laminate and the new API this summer. We hope they use these new tools to do just that.