Vodpod had a little bit of downtime today due to a Mysql bug (for you non-geeks, Mysql is our database software).

We’ve fixed the problem temporarily, so the site should run fine the rest of the day. But we’re going to have to do a bit of maintenance on our databases tomorrow morning to get the full fix in place. As a result, Vodpod will be in “read-only” mode for a couple of hours in the morning (Pacific Time).

That means you won’t be able to add videos between roughly 8AM-11AM Pacific tomorrow morning. But you’ll be able to watch videos just fine.

Apologies in advance for any inconvenience this might cause.

If you really love collecting videos, you’ll need one of our hot new Vodpod Pro accounts. It’s a steal at just $24.95.

What do you get? Well, for one some awesome stats:

Not only do the charts look cool, but you get detailed stats for each video, showing views on Vodpod as well as views through any widgets you have deployed.

What else?

• Up to 20 video import feeds, so you can import all of the collections you have around the web
• Up to 20 collections, so you can build your own mini-YouTube
• And a nifty badge that tells the world how awesome you are

And it goes without saying you’ll get the kind thanks from Team Vodpod and the entire Vodpod community for helping us to keep the machines on and humming.

So run, don’t walk, to get your Vodpod account Pro-ified.

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 were perusing the Quantcast top sites list yesterday, and pulled out the top video sites on that list (interestingly, all are “Quantified” except YouTube):

YouTube — #4

Hulu –  #38

DailyMotion — #93

Vimeo — #228

Justin.tv — #253

Vodpod.com — #320

So, among video sites on the web, Vodpod is now arguably the sixth most trafficked. Why are we growing?

I think, in the end, it’s because we do something slightly different from other video sites. Like YouTube, DailyMotion and Vimeo, we’re people-powered. Unlike those sites, we let people aggregate their favorite videos from anywhere on the web rather than upload their videos to us.

For example, someone like Talking Points Memo can build a collection on Vodpod that includes videos they make and host on blip.tv or YouTube, along with videos they find and think relevant from sites such as MSNBC, the Daily Show, and others. An even more extreme example: TechCrunch has aggregated videos from over 100 different video sites in their collection (which in turn powers their VodSpot at video.techcrunch.com).

Now that there are literally tens of thousands of sites who offer video with embed codes, we solve a real problem, and make it a lot easier to keep all your favorite videos in one place. Offering publishing tools — our widgets, VodSpot, our API — provide a purely practical reason to keep your collection at Vodpod.

And that’s why we’re growing.

We passed two nice milestones a couple of days ago:

Over 3,000,000 videos collected on Vodpod.com.

Now over 600,000 members on our service.

One other milestone: last month (August 2009), over 10 million people visited Vodpod.com to watch videos. That was more than 5 times as many people who visited Vodpod.com in August 2008.

Among other things, that data reminds us we have an awesome community here at Vodpod, who are building it into one of the best and biggest places to find and watch video on the Web. Thanks for that!

We’re pscyhed to have TechCrunch using VodSpot.

Their new video site — christened VideoCrunch, naturally — launched today. Here’s their Vodpod collection that powers their site; videos are automatically aggregated on their account from TechCrunch, Mobile Crunch,  and CrunchGear using our blog importer.

Here’s the TechCrunch article about VodSpot and their new video site.

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.

Welcome to our new version of the Vodpod blog!

You’ll notice that our Vodpod blog is a bit rough around the edges right now. We’ve had to make an unplanned move to WordPress.com from the self-hosted WordPress.org blog (our self-hosted blog got hit by a spammer). So, we’ll hope you’ll excuse the cracked paint and loose boards. We’re working to get it all straightened out as quickly as we can.

We’ve tried to make Vodpod more engaging for visitors by allowing guests to comment on videos you collect at Vodpod.

Most of the time, people add interesting comments. Occasionally, guests visit and even add excellent comments. But not everyone out there has good manners, or good taste, and occasionally comments might get left on videos you collect that aren’t appropriate.

In the rare instances when this happens, you can “hide” the comment. Just go to the video page, mouse over the comment that is inappropriate, and click the “thumbs down” button:

This will have the effect of “hiding” the comment:

Of course, because we’re a diverse video community, it’s important to strike the right balance with this tool. The “down mod” tool isn’t designed to exclude comments you disagree with; rather, you should use it only when the comment violates the overall ethos of our community here at Vodpod.

The most common examples see of comments that should get “down modded” are:

Spam — the comment includes a link that isn’t relevant, and is only provided to drive traffic

Inappropriate language — racial epithets, excessive swearing, personal insults

Jibberish — some people just type in jibberish to get a reaction

We hope you’ll use the tool — judiciously — to make Vodpod a more interesting community, a place where we allow people to express a wide range of views, but where we keep things civil and informed, too.

We’ve finally gotten around to re-building our Facebook app. Our new Facebook app is simple, elegant, and exactly the thing you’d want if you like to share videos on Facebook with your friends.

If you use Facebook, get it now! Details on how to install the new app are below, along with an overview of what has changed.

We first built a Facebook app two years ago, when the initial Facebook application platform was launched. We attempted to build as much of the core Vodpod functionality as possible into that first app. That approach proved hard to maintain and was overly complicated; as a result the Vodpod Facebook app was the poor step-sister in our family of publishing tools.

The new Vodpod Facebook does one thing, and it does it well — it puts a nice looking entry in your Facebook feed (video thumbnail, title and your comment) whenever you add a video to your Vodpod collection:

If this is so simple, why is it so great? Because your friends will actually see when you’ve added a video, and they’ll be more likely to watch what you’re collecting. And, because Vodpod allows you to share your favorite videos with a click from more than 10,000 different sites, they’ll be able to see all your favorites (and not just the videos you like on YouTube or DailyMotion). Over the past week, I’ve noticed that my Facebook friends are watching — and commenting on — videos I add far more frequently than they did with our old application.

It’s just three quick steps to install. Go to your Vodpod home page, and under the “share and publish” menu on the right, click Facebook and then click the “Connect with Facebook” button at the top of the page.

You’ll see three quick screens asking you to give our new app various permissions in order to publish items to your Facebook feed.

The first screen asks you to allow access for the Vodpod Facebook app — just click the big blue “Allow Access” button:

The second screen asks for permission for “Offline Access” — which means we can publish to your Facebook page even when you’re not logged in and using Facebook. Click “allow offline access.”

The final step asks is a simple permission to allow us to publish content to your feed — click “Allow Publishing”:

We’ll take you to your Vodpod account page to confirm the application is installed — you should see a screen that looks like this:

That’s it, with those quick steps the Vodpod Facebook app is installed. Next time you add a video to your Vodpod collection, you’re Facebook friends will see it in their feed.