As some of you know I’ve joined the Viddler team for a month to help build up some of the community over there. It has been a fun first three days.
I wanted to give an overview of some of the things we were able to do this week as well as give a general synopsis of some of the things to come. Perhaps some of you can even help out a little.
It took me a little while to get familiar with their systems, but overall I like how they have things setup. Viddler uses many internal systems to not only monitor their service, but also to collaborate on various tasks and bug fixes. Viddler uses SVN, Trac, email, calendars, Skype, and a host of over little bits in order to keep up-to-date with each other and get things accomplished. Not surprisingly they also use Viddler to post videos of some of the new things they are doing, which they keep private, and then share those videos among the team.
Having some of the team here in Pennsylvania (Viddler HQ with a few people is in Bethlehem and I’m about an hour and half from there), some of the team is in Phoenix, Arizona, some in Poland, etc. I think the team does a really great job of keeping up with each other and they seem to get a lot of work accomplished.
After I got up-to-speed with all of their systems and got a feel for how Viddler wanted to start to bolster a really active community I wrote about how Viddler is going to smash down the wall between the team and Viddler’s users. And that is incredibly true. Viddler wants its users to become active, outspoken, and they will listen.
For the rest of the week we had some meetings with a few potential sponsors and partners to get some contests together which is starting to become really exciting. What better way is there to get a community excited than to start handing them cool stuff for using the service?! I can’t wait to get some of these contests going since I know they will be a huge hit, and I will have fun going through all of the submissions.
In between meetings and strategizing we were able to choose the week’s featured video which came from a couple of easy riders which I thought was some great video from the front of a motorcycle during a race in London. The diversity of the people, content, and videos that you find on Viddler is really refreshing. Rather than just having commercials, clips from TV, and clips of people doing stupid things (which Viddler has its full share of too), there is also a whole host of independently created content that I really enjoy.
Shortly after getting this video together we started some conversations with my good friend Gary from WineLibrary TV in order to full host a searchable backup of all of his episodes. There is some really exciting stuff that will be coming from this "partnership" not only in the form of content generation, searching, timed tags, etc. – but Wine Library’s community is incredibly active so we look forward to seeing some of their audience spill over into Viddler and becoming active in that community as well.
Friday came around too quickly and so we thought we’d have some Friday fun. Some things people try is amazing.
So after three days we’re making some serious strides. Not only is the entire development team making leaps and bounds in the area of video sharing online (trust me, you have not seen anything yet as I feel that Viddler will be the video sharing site of the future for professionals) but we’ve also started to see an upturn in the number of new users, videos, and overall traffic to the site. In only three days! Here is to hoping the trend continues.
If you are a video content producer, someone that puts on slideshows or demonstrations or screencasts, or just want to use your webcam to record a video to share with your family – please check out Viddler and see why I think it is or will become the best service available.
[tags]viddler, winelibrarytv, video, sharing, community, skype, trac, contests[/tags]
[slug]viddler-week-one[/slug]
