Broadband has fueled the explosion of online video sites to the point that bits of content lay scattered throughout the Internet. As users continue to generate video in a smattering of places, the clip connoisseur toggles between them to get his fix. Dabble.com wants the video junky to stay in one place.
Aggregating content from YouTube, MySpace, Revver, Blip.TV, Grouper, Brightcove, VideoEgg, Vimeo, Apple, Google, Yahoo, AOL, and MSN among others, Dabble.com is a catalog of user-generated videos. Users can search for videos across all these sites from Dabble.
Collecting metadata, which includes location, author, licensing information, and user tags, Dabble pulls videos from hosting sites and makes them keyword searchable.
“Besides information about the video itself like the title or where it’s hosted, we have information about who made it, who’s in it, tags from outside Dabble as well as our users, and who’s watching and collecting it into playlists. Dabble exposes the value of media. We’re like a new kind of guide for the new TV: web video,” said founder and CTO Mary Hodder.
But in addition to being an online video index, Dabble is also Web 2.0-inspired. Members can collect videos for an online playlist and share and discuss them with other members. There is a “Wikipedia-like interface” as well that holds video descriptions and information edited and maintained by members as part of “the central record.”
Instead of a user ratings, which Dabble claims are “meaningless,” the site takes a social networking approach so like-minded users can connect and recommend.
Already containing over 100,000 videos from the Internet Archive’s Moving Pictures Database, Dabble is getting good reviews from some well-known Internet authorities.
The site creates “the shortest distance between the most production and the most consumption,” said Doc Searls, senior editor of Linux Journal and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto.
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