VideoSift
Encyclopedia
VideoSift is a video aggregator
designed to showcase unique and interesting videos, the name of the site being a direct allusion to the metaphor of sifting wheat
from chaff
. It was founded by Brian Houston in February 2006, who was joined by James Roe and Rommel Santor as co-creators. Members submit embedded videos from other websites, such as YouTube
and Google Video
, which are then ranked according to a social-voting system similar to and inspired by Digg
. Nicknamed the Sift, VideoSift aims to provide its users with the best available online video content through a consistent and attractive interface, responding to the problems of videos being scattered among many different sources, each having arguably difficult or unintuitive user interfaces.
While in its infancy the site was loosely organized; the site founders allowed any user to submit videos, subject to an ever-changing limit depending on the volume of traffic. With the exponential growth of the site's popularity over the course of 2006, upgrades were introduced leading to VideoSift 2.0 and later iterations that required new users to graduate through a "probationary period". This was meant to mitigate sockpuppet and astroturfing
abuses that became more tempting for outsiders considering the site's increasing popularity.
Routine administrative functions such as discarding expired videos are carried out by a bot
named Siftbot.
, it allows for an extra step of "sifting" - a third party must first approve of the video by selecting it for submission before the original creator can cast a vote for it.
In response to Sifters' desire to showcase their own videos, occasional Siftoffs have been held, with the first in May 2006. Videos in the Siftoff are uploaded to a separate queue where users have a month to decide, through the normal voting mechanisms, which video of this subset group is most worthy. The siftoff has since been removed again.
The ability to permanently ban members who self-link is given to those who have gained "gold star" status within the VideoSift community. Two users must both invoke the *ban command, which will make the system ban the offending member. This is often used for those who spam, or self-link videos to the site and has been known to be used swiftly and effectively by senior members of VideoSift.
In January 2008 an instaban feature was introduced, that allows users with diamond level membership to instantly ban a probationary member without confirmation from another user.
.
The ability to "downvote" a video was introduced in June 2006, allowing the Sifter with a moderate seniority level - those with a bronze star meaning 25 star points.
, to police against videos they consider unworthy or unappealing. Downvoting met with some controversy as users adjusted to the phenomenon, and set informal guidelines on usage.
Members help to shape and mold the future of VideoSift by suggesting new feature requests and existing feature changes. Often streamlining the site and making it very versatile as well as retaining a simple interface.
.
Prominent and skilled users have been invited to join the original two founders throughout the Sift's history. Rommel Santor became the Development Manager later in 2006, contributing his skills in coding to add extensive new features to the site's codebase.
In Summer 2007 VideoSift 3.0 launched, breaking away from the Pligg system to use its own software. The new program was written by Rommel Santor and is called VaroCMS.
In January 2008 VideoSift 3.1 launched, still using VaroCMS, but bringing many sweeping changes.
format, and only from the following websites:
YouTube
, Break.com
, Revver
, Vimeo
, MetaCafe
, Google Video
, iFilm
, Myspace
, Onion
, VideoJug
, Yahoo, Dailymotion
, LiveLeak
, VSocial, Fora.tv
and Grouper.
Comedy Central
submissions were banned after Comedy Central's decision to block non US-based viewers for their content (region blocking), but the ban was reversed and is under an ongoing discussion.
Members who have achieved a 'gold' status can submit other flash based video content such as collegehumor
or adultswim videos
As of September 2010 the following 98 channels are available: Animation, Art, Actionpack, Asia, Anatomy, Blues, Books, Bravo, British, Brain, Comedy, Cute, Canada, Catsanddogs, Celtic, Cinema, Comics, Commercial, Conspiracy, Controversy, Cult, Cooking, Downunder, Dance, Dark, Documentaries, Drugs, Debunked, Election08, Electronica, Eia, Equality, Eco, Engineering, Fail, Femme, Fire, Future,F ear, Gay, Geek, Grindhouse, Horrorshow, Happy, Hiphop, Howto, Humanitarian, Health, History, Islam, Jazz, Kids, Latenight, Law, Livemusic, Love, Lies, Music, Mystery, Military, Metal, Money, Magic, Meme, Nature, News, Obscure, Politics, Parody, Philosophy, Religion, Rocknroll, Sexuality, Scifi, Science, Shortfilms, Sports, Standup, Spacy, Teens, Timeshift, Talks, Terrible, Travel, Videogames, Vintage, Viral, Worldaffairs, Waronterror, Woohoo, Wilhelm, Water, Wtf, Wheels, Wildwestshow, Wings, 1sttube and 80s.
With the launch of VideoSift 2.2 'channels' were added to browse by and filter out videos by their respective categories. Currently these are: Animation, Art, Comedy, Cute, Geek, Music, Nature, Politics, Vintage, and Viral. A video may be in as many channels as are applicable.
Additionally, VideoSift now allows senior users to create collectives of users to sift even more specific niche videos.
Video aggregator
A video aggregator is a website that collects and organizes online videos from other sources. Video aggregation is done for different purposes, and websites take different approaches to achieve their purpose....
designed to showcase unique and interesting videos, the name of the site being a direct allusion to the metaphor of sifting wheat
Wheat
Wheat is a cereal grain, originally from the Levant region of the Near East, but now cultivated worldwide. In 2007 world production of wheat was 607 million tons, making it the third most-produced cereal after maize and rice...
from chaff
Chaff
Chaff is the dry, scaly protective casings of the seeds of cereal grain, or similar fine, dry, scaly plant material such as scaly parts of flowers, or finely chopped straw...
. It was founded by Brian Houston in February 2006, who was joined by James Roe and Rommel Santor as co-creators. Members submit embedded videos from other websites, such as YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
and Google Video
Google Video
Google Videos is a video search engine, and formerly a free video sharing website, from Google Inc. Before removing user-uploaded content, the service allowed selected videos to be remotely embedded on other websites and provided the necessary HTML code alongside the media, similar to YouTube...
, which are then ranked according to a social-voting system similar to and inspired by Digg
Digg
Digg is a social news website. Prior to Digg v4, its cornerstone function consisted of letting people vote stories up or down, called digging and burying, respectively. Digg's popularity prompted the creation of copycat social networking sites with story submission and voting systems...
. Nicknamed the Sift, VideoSift aims to provide its users with the best available online video content through a consistent and attractive interface, responding to the problems of videos being scattered among many different sources, each having arguably difficult or unintuitive user interfaces.
Concept
Members submit videos from a limited selection of approved hosts, these videos are then entered into a queue where other members may vote them up or down. If a video receives the requisite balance of positive votes it is published to the front page and remains available in the site's archives; if it fails to achieve this within 2 days it is moved to the users profile in a "personal queue". A broad range of videos may be posted; only those with entire episodes of television programs, pornography, fatalities or racism are expressly prohibited.While in its infancy the site was loosely organized; the site founders allowed any user to submit videos, subject to an ever-changing limit depending on the volume of traffic. With the exponential growth of the site's popularity over the course of 2006, upgrades were introduced leading to VideoSift 2.0 and later iterations that required new users to graduate through a "probationary period". This was meant to mitigate sockpuppet and astroturfing
Astroturfing
Astroturfing is a form of advocacy in support of a political, organizational, or corporate agenda, designed to give the appearance of a "grassroots" movement. The goal of such campaigns is to disguise the efforts of a political and/or commercial entity as an independent public reaction to some...
abuses that became more tempting for outsiders considering the site's increasing popularity.
Routine administrative functions such as discarding expired videos are carried out by a bot
Internet bot
Internet bots, also known as web robots, WWW robots or simply bots, are software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet. Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone...
named Siftbot.
No-self links policy and the Siftoff
VideoSift has a policy of "no self-links", which means contributing videos that the VideoSift user ("Sifter") created themselves. In addition to functioning as a means to prevent astroturfingAstroturfing
Astroturfing is a form of advocacy in support of a political, organizational, or corporate agenda, designed to give the appearance of a "grassroots" movement. The goal of such campaigns is to disguise the efforts of a political and/or commercial entity as an independent public reaction to some...
, it allows for an extra step of "sifting" - a third party must first approve of the video by selecting it for submission before the original creator can cast a vote for it.
In response to Sifters' desire to showcase their own videos, occasional Siftoffs have been held, with the first in May 2006. Videos in the Siftoff are uploaded to a separate queue where users have a month to decide, through the normal voting mechanisms, which video of this subset group is most worthy. The siftoff has since been removed again.
The ability to permanently ban members who self-link is given to those who have gained "gold star" status within the VideoSift community. Two users must both invoke the *ban command, which will make the system ban the offending member. This is often used for those who spam, or self-link videos to the site and has been known to be used swiftly and effectively by senior members of VideoSift.
In January 2008 an instaban feature was introduced, that allows users with diamond level membership to instantly ban a probationary member without confirmation from another user.
Curatorship through seniority
One of the unique aspects of the VideoSift community is that the volunteer members receive de facto administrator powers with long term commitment to the website. After accumulating 50 star points, members gain such abilities as discarding posts in violation of guidelines or flagging videos NSFWNSFW
Not suitable/safe for work , not work-suitable/safe , or not school-suitable is Internet slang or shorthand...
.
The ability to "downvote" a video was introduced in June 2006, allowing the Sifter with a moderate seniority level - those with a bronze star meaning 25 star points.
, to police against videos they consider unworthy or unappealing. Downvoting met with some controversy as users adjusted to the phenomenon, and set informal guidelines on usage.
Members help to shape and mold the future of VideoSift by suggesting new feature requests and existing feature changes. Often streamlining the site and making it very versatile as well as retaining a simple interface.
Technology
VideoSift used to be based on an open source content management system called Pligg, which is in turn a port of software written by Ricardo Galli http://meneame.net/. His software received much of its inspiration from the popular technology site, DiggDigg
Digg is a social news website. Prior to Digg v4, its cornerstone function consisted of letting people vote stories up or down, called digging and burying, respectively. Digg's popularity prompted the creation of copycat social networking sites with story submission and voting systems...
.
Prominent and skilled users have been invited to join the original two founders throughout the Sift's history. Rommel Santor became the Development Manager later in 2006, contributing his skills in coding to add extensive new features to the site's codebase.
In Summer 2007 VideoSift 3.0 launched, breaking away from the Pligg system to use its own software. The new program was written by Rommel Santor and is called VaroCMS.
In January 2008 VideoSift 3.1 launched, still using VaroCMS, but bringing many sweeping changes.
Accepted video embeds
For compatibility reasons VideoSift accepts only videos in the FlashFLV
Flash Video is a container file format used to deliver video over the Internet using Adobe Flash Player versions 6–11. Flash Video content may also be embedded within SWF files. There are two different video file formats known as Flash Video: FLV and F4V. The audio and video data within FLV files...
format, and only from the following websites:
YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
, Break.com
Break.com
Break.com is a humor website founded in 1998 that features comedy videos, flash games, and pictures among other material. The chief executive officer of Break is Steve Boss...
, Revver
Revver
Revver is a video sharing website that hosts user-generated content. Revver attaches advertising to user-submitted video clips and originally offered to share ad revenue with the video creators. Videos could be displayed, downloaded and shared across the web in either Apple QuickTime or FLV format...
, Vimeo
Vimeo
Vimeo is a video-sharing website on which users can upload, share, and view videos. It was founded by Zach Klein and Jake Lodwick in November 2004...
, MetaCafe
Metacafe
Metacafe is a web site that specializes in short-form video entertainment in the categories of movies, video games, sports, music and TV.The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with offices in New York, Los Angeles, London and Tel Aviv...
, Google Video
Google Video
Google Videos is a video search engine, and formerly a free video sharing website, from Google Inc. Before removing user-uploaded content, the service allowed selected videos to be remotely embedded on other websites and provided the necessary HTML code alongside the media, similar to YouTube...
, iFilm
IFilm
ifilm.com was an online archive of short films, movie trailers, and other video clips of interest. Ifilm.com was originally founded by independent filmmaker Raphael Raphael in 1997 as an independent film and media collective...
, Myspace
Myspace
Myspace is a social networking service owned by Specific Media LLC and pop star Justin Timberlake. Myspace launched in August 2003 and is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California. In August 2011, Myspace had 33.1 million unique U.S. visitors....
, Onion
Onion
The onion , also known as the bulb onion, common onion and garden onion, is the most widely cultivated species of the genus Allium. The genus Allium also contains a number of other species variously referred to as onions and cultivated for food, such as the Japanese bunching onion The onion...
, VideoJug
VideoJug
Videojug is an instructional video website, It launched as a beta online in 2006. The website provides both professionally made videos produced internally, as well as some editorially selected quality videos produced by amateurs....
, Yahoo, Dailymotion
Dailymotion
Dailymotion is a video sharing service website, headquartered in the 18th arrondissement, Paris, France. According to Comscore, Dailymotion is the second largest video site in the world after YouTube....
, LiveLeak
Liveleak
LiveLeak is a video sharing website that lets users post and share videos. Liveleak places emphasis on current events, politics and reality-based footage such as war scenes from various parts of the world.The site went live on October 31, 2006...
, VSocial, Fora.tv
FORA.tv
FORA.tv, Inc. runs a website that gathers a large collection of unmediated video drawn from live events, lectures, and debates at universities, think tanks and conferences....
and Grouper.
Comedy Central
Comedy Central
Comedy Central is an American cable television and satellite television channel that carries comedy programming, both original and syndicated....
submissions were banned after Comedy Central's decision to block non US-based viewers for their content (region blocking), but the ban was reversed and is under an ongoing discussion.
Members who have achieved a 'gold' status can submit other flash based video content such as collegehumor
CollegeHumor
CollegeHumor is a comedy website owned by InterActiveCorp and based in New York City. The site features daily original comedy videos and articles created by its in-house writing and production team, in addition to user-submitted videos, pictures, articles and links. In early 2009, CollegeHumor's...
or adultswim videos
Video organization
At heart, VideoSift is a video organization site. Videos are organized by their tags and channels, which an inputted but the submitting user and can be changed and/or amended by senior users of the site. Channels are unlike many other sites, not generated in advance, but created by users when they reach a certain level of membership, diamond or more, which is then sent to the administrators, evaluated and approved/rejected as the case may be. Some channel suggestions have been considered too close to other channels, such as tech, which was too deemed close to science and geek.As of September 2010 the following 98 channels are available: Animation, Art, Actionpack, Asia, Anatomy, Blues, Books, Bravo, British, Brain, Comedy, Cute, Canada, Catsanddogs, Celtic, Cinema, Comics, Commercial, Conspiracy, Controversy, Cult, Cooking, Downunder, Dance, Dark, Documentaries, Drugs, Debunked, Election08, Electronica, Eia, Equality, Eco, Engineering, Fail, Femme, Fire, Future,F ear, Gay, Geek, Grindhouse, Horrorshow, Happy, Hiphop, Howto, Humanitarian, Health, History, Islam, Jazz, Kids, Latenight, Law, Livemusic, Love, Lies, Music, Mystery, Military, Metal, Money, Magic, Meme, Nature, News, Obscure, Politics, Parody, Philosophy, Religion, Rocknroll, Sexuality, Scifi, Science, Shortfilms, Sports, Standup, Spacy, Teens, Timeshift, Talks, Terrible, Travel, Videogames, Vintage, Viral, Worldaffairs, Waronterror, Woohoo, Wilhelm, Water, Wtf, Wheels, Wildwestshow, Wings, 1sttube and 80s.
Earlier organization
As soon as a video receives the required amount of votes it is published to the front page, which is arranged in reverse chronological order. Videos can be further filtered by the user according to most votes in a year, month, week, 24 hours and all time.With the launch of VideoSift 2.2 'channels' were added to browse by and filter out videos by their respective categories. Currently these are: Animation, Art, Comedy, Cute, Geek, Music, Nature, Politics, Vintage, and Viral. A video may be in as many channels as are applicable.
Additionally, VideoSift now allows senior users to create collectives of users to sift even more specific niche videos.