It feels like a few months since this post, but here we are. VideoSift has become a passion for me and quite a few other people. I know, it's only a website, but a good online community is also a living thing – a sentient group mind, and I'm very proud to have been a part of this organism over the last 12 months.

Perhaps I'm biased, but would it be wrong to claim that this the most alive, most vibrant, most intelligent community on the Web? Also, I feel like I've met a few hundred people who might let me crash on their couch for a night, and that has to be a good thing. (Do you have Wi-Fi and beer?)

On to the goodies ...

VideoSift Collectives

We're very excited about this feature. In a nutshell, Collectives are a way to create mini-sites around common interests. Here are the details on how it works:

All Gold Star members are able to found one Collective of their choice. For example I've founded "80s High School Reunion" . This is a Collective for people of a certain age or people who have an interest in 80s music, movies etc. As the founder of the Collective, I spawn my Collective from my profile. I give the Collective a subdomain - in this case, 80s.videosift.com. I choose a Collective avatar from Flickr, and give the Collective a description.

Now I can start inviting Collective members. As the founder, I can invite members by entering their member name in the Collective admin page.

When a Sifter joins a Collective, they can start attributing posts to the Collective. That means that when you submit a video, you can choose a collective you are a member of and it then "belongs" to that Collective. A sifter might be a member of a few Collectives. So, I might attribute a Devo song to the "80s high School Reunion" and a Men at Work song to the "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie" Collective that I am a member of. It's up to me.

Although a Sifter might be a member of a few Collectives, a Gold Star may only found one Collective.

Within the collective page, there are Collective member rankings showing who has the most votes for videos attributed to that Collective. The "Vote Leader" is the Collective member other than the founder who has the most votes for their Collective attributed posts.

Outside the Collective, there are rankings in the sidebar showing the "Top 5 Collectives" by vote. So there is competition within the Collectives and competition between Collectives as well.

A couple of important points about attributing videos: You may not go back and attribute your old (Pre Feb 17 '07) posts to a collective. You may not change an attribution once it is made. You can however, edit your posts that were made after you joined a collective and attribute at that time.

Within the collective mini-site, there are different ways to sort the videos and a comment area, similar to a member profile. The CSS of the collective mini-site is completely customizable via an upload file.

Lastly, you may receive email notifications when a member has attributed a new post to your collective or posted a comment on the Collective mini-site. (notifications can be disabled in your personal profile).

Thanks as usual, to Lucky for doing all the heavy lifting in coding this. Also thanks to the beta testers of the late, great Techno Ravers Collective.

New Channels

We've expanded our channel line-up to an even 10. Your favorite channel might not be there. If you are a Gold Star, I encourage you to start a Collective on the topic! Here is the rundown on the new channels

Animation - This is probably the easiest of all the new channels to define. It's for all things moving - from cartoons, anime, claymation, stop-motion and other obvious ones that I've missed.

Art - This is the most difficult channel to define. There are some works that obviously fall into this channel, but lets try and use a slightly conservative view on "art" . I'm hesitant to give examples, but if you'd like to throw up some in the comments, we can discuss it.

Viral - We define Viral Videos to be clever commercials promoting a product or service. It may not be obvious that the video is a commercial. One of the reasons for including this as a channel is that I know some Sifters would like the ability to filter this type of content off the Sift.

Vintage - This is for old stuff. Your definition of "old" may vary, depending on your age. That's OK.

Nature - David Attenborough clips, wild animals, weather and more. Domesticated pets would not fall into this channel in most cases.

We will do our best to try and find the obvious ones to tag into the channels retroactively; we could use your help in tagging the rest of the old catalogue. Thanks muchly to my Vegemite cohort Ren for designing the new channel logos.

Other Changes

Channels and Collectives now have their own tabs. We've rejiggered the in interface a bit to make jumping around easier. We've also cleaned up the toolbar under the videos with icons for different functions. (Thanks http://www.videosift.pl">Lukasz).

We've added a video description field for all posts. This will show up on the front page and on other multi-post pages. It's a way for the poster to give more information on the post. Longish descriptions will be truncated with the rest showing up in the first comment via a [more inside] link.

There is now a "long" tag for videos over 10 minutes. This will appear as clock icon next to the video. (No more ZZZs.)

Celebration

We'll be popping in and out of a this http://gabbly.com/www.videosift.com">Gabbly chat session for the next 24 hours or so. I hope to see you all there.

I would also like to announce Ladybug's external VideoSift forum, Sifter's Coffee House which she has done a really nice job on. We've given it a permanent place in the "friends and partners" panel on the right. ->

Thank you Sifters, it's been an amazing year. We've had a blast having this kind of shared community journey. The next 12 months are going to hold some big surprises – they are already taking shape, and I can't wait to share them with you all.