Our submissions and favorites could represent our individual cultural exposures to the vast catalog of media offered in the modern world.

With the development of my.videosift.com and the personaliztion features that go with it, it would be interesting to start tying up community bonds with similar services offered by other web 2.0 sites for example, sift submissions could be word culled and cross referenced with other sifters; if a user likes The Smiths, it would show that Farhad2000 likes the Smiths too. This is a feature that is currently present in Facebook when you enter your media likes and dislikes, well Videosift is that large database of actual media selections made by the user.

Where does all this lead? While the community benefits are obvious, and will take place (I expect in time for a wider set of community features to be implemented as the user base widens). The business and marketing potential is there for a media gathering service, something that keeps track of that elusive demographic set of the highly educated, young students and addicted women who have been disfranchised with traditional media forms. New highly emerging videos that start to receive hits from users could show shifting viewing trends, or dormant media that a lot of users have expressed likeness to i.e. media that can be revived for a wider market (think of the countless aimless re-releases of Beatles compilations, and how a data gathering service powered by a community could fine tune the choices media developers can take). Or finally the holy grail of web 2.0, new media that could transition into the main stream market based on viewer submissions alone, will we have our Tom Green? Our Darude? Our Andy Milonakis?.

What am I saying basically? The Sift has bright potential indeed it could become the Niselen rating system for digital media.

One feature I would like to see implemented (ha you knew this was hidden somewhere in this!) if possible is the same relational engine that Amazon possesses for user choices, if a user liked The Smiths, and Farhad2000 liked the Smiths maybe our choices are correlated and Farhad2000 could have seen something I haven't seen thats totally awesome but I didn't know about it yet...

Message being go upvote my stuff so I can get my GOLD 100 Star before Benjee does!

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

Some good ideas in there Farhad. Lucky is busying away on a project that is not quite that, but has some of the features you are mentioning. I do like the idea of being able to connect users based on their preferences. That's something we should look at.

The sift is screaming out for a "Arts" tab violently. Especially now that I noticed few sites actually have such a category.

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

The problem is that art falls across so many other categories, and is very subjective as to what constitutes "art". If we could come up with a better term ...

maybe artsy-fartsy. That's much better.

Well relegating such a invocation to Gold Stars is reasonable, especially since we police each other as well as others. Or even relegating it to a few trusted sifters such as Plastique Monkey?

The biggest problem is that postmodernists have broadened the term art to include so much now that the term visual culture is used instead. Categories and differentiation have been erased. The high and low are given equal value. Technology has given artists all kinds of new ideas to expand art forms.

Of course not everyone embraces postmodernism. There are those to stick to modernism or some movement contained in it.

I believe you will have difficulty designating videos with an art channel and having folks agree about it. Reading up on the current thinking hasn’t been easy, nor has trying to explain it to high school students. I’m still sifting through a thick book on visual culture that is over my head.

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

That's exactly what I meant to say DD - thanks.

One of the officers of our local film festival spoke before a film at our last festival. He said that art challenges you.

I mention this because not everyone wants to be challenged by film or even art.

I think it's a good idea, making it like the related links, but maybe it would be more relevant to the subject. Make it like 'people who voted for this also voted for...'

Also make an action channel! I agree that Art would be too hard to define, but there are lots of action clips (chases crashes explosions shootings etc.) to put into a category itself.

Everyone likes things that go boom

Farhad: of course you'll get your 100 faster than me...I doubt I'll have the time/dedication to out Sift you now (Ultimate self-Sift pimping by the way!)

Sounds like Last.Fm for video.

One interesting thing about the Sift: there aren't subscriptions/favorites of people. All sifts are equal , it's very egalitarian. Favoriting people would harden the network effects and create more of a power law distribution than there already is.

That said, I wouldn't say that VideoSift is truly "long tail". Vids have to prove their worth. Videos do well which piggyback a popular meme (Star Wars, Bush-bashing, Monty Python, timelapse). Niche interests (I like the band Ween, speak German, like the Python programming language) probably won't escape the queue. So this encourages more mainstream selections already familiar to the VideoSift audience.

While the videos are not within the long tail I would say a lot of our users are. I can name the usual suspects off the top of my head while most silently lurk, I would love to see some statistics from the VS user database, like activity via posts and such.

Any chance Dag?

>> Message being go upvote my stuff

Does begging for votes actually work? Because in that case, exercise your right to vote. I'm ready to backup a Dumptruck of awesome into the inter-tubes.

....go for it winkler1, too many cropped ears and tails in the world....I tend to post, from my backlog of associative memories, and am surprised when I find things I thought I'd never see again...

and farhad is describing a natural progression of the viddy-blog sensation...its already a programming barometer,... they are writing the course description now, for the students of broadcasting media everywhere.....

Brief History of National Television and Cable Networks, 101