The viral tag. I had a bit of a chat via comments with both Krupo and joedirt now, and I'd like some clarification on its use. The Krupo tagged video resolved simply enough, with my end opinion being that viral should be applied to any commercial, whether or not it's a viral campaign. That sounds a fair compromise, for as Krupo pointed out, some people like to use that tag to filter advertisements.

The second time, a video I posted got tagged as viral by joedirt, and that was a tad confusing for me. As joedirt pointed out, he sees anything which he considers "viral", an ad campaign or otherwise, as something he would tag as viral. I think it might be good to get some kind of community consensus on this. I realize that there have been issues with tagging before, and I don't mean to end this, only bring it up for consideration.

Wikipedia has a good page on the viral phenomenon here, and has definitions for "viral marketing" and "viral video".

My opinion is this: while it would be tempting to attempt to single out "viral" videos of all kinds and apply the tag to any videos that seem to fit the description, I think we'd end up tagging nearly everything on the sift. In fact, in the viral video page linked from the wikipedia page I just linked above, it lists the sources of viral videos and it's basically a superset of the video hosts supported by videosift. I think it is much easier and a line can more clearly be drawn on advertisements (viral or otherwise) rather than the "viral-ness" of a video. Therefore I would suggest the tag only be used for advertisements, which matches up with the description of the viral tag in the FAQ (except it says for viral campaigns rather than all advertisements).

What does everyone else think?