Zonbie's channel-pondering post got me wondering about the status of all the channels, so I just took an inventory. The following channels appear to be unmaintained at present:

animation, actionpack, cute, eia, femme, gay, horrorshow, hiphop, humanitarian, history, islam, jazz, music, mystery, military, politics, sexuality, sports, spacy, viral, worldaffairs(?), waronterror, wtf, & wildwestshow.

I don't know what the procedure is for taking over an abandoned channel, but I guess if you're a recent 250+ you can consider those listed above.

It's also made me wonder if there isn't something we can do to improve these channels in lieu of a maintainer. Now, some of them are humming along just fine without (#sports, for instance), but others, I feel, could use some tweaking. #femme and #sexuality, for example, seem to be oft misused.

I suspect #femme was meant for videos which celebrate women or deal with womens' issues but it gets slapped on any video with a female in it. examples: http://femme.videosift.com/video/Two-Seconds
http://femme.videosift.com/video/How-or-Rather-Where-Not-To-Park-Your-Car
http://femme.videosift.com/video/Decorative-Clocks-for-Your-Wall-and-Bedroom
http://femme.videosift.com/video/Why-Jennifer-Beegle-Didn-t-Vote-For-Obama

Part of the problem may be that there's no meaningful channel description for #femme. Perhaps we can reach some sort of consensus what the channel should be and then have the siftlords edit the description? Maybe one of our resident feminists would like to take a crack at a first draft?

There's a bit of overlap in a lot of these channels, too, and I wonder if it wouldn't just be a convenient time to eliminate or merge some of them seeing as they're not owned by anyone (no toes to step on). It seems to me things are going to get rather unwieldy if we don't eliminate channels from time to time.

My personal opinion -- this whole post is obviously my opinion. I'm just trying to get the topic rolling, not tell anyone what to think or do -- my opinion is that actionpack, horrorshow, waronterror, viral, wildwestshow, mystery, and spacy could probably all disappear.

#actionpack - "Ball Flexin'"? Seriously? Whoever came up with that should be kicked in the sack. Tell us how much flex you notice.

#horrorshow - Does it get enough use to differentiate from movies? Would dw1117 be interested in merging horrorshow and grindhouse into something new?

#waronterror - The real world War on Terror isn't clearly defined so I don't see how a channel about it can ever be. Seems destined to be overused.

#viral - Probably the most misused in all of videosift. It's for viral marketing but it gets stuck on anything and everything. Get rid of it; we've got #commercial.

#wildwestshow - The description is written in choggish. What the fuck is this channel for? Get rid of it.

#mystery - Seems to be used very infrequently and used sarcastically when it is.

#spacy - Seems like a hybrid of #wings and #science.