I wish Google Reader did this for people that subscribe to my feed (which is also available on Twitter by the way). According to Google Reader there are a few hundred people that have subscribed to this site that use Google Reader. This certainly isn’t everyone that has subscribed to this site but it’d be nice to know who these people are. It’d be nice if Google Reader, optionally, told me the usernames of the people that subscribed. A simple email notification that says “So and So has subscribed to your site via Google Reader” would suffice. This would give me the same opportunities as today’s popular social networks and I think that’d be great.

Today I was reading on WordPress.com’s blog about “Two New Stats Things”, written by the always fantastic and multi-talented Andy Skelton, and since I use WordPress’ free stats plugin as my primary means of tracking statistics here on First initial, last name I figured I’d show my appreciation to Andy and team for the upgrades being very welcomed.

When I scrolled to the bottom of the page (there were over 175 comments when I was going to post my own) the normal comment form you’d expect to see was not there. What was there was a message stating that I have to log in to post a comment. I did that. Then, I went back to the page and it said this:

“You must set a WordPress.com blog as your URL to post a comment. Please update Your Profile.”

I realize that WordPress.com is, in and of itself, its own community. It is a “service” built on top of WordPress. But I found this, as I said, odd and also a bit disappointing that I couldn’t leave a comment to say thanks. Oh, the reason I can’t just update my profile and leave a comment? I don’t have a WordPress.com blog but I do have an account there so that I can use the API key for both Akismet and Stats (two products I am extremely thankful to the Automattic team for). Otherwise I’d have just bit the bullet and left a comment with an ‘inaccurate’ URL. But I couldn’t.

So I’ll thank Andy and his team here. Thanks Andy. For my humble little blog your stats plugin has been just what I’ve needed and nothing more to track how people read here on my site. The most recent update of showing the home page stats is very, very welcomed. Thanks.

The very next day Steven asked, via his own Web site, for some suggestions on what Panic could do to achieve the goal of being “more accessible and more open.” While he offered some of his own ideas he asked for suggestions to be sent to his personal email address.

On December 7th, five months after the interview and who-knows-how many months of internal discussions at Panic, the company has an official blog. They have a Twitter account too but the Twitter account has been in use for some time (they even respond to inquiries about their products promptly).

This new blog, however, is the company’s largest leap forward towards transparency at Panic. Or, at least it has the potential to be. So far the company has used the blog for announcements and peeks at the culture within Panic. This is excellent, of course, but I hope they use their blog to let us in on some of the things coming in the future, to ask questions, to show the thought process behind a decision, etc. And I’m sure they will. The blog’s bindings haven’t even been broken yet so we’ll give them time to loosen it up. B’okay?

In usual Panic style their blog is incredibly gorgeous, unique in nearly every possible way, and shows off the company’s culture. Well done Panic.

Huzzah! And there was much rejoicing.

I’m here to tell you of a new way to quantify community and a new way to gauge how well you are doing building that community. Let’s face it, while Gary is right – that community starts with one – you can’t achieve your goal with only one. It doesn’t matter if your goal is to spread a message, teach people about a given topic, sell a product, or earn money from advertising – you can’t do that with only one person in your community.

Try to think of your community as being in the room with you. And, if I may digress for one moment, by community I mean people that actively participate in whatever you are doing. Not every single person that walks by, but those that come into the room, chat, sit down, or even remove their coat. Having one person in the room with you is nice but add a few more and you’ve got a party.

I’ve had people that are building online communities say to me “I only have 600 people…” in their community. If you take Gary’s advice, you’re well on your way to building a large community. But, if you use this new way of gauging how well your community is doing – you’d have an incredibly full room and an amazing amount of potential.

Lets take my reasons for building a community above and break them down using that 600 person metric. Spreading a message, we’ll use the Green movement as an example, with 600 active community members in this movement you could do some real damage. You could make some big moves. If you had a room full of 600 people that are crazy about the Green movement – what could you do? You could storm an entire city and spread a message. You could create a campaign for each of those people to educate just one other person about using Green materials to build a house and you may come away with a much larger community in short order.

Now, onto the finances of it. If you’re building a community to make money – presumably through selling a product or service or by advertising – here is how having 600 people in your community is no joke. We see several tech conferences that cost hundreds of dollars each and every year. Even though the community members for these conferences have to fork over their hard-earned money to even get into the room, they are typically bombarded by information from various sponsors. Sponsors for these events, which sometimes have 500 to 1000 people at them, pay thousands of dollars for those sponsorships. Thousands. For one day events and a handout. So do you think you could find a sponsor for your community, especially one that aligns with the overall message or product for your community, that’d be willing to sponsor some type of activity or campaign? I have no doubt that you could.

I’m not suggesting that you go out and find sponsorships against your 600-person community. I’m simply showing you that with even a relatively small online community – it is full of potential.

So please stop complaining that your community isn’t full of millions of people. Maybe you don’t have a big enough room. Communities do not have to be millions strong to be valuable. Think of your community as being in the room with you and think of ways to energize that community much in the same way you would as if they really were in the room with you, and I believe the possibilities are endless.

NPR.org is getting a facelift on July 27th. As a way to promote the new redesign, allow people to see it, and to give feedback, NPR has created this promotional video and put it on YouTube. The video shows Scott Simon, one of NPR’s hosts, going through the site for the first time and describing some of the new features.

This is absolute genius. Probably the best way I’ve ever seen a new redesign unveiled to a community. They also written a letter from the editor and posted it to the site. On July 27th I’ll be making NPR.org my home page.

Via Khoi Vihn.

“Twitter killed a lot of blogs, and I’m beginning to think that it’s killed even more comments. I love Twitter, but I do miss the old days of the blogosphere, back when blogs where as common as opinions (I was traversing my archives earlier; it was like visiting a graveyard, with URLs for headstones). Back when even a half-assed entry would garner comments from near and far, and people would link to each other and the sense of community was in-between people and their writing, rather than in-between 140-character quips.

Those days are gone, and a new batch have arrived, where if I write that I’m eating a strawberry pie on Facebook, it’ll get more replies than if I dig up a super-rare interview with George Lucas and write about it on my blog… What’s a man to do?”

Michael and I share these feelings. I really do miss the old days of blogging. I do like Twitter and Facebook, but it doesn’t distract me from reading and participating on blogs. Although it seems to do just that to the majority of ‘the blogosphere’.

A few examples of this in action, if I may.

The other day I wrote a link about Gmail labels and asked a question at the end of the post about how people currently use labels. That question got zero replies. Back when I was one of the authors of the now defunct TheUberGeeks.net that question could have garnered 10-20 replies before the sun set. Even here on my personal blog I’d get a few replies to a question like that – back in the old days. After a day or so of not getting any replies I Twittered a link to the post. That managed to get three replies. As irony would have it, Michael was the very first person to respond.

Here is another example. And one that fits in well with Michael’s comment about strawberries and Facebook. Yesterday I was eating a banana. So I Twittered nothing other than the word banana. I got at least 8 replies on Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, and other services. Wow. Fruit is still popular.

Well Michael, my friend, the old days of blogging are long gone. They will more than likely never return. As you say you may be able to adapt and overcome – but I like to think that we’ll just have to live with it like old men that wish for ‘the old days’ again.

“In the end, we’re talking about fundamental social principles of mutual respect, open communication, and effective incentives. People often want to feel like they’re part of something larger than themselves, and that their talents and skills are appreciated. So polish up the skills you learned in the dorms, the glee club, or the Elk’s Lodge, and lead your community online.”

In her article she actually scratches under the surface to reveal details that I believe have been talked much less about in recent years than the broad strokes of community building. When the idea of “community” really began to take stride we all talked about openness, communication, actively greeting your new members, and hand-holding. But Laura touches on things that go below that. She strips off the layers of community building to reveal the duties of the community builder to be much more refined and those that have longer-term affects than making your newest members feel at home.

Here is what she said regarding rewarding good work.

“It’s human nature that one negative comment affects us more than ten positive ones. So praise liberally, but keep in mind that different positive actions deserve different rewards. Keeping them separate is really important, or you risk deflating the value of all of them. Think of school: you wouldn’t get an “A” just for perfect attendance, but you might get a certificate.”

This is a very insightful thought put more succinctly than I could have pulled off. At Viddler, as an example, favorites and comments come in droves (for a good video). But how do you balance that out between good work and hard work? Some people publish great videos every single time. Do you react the very same way for each video? What about distinguishing hard work from just blind luck? In our business sometimes simple, unedited videos (like my Random 60 videos) get more attention than well thought out, highly refined, and fine tuned works of art. Such is life. But those are two very different examples of “good work” and each should be rewarded in their own way.

I think this part of “the job” is probably one of the hardest challenges faced by community managers. You always want to give kudos where due, but how can you keep the value of that praise at a high level? Food for thought.

She also makes some great points about incentives, looking for trends that match your community’s interests, and mentoring. Really a must-read for anyone trying to build and ultimately coach a community.

An excellent article by someone who truly gets community on the Web and off.

Source: Podcamp Hawaii: Session: Using video to build community.

I thought this was far too great not to mention it here.

As of today I’ve posted over 7,600 updates to Twitter and now have over 800 followers.

When I first saw that I had nearly 800 followers I was surprised that so many people would want to know what I was up to. For the six months or so of Twittering, it was all just nonsense stuff about what I was doing. Then I started at Viddler and so I’d try to keep up with the Viddler community on Twitter through my account. Now, it is a combination of small updates, notifications of new posts to my site, and the occasional conversation.

But then I dug a little deeper and my surprise turned into doubt, which then turned into disappointment.

The 800 followers I have on Twitter is a bit of a misnomer. Taking a look at my followers page, I noticed that a fairly large percentage of the Twitter accounts were “spammy” in nature, web sites, bots, fake celebrities, and presidential candidates. So even though Twitter would have me believe that, every time I post an update, over 800 people are receiving my updates – in reality only half of my “followers” are real people, and probably only half of them watch Twitter with any regularity.

This doesn’t change my opinion of Twitter, its value, or those that are following me (thanks, btw). This sort of thing was bound to happen. It does however, change my thoughts when I see someone with a few thousand followers on Twitter. I begin to wonder how many of those followers are real, and how many really care about following that person.

How many real followers do you have?

“It’s been interesting though seeing which sites generate the most feedback, interaction, conversations, etc.”

project pedal (blog): Quality vs Quanity

I recently gave Pownce a spin for a few days and I really like it. Being that I do not use the SMS features on Twitter, I actually like Pownce much better than Twitter. I’m not going to dive into all of the reasons I like Pownce better because that doesn’t matter. What matters is that I am being forced to use Twitter over Pownce, sorta, because of “community pressure”.

Here is the breakdown of community pressure as I see it. There are a few reasons why we use services that, even though we like a different one, we still use the service.

1. All of our friends are on the service.
2. There is more activity on the service.
3. Everyone uses the service.

All of our friends are on the service. This is a pretty compelling reason to use any service really. If everyone you “know” is using that particular service, you’re bound to check it out and be part of the action. If the only reason you use Twitter is to keep up with what your friends are doing, and not because you like it more than another service that offers the same features, then you fall into this particular facet of community pressure.

There is more activity on the service. Nearly everyone of my “friends” on Twitter has a Pownce account. Yet, they don’t use it. So, it isn’t a matter of them not knowing about Pownce, it is more about them not actually using the account they created. Why? Probably because everyone that has a Twitter account is using it right now. The activity is contagious and spurs more activity.

I have yet to meet anyone that says that Pownce doesn’t do something that they want it to, or, that it is inferior to Twitter in anyway. (With the exception of SMS, of course.) I believe that if everyone with a Pownce account shifted their daily activities from Twitter to Pownce at the same time, that the reverse could be said for Twitter that is being said now about Pownce, that it is a ghost town. It is all about the activity.

Everyone uses the service. This may not fit with the Twitter / Pownce scenario as well as it does with the YouTube / (everyone else) scenario. Here is a quote from a recent article by Ryan Carson of Carsonified that he wrote about using YouTube to promote your message.

“I’d rather use Vimeo because it’s beautiful, but the truth is there’s a lot more people on YouTube. If you compare 90 views on Vimeo to 10,367 on YouTube there’s just no comparison.” — How to use YouTube to get your message out

Ryan expresses that he actually likes Vimeo more than YouTube, but it doesn’t matter because his goal of reaching as many people as possible is better accomplished using YouTube. I like Pownce more than I do Twitter, but it doesn’t matter, if I want to be part of the conversation I am forced to use Twitter because that is where the conversation is happening.

I’m still not sure what the solution to community pressure is or even if there is one. You can’t fight trends. Being “first to market” is still one of the largest advantages in any industry, period. Even when teams like Pownce and Viddler innovate in ways that previous teams doing similar things have never done, they still end up with the same challenge of gaining market share by “stealing” it away from those that may have it simply because they were first, not because their the best.

Then again, these shifts usually happen over long periods of time. Fads don’t change in one year, but have patterns over decades. The Internet is a different beast, where it seems like these patterns have a much shorter wave-length, but they do change, and it is possible to find niches. I’m looking forward to the point where all services are so wide open, and applications are at the end-points, and which service you use no longer becomes as relevant. But that may yet be a little ways off.

Why do you use the services that you do?

“37signals responds to downtime, perfectly. They start with an explanation of what happened, then apologize with the promise to compensate where warranted, and assure it won’t happen again, all with human feeling. Learn.” — (view bookmark | view their post)

Pulling this off is no easy task – though for a remarkably customer service conscience group like 37signals perhaps this comes pretty naturally. I wanted to take a second to show some bad examples of this type of response, so that you can see the contrast (and I’m sure I could be one of these examples if I was harder on myself).

Recently Flickr had some downtime that they knew they were going to have so they gave fair warning about it. This is a good thing. However, their maintenance took longer than they thought it would, and I think they might have stepped over the “snarky remark” edge just slightly. Just so we’re all clear, I love Flickr. I’ve met some of their staff members and each of them are good people. Here is a snippet from their downtime notice post.

“Do you remember when we said we were almost back online? Well, that time we were joking, but this time is for real!”

Personally I think they could have skipped the “every few hours” approach to updating and just waited until the service was updated to bring the community up-to-speed (more on this below). Snarky remarks like the above don’t help too much. How can this be avoided though? You don’t want to be completely unhuman. Let’s look at how 37signals brought the human-feeling into their post, with this line.

“Again, we’re truly sorry for this interruption. This is not how Fridays are supposed to be.”

During their downtime they also updated their users as best they could (this particular situation was relatively out-of-their hands) and while they injected some heartfelt messages into those updates, I think they could have saved that for this post.

Another bad example would be to remain silent and have your service degrade, well, not so gracefully. Blogger recently had some outage and their users just saw a weird message and there was no updates from the Blogger staff. Silence isn’t a good tactic at all.

Points to remember

Based on the good example of 37signals and the bad examples above, I think that we should all strive to do the following when web services go down – and I’ve ordered these by importance (in my opinion).

• Degrade gracefully. When downtime occurs, forward to some sort of friendly message that is easily updatable by staff members to let the community know what is going on.
• Keep explanations short and simple. Don’t update every 5-seconds (especially if you have nothing to report), and don’t be long winded. Sometimes “we’re working on it” is sufficient. Oh, and each update should have a timestamp.
• Don’t give false expectations. I’ve learned this the hard way. Even if your engineers tell you that it will take an hour, there is no need to say that publicly. Keep the “we’re close” messages to a minimum too.
• Be human. Try your best to explain the situation in human terms and be warm.

Once the service is back up and running, and a longer explanation is warranted, you can look no further than 37signals post for inspiration.

One thing we can’t see is whether or not 37signals did any contacting of their users behind the scenes. Since their product is a pay-for service, they could have very well personally contacted some of their larger accounts to let them know what is going on. Or, after they were back up, they could have reimbursed them beyond the offer they made publicly. Things like this go a very long way.

Please notice that I believe this task to be extremely hard to pull off well and that I think both Flickr and Blogger are great services.

I’m hoping that I can take all of these points and learn from them the next time we have any troubles at Viddler. In the past we’ve handled these situations fairly well, but I know we can improve a lot by learning from others good and bad examples.

Thoughts?

Addendum: It appears that I am not the only one that thinks 37signals did a great job. Not only do they have numerous comments on the post, but Dan Benjamin also thought so.

Some deal with this issue from an ideological perspective in that they disable comments because they feel that people will behave differently when commenting than they would if they wrote from their own Web sites. Jeremy Keith recently said:

“Choose a random video on YouTube or a random story on Digg, read each and every comment and then tell me that the comments contribute to any kind of community discussion. They are shining examples of antisocial networking.” — Reflection

I feel this is a blanket statement, which has some validity, but I do not believe that YouTube or Digg comments are completely “examples of antisocial networking”.

Sure. Many comments found on Digg threads are a bunch of teenaged boys (the proof is in the statistics) yelling back and forth about whether or not that specific article is digg worthy – but I believe those threads are there exactly for that reason. Should the commentary on Digg be about the article itself? Or should that conversation be reserved for the article’s origin? I believe it is up to the community to decide and it seems like they have.

Not that Jeremy’s point isn’t a valid one. Someone leaving a comment on my blog may indeed be a little looser with their speech than they would if they were responding, like I am right now, from their own Web sites. And if the author of the site is not willing to weed through the comments – then perhaps it is best to disable the comments for that very reason.

But I believe there is a completely different angle to consider.

One of the benefits I see coming from disabling comments is the number of links you end up getting back to your site. It is always nice when someone writes a blog post in response to something you said or wrote and have them link to your site or post as a way to direct people to the rest of the conversation. I’ve been fortunate to have a fair amount of people doing that very thing with some of my posts here on my personal site – and everytime I enjoy it when they do. I wonder, if I disabled comments, would the number of “linkbacks” increase because I was no longer providing a way for the conversation to continue on this site?

In the spring of 2004 I published a poorly written post entitled: “Disabling Comments, The Pros” wherein I spoke about a few sites that were good examples of this “theory” at work. Some of the most popular personal weblogs to date have been those who rarely, if at all, enable comments on their posts. I don’t believe this to be “the formula for creating a popular personal blog” but I believe it may help in some cases.

I leave comments enabled because I suppose I’m not as strict as Jeremy. I don’t care if my readers (all 11 of you) comment in a little different form than they would if they had written an entire response on their sites. So I guess I’m willing to moderate, though I very rarely do, in order to keep the conversation somewhat centralized.

What do you think? Have you ever considered turning off comments? Why? You may answer in the comment form below.

“We spend a lot of time on the web. We’re building software that makes people spend even more time on the web. Let’s make it a nicer place to be. Add some social grease to your next app and make your users feel appreciated[.]” — Lachlan Hardy

He gives a few great examples of how this is already being done by some of the social leaders in our industry. And I think he makes a really great point when he says: “This is not a technical issue! It’s one of priorities, focus and intent. Most applications don’t have any development time focused specifically on being nice to people, but doesn’t that sound like a great way to build your community?”.

One thing I’m striving for at Viddler is keeping my ear firmly pressed to the ground in order to find out what Viddlers want, even if they don’t let us know directly. For example, they might tell the Twitterverse and it may not even be related to Viddler itself. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try to accommodate the simple, valid features that our users would love to have.

This is extending the “nice” features into “having the features your users want the most”. Perhaps Viddler would do well to listen to Mr. Hardy – and have a few more “nice” features thrown into the mix. I’ll be looking into this more this week to see how we can improve how nice we are.

Thanks for the advice Lachlan!

One of the good examples of scaling communities mentioned was Flickr. Obviously they’ve become the community poster-child and rightly so. They’ve put a lot of thought and hard work into making their communities thrive, grow, and in some ways scale very nicely. However, there is still a limit that any community will hit and then it is forced to divide regardless of the feature-set that the service offers.

Online communities reflect their real-world counterparts so lets use New York City as an example of community division. Everyone that lives in New York City is part of a community. They all feel it. They all take pride in it. And in some way or another they all take part in it. However, none of them are familiar with everyone inside of their community. Most of them will never meet face to face. But each one of them has their own much smaller communities that they belong to. Maybe they work at a company, or visit the same coffee shop everyday, or play basketball with their same five friends in the park on Saturdays. Regardless, they’ve divided themselves from the much larger community and created or taken part in a much smaller community inside of the one that surrounds them.

Flickr has given some really great features to its group administrators allowing them to setup their own communities under the much larger Flickr community. That’s the first divide. Flickr has worked really hard to make those communities work well whether there are only two members of that group or ten thousand. But, is there a limit? I feel there is and it might be different for every community.

Once a group gets too large, other groups begin to emerge that may do things very much in the same way as the much larger group – yet they divide in order to find elbow room. To help themselves separate the signal from the noise or even just to pull their friends along. I’ve done this myself. I belong to both the 365days group and the MeToday group. However I’m far more active as a MeToday group member than I am a 365day group member because the MeToday group seems like its my friends getting together and posting their 365day shots. I’m a member of the enormous Macintosh group but I also belong to the Macbook and Apple symbol groups.

On Viddler I’ve noticed other divisions occurring too. We’ve not released any group type features, though we plan to, and yet already groups of people are banding together to create their own social groups. This is done a combination of ways and obviously marking each other as friends is one way, or tagging videos the same way is another. But then we have our forums where small grass roots efforts to form communities (like our newly formed Viral Marketing Team, which is too freaking cool) are taking place. This is the first divide. I’m sure we’ll begin to see others in the near future and I can’t wait for those days to come.

When you put people into the same place with similar interests they all band together with common goals. When that group reaches “the community limit”, they begin to divide while still being loyal to the larger group. I do not think that any set of features can help to stop this and I don’t think too much time should be put into trying to stop it either.

I am not a huge boxing fan (since I don’t watch boxing all that much I wouldn’t want to call myself a fan for fear of being ridiculed) but I am a fan of Muhammad Ali, and his boxing style and career. When I read Paul’s entry about the redesign, and when he referred to it as Ali, I got a little bit frightened. Would the new site hold a candle to my thoughts on Ali?

Being that I am familiar with the system that runs 9rules (which I’m sure, from what I’m seeing now, has been improved 10-fold since my tenure) I know that an enormous amount of hard work went into creating this iteration of the site. Style, layout, and panache aside – the underpinnings of the new 9rules.com is a monumental upgrade from the previous code-base which was a mashup of the incredibly crappy code I wrote while I was there and Mike Rundle trying to patch said crap. I’d be willing to wager that only a small percentage, or almost none-at-all, of the code that I wrote is still in use at 9rules (which is a blessing for them, trust me).

In other words: the 9rules team did as Ali taught: “I run on the road, long before I dance under the lights.” They were willing to go back to the “drawing board” to rebuild their architecture simply to make it more manageable, faster, and more stable. And really this is something the general public, or any of their members for that matter, wouldn’t have noticed – but this is exactly what they should have done. And from what I’ve seen so far they’ve accomplished what they set out to do.

So, does it hold a candle to my thoughts on Ali? Actually – it blew the candle right out. I’m really impressed by this accomplishment.

Take a look around the new 9rules. I think you will like what you see. Register for an account so that you can take advantage of notes (which got a huge shot of nitro in this release) and my.9rules (which is brand-new) – which are teeming with life right now. Oh and don’t forget to play around with topics, which is a feature that 9rules has wanted to do for quite awhile and I think they pulled it off really well. I’ve been messing around in the apple topic all morning.

Kudos Paul, Mike, and Tyme. You guys are class acts and 9rules Ali is really great. I recommend everyone buying these guys a drink, or a milk for Mike, at SXSW.

To leave you with another quote from Ali, that I feel applies to the 9rules team: “Champions aren’t made in gyms. Champions are made from something they have deep inside them-a desire, a dream, a vision. They have to have last-minute stamina, they have to be a little faster, they have to have the skill and the will. But the will must be stronger than the skill. “

[tags]9rules, paul scrivens, mike rundle, tyme white, redesign, muhammad ali, blogging, community, social network, web design, thoughts[/tags]
[slug]9rules-Ali[/slug]

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]

[tags]flickr, creative commons, pbs, sharing, community[/tags]