Brilliant stuff! I've seen another fullscreen UI, forget the site but it worked well

What about adding metadata (up/down/comment) back into the sift?

The key technology that makes this site possible is embedding. We embed the content from other sites and add metadata - comments,tags,voting. How is content for other types embeddable? If embedding isn't possible, is it a digg/delicious-style site with a smarter better looking community?

Just thought of one example, sort of: podcasts. These are freely available online and easy to embed. But even they aren't at the same URL forever. A couple of my favorites, CarTalk and TAL, only keep one or a few episodes online, so they're very ephemeral.

I agree with the other comments that changing the focus/muddying the waters is dangerous. A sandbox would make sense IMO . ***Sift would make sense.

Slightly off-topic, but chime.tv has a very nifty Flash UI.. videocentric, not metadata centric. In other words the vid takes over the screen if you want, and the navigational elements fade away. This is quite nice, though I haven't used it heavily.

Oh man, WeShow is fugly. It's like EVERYONE iS talKing ALL at OnCe, looK heRe NoHere.. ugh. Though I don't get how their front page is 10.55K and VS is 19.

Nice UI! Looks a lot like Pandora. There's all sorts of interesting and smart things VS could do with the metadata/voting history in place. (Users who liked BDSM kitty spanking also liked ____). Think VS meets Last.FM. There's public domain code for collaborative filtering/marketbasket analysis out there, think I sent it to Lucky a while ago.


Could make our timewasting a lot more efficient

Tags, Categories and Playlists are just Metadata. Collectives are Voting Blocks - a group with its own motivations, namely to propogate its memes and popularity. Not in an evil way, it's just their nature.

I post to different categories. I can't be bothered to know/join/submit to the different collectives -- too much work. I'm sure my submissions will suffer as a result. Orphan vids are at a structural disadvantage, and Collectives will/have raise the vote minimum.

One of the cool things about the Sift was always its egalitarian nature. All items in the queue were equal, and there wasn't anything structurally to reinforce power laws. Collectives change this.

I predict in a month, 90%+ of posts escaping the queue will be to Collectives.

Metadata = Knowledge = Power
Librarians for World Domination!

Re filenames I think some ability to zoom in quickly to bring up metadata would be the answer.

Still the problem is that replicating the real world is sometimes not the answer. I have Google Desktop Search - I hit ctrl twice and I can search for any file instantly. That's quicker than exploring a virtual desktop.

Still it will likely have it's own applications and userbase.

It's up for debate of course, but IMHO the Daily Show recognized the absurdity of Iraq long before the MSM. ("Stay The Course"/"We've never been stay the course").

Another interesting thing looking at your list: is there a narrative thread organizing the videos? Chronological? I wonder if the playlists have enough context/metadata to be a useful compound document. Your playlist only has a single word, which is borrowed from TDS. Or maybe the ambiguity is a feature..

I was thinking the other day how interesting it is that writing can now quote videos. The ability to quote video within a written argument is a style of writing enabled beginning 2006 by YouTube's semilegal content.

When I paste the embed code, it could know if it's a dupe.
Reading the description of your problem with the submitting system, I can understand that you can be irked after fancifully crafting a snappy title and some witty tags, but there honestly isn't much value in implementing such a thing simply to check for duplicate embed code. If your creativity is really that important to you, there's nothing stopping you from just clicking the 'continue' button immediately after pasting the embed code. If it's a dupe, the error page will tell you immediately.

Beyond that, I'm imagining something which would return an HTML table with video name and tags as I search. I don't need all the other metadata (submitter,date,votes,rank) to know if it's a dupe.
I'm fuzzy on this point. You said "as I search," but are you saying you'd like a dynamic search/display for titles/tags as you type your new video's title/tags? If this is what you mean, the effort just seem like it'd be worth it. You're saying just title/tags is enough to be positive there's a dupe, but if we show a table of titles/tags, strictly that by itself (not browsing the actual vids) just cannot be enough to know there are dupes in 99.9% of cases. Most titles/tags are not that obvious; you would surely still have to go look at the actual videos. Of course, the alternative is what we do today: just click 'continue' and see an actual listing of the equivalent results. I know the number of concurrent submitters at any one moment isn't vast, but the overhead involved in performing a search through all the thousands of rows in the video db for every keystroke is just a bit much for too little return.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not at all against suggestions or ideas of how to improve things here on the Sift. I'm an enormous proponent of new features, but in this case I think there just aren't strong enough arguments in their favor. Of course, that's just one man's opinion. (Oh, I mean mine, if that wasn't obvious. )