Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

So, it's my pleasure to announce our end of year project, and the formation of the VideoSift Gold Star Academy. It's a little tongue-in-cheek, but seriously - I think this community knows much more collectively about good online video than any single editor at one of the big publications.

Starting on November 1st there will be a new invocation, "*nominate" for any of our videos. This will work just like a channel invocation, and will place a small icon next to the video indicating it's been nominated. Videos only need to be nominated once.

I want to lay a few guidelines on you that we've thought up. These are still open to suggestions - until we make them hard and fast on November 1st. We'd love to get your input.

The focus should be on hand-crafted videos, not clips from our favourite shows, commercials or professional music videos. We would probably make exceptions to this rule if the video is something that was made popular almost exclusively by its presence on the Web. A good example of this would be the OK Go treadmill video.

The content should come from the year 2006. So Star Wars Kid would be out. The exception to this would be content that was made before 2006, but was released or made popular in the year 2006. (Our number 2 ranked Dorkman Star Wars duel perhaps?)

This is a gold star level invocation, so hurry up and get your gold stars before November 1 people.

Anything else?

Ok, how many nominations do you get? and how is it top100? is there voting later on, or just sorted by VS upvotes received? And are you just gonna give #1 to uke-dude?

Probably need more clarification on tv / movie clips.. what about outstanding tv moment like stewart on crossfire, or colbert correspondance dinner speech (well cspan is tv).. I'm assuming your favorite fam guy/simpsons/tds/colbert clips are out (what is left?).. So can we limit the number of slots for guitar based vids or kitten based vids?

we have some regulars sitting around mid-30s.. have to fast track some people.. let's see 8 videos a day.. it's doable. auto upvote set to on.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Good questions. How does 5 nominations per sifter sound?

I think that after we have a list of about 500 - 1000 videos, we will pass those nominations on to an "executive panel" of around 20 secret sifters (who know the handshake). They will winnow the submissions down to 100. We will use the number of votes as a factor for ordering as well, but not exclusively because a video submitted in October is going to have less votes than one submitted in February of course.

well 40 academy members.. that's 200 vids. (just sayin')

Here's an idea also.. How about the *nominate doesn't print out anything, so secret nominations. So there could be overlapping nominations of multiple people said *nominate (I'm guessing siftbot would destroy your comment when you nominate). You could also sort by that and take that into account for rankings. If my top 3 picks are already nominated, I'm going to search out crappier videos just to find 5 to nominate...

(Of course with only 5 votes, we might not end up with 100 vids using this method)

I like the sound of this. But....
What about the people who don't submit videos but vote constantly? I can think of a few good sifters who fall into this category.

I think the secret nominate is very interesting... makes a lot of sense, seems like a truer sample. This would mean that you couldn't predict how many nominees would emerge. If too few, more nomination votes could be given out.

200 seems like too many, 10 too few. 30-50 seems like the right range for the end product. You want to have some gems that weren't turned up elsewhere IMO.

I've long had an idea of doing a scrapbook at the end of a year, to print&bind the viral jokes that were emailed that year.. this is sort of an equivalent.

I'm trying, just spent an hour trawling youtube for 5 submission worthy vids.
But now our cable connection is capped I had to stop, waiting for vids to load is too painful!

Can you submit all 5 votes to one video?

This will be hard. Time to troll through the tubes.

These are nominations on (A) existing VS posts, or (B) new submissions?

I thought it was A, but folks are talking like it's B. If you're going to do a "best of", A makes sense to me.

How long will we have to vote? I'm a terrible procrastinator

It was A, i think we want to have it together by the start of December, maybe a little earlier.