UPDATE: As far as I can tell, is Mefeedia the World’s Largest Human-Powered Knowledgebase for Online Video??? Mahalo is bigger on the text side, YouTube and other UGC are more about general categories, and the How-To video sites are more about How-To rather than what i would consider knowledgebases, aka Wikipedia. Please leave a comment or send an email to frank at mefeedia dot com if you have any thoughts on this.

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Mefeedia has reach another important milestone - 1,000 curated channels - thanks to the Mefeedia community of content curators, now number 330 active, and growing.
Our original goal of channels was to create small, enthusiast communities that would curate the best video feeds from the around the Web - a sort of knowledgebase for online video and audio. Each channel would be Wiki-like where anyone could add or remove a video feed that is relevant to that channel’s topic. Today, with over 1,200 curated channels, Mefeedia’s channels cover a range of topics - everything from cooking to travel to social media to comedy.

Some statistics on our Channels:

• 330 active curators editing and adding to channels
• 1,200 Channel communities
• 4,650 video feeds added
• 1,050,000 videos curated

Feed Focus

The key to channels is creating order out of chaos - an organized knowledgebase for online video. This is why we focused on creating communities and audiences around media feeds - you can quickly find and subscribe to the shows in each specific topic. For example, a user can quickly find and subscribe to “Fearless Cooking” and “Healthy Helpings TV” within the Cooking channel, and see the other 16 shows focused on cooking. It is one place to find every media feed on cooking - all filtered and vetted through the community!

Human-Powered Knowledgebase for Online Video

Wikipedia is the perfect example of a human-powered knowledge site that is constantly evolving and improving. Similarly, Mefeedia has become one of the largest knowledgebases of online video information available on the web today - and continues to evolve based on the 1,000 channels and expertise of 330 active curators.

Anyone can join a channel and begin participating by following these easy 5 steps:

1. Register on Mefeedia.com
2. Browse to a channel you would like to participate in - click “Join Channel”.
3. Find or submit a Feed (becomes a “Show” on Mefeedia.com) that you would like to add.
4. Go to that feed’s “Show Page” (will be at www.mefeedia.com/feeds/[some number]).
5. Click “Add to Channel” and add to the appropriate channel.

All channels are then monitored by the 300+ curators and Mefeedia staff, so if something is added inappropriately - say, a Golf Show to the Cooking Channel - it can subsequently be removed.

What’s Next

We plan to greatly expand this knowledge network, building on top of these channels to enable even better search and discovery on media. Stay tuned.See more in:channels, knowledge networks, mefeedia

May numbers have come in - and we are excited that we reached 5 million unique users for the month of May (source: Google Analytics).
2008 Uniques per Month: 

Thank you to the Mefeedia community! We continue to work hard on building a better Mefeedia, so stay tuned…See more in:mefeedia

Today, we are launching News Video Search. “Mefeedia News” aggregates embeddable video from over 500 news sources worldwide. Videos are grouped based on topics. Each topic can be searched via keyword.
Features:

• Browse and Search by Topic - each topic can be narrowed based on just the stories that interest you. For example, browse to “Politics” and search for “obama“. Or browse to “Technology” and search for “facebook“.
• Feeds - receive the latest news video via MediaRSS that you can input into your feed reader of choice.
• Watch - watch all news videos and podcasts via embeds, using the sources’ player (where available).
• “Watch this page” - watch all of your search results in a Theater View for easy scanning and viewing.

Sources:

Sources include major news publishers, local news organizations (via ClipSyndicate), and blogs. The sources were based on popularity, relevancy, and user-curated channels that allow the users to have input into which sources are authorities in each topic, such as technology news. Here is a sampling of some of the sources:

• Network News: ABC News, MSNBC, CBS News, FOX News, CNN
• News Sites: New York Times, Associated Press, Reuters, CNET, WashingtonPost
• News Shows: 20/20, 60 Minutes, Nightline, Today Show
• News Magazines: BusinessWeek, NewsWeek
• News Podcasts: TalkCrunch, Read/Write Talk, Wall Street Journal Podcasts
• News Blogs and Vlogs: WebbAlert, TMZ, Political Lunch, The Ointment, Beet.tv

Curated Channels:
As mentioned, we let users influence which news sources are “top sources” for each category, via our Channels. Channels are curated by user-based Subject Matter Experts and these SMEs add the most relevant feeds to each channel. It is the Wiki model, adopted for curating video channels.

Enjoy the new search service!

http://www.mefeedia.com/newsSee more in:mefeedia, news search, news video, news video search

Mefeedia Video Search is now available. Give it a whirl and let us know what you think - all you have to do is use the search box in the upper right side of the home page or in the header of any subsequent page. A brief summary:

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A Quality Index, Searching 15,000+ Video Websites

Videos from many different, highly relevant, and high quality sources is the key to powerful video search. Indexing the best video available from many, many sources is of utmost importance in helping users find the video that they will be interested in. Number of video websites indexed and searched, plus number of video feeds, is the metric we use as a barometer for video search coverage. With 15,000 video websites searched, Mefeedia helps users find video from:

• Major Video Sharing sites (YouTube, DailyMotion, Metacafe, Blip, Veoh, and many more)
• Web Series Sites (AllorNots, Quarterlife, BoingBoing TV, 60 Frames series, Next New Networks series, etc.)
• Video Blogs (Steve Garfield, Ryan Is Hungry, etc.)
• TV Sites (Hulu, CBS, ABC, and others)
• News Sites (CNN, MSNBC, ABC News, CBS News, etc.)
• Music Sites (Imeem and others)

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Find Videos, Find Shows
We are featuring a number of options to narrow your results to find exactly what you are looking for:

• By Date
• By Related Terms
• By Show
• By Vertical Category (TV, Music, Podcasts)

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Viewer Experience
In addition to Video Search, we are launching a new AJAX Player that will enable you to watch each search result in succession. Just click on the thumbnail of the video you want to start with, and the player will launch. The player supports over 300 different players from the thousands of video websites that we index.

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Vertical Video Search: TV, Music, Podcasts
Our first vertical searches are also being launched simultaneously: TV, Music, and Podcasts.TV - TV Search allows you to quickly find your favorite TV Shows (mainly U.S. TV to begin with) from the major networks to cable providers.

Music - Search across popular Music sites such as Imeem.com - find music playlists, music videos, and songs from your favorite artists.

Podcasts - Find audio podcasts from mainstream media, enthusiasts, and many others. Many podcasts that are part of the iTunes directory are here and more. Or you can join mefeedia, and import your iTunes podcasts for easy, web-based management of your iTunes podcast subscriptions.

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Beta
We are in Beta with Video Search - mainly, because we are still working on indexing even more video! We are extremely pleased to have an extensive search engine that covers so many different video sites and are looking to continually improve it. We look forward to your feedback - just post to the Mefeedia users group. Enjoy the new video search - we hope you find some video worth watching!See more in:mefeedia, search, video search

Just wanted to thank all of the great users of Mefeedia - thanks to all of you, mefeedia.com is growing!! We have just hit 3 million unique visitors for the month of February (with 0 marketing / advertising budget, of course!). We hope you enjoy the new updates on the site - there is more coming down the pipeline, so stay tuned. Thanks again!!!See more in:mefeedia, users

I just read a Bebo press release about their “radical new vision” for Open Media. My question for them: Where have they been living the last two years? Online video has always been about being open - making it easy to publish, distribute, and share with your friends. PaidContent.org wrote about this new “open media platform” in a post here, saying “the race is on to be the most ubiquitous platform in town”. An excellent observation, and I am glad that we have had a 2 year head start in that race. :)
Open Social Media Platform + Open Player = The Most Open Platform in Town

Mefeedia (the “open social media platform”) + Miro (”the open player” and Joost killer) is the most open platform in town. MediaRSS in / MediaRSS out - mash it up, mix it up, play it, watch it on any device, watch it in Second Life, share it with your friends, use your friends as filters, download to Miro, bring it to your TV. Openness = Flexibility and Choice.

The combination of these two platforms is very powerful. I am glad to see the rest of the “town” is catching up to the vision we set forth several years ago here at Mefeedia.

UPDATE: Miro has officially release it’s 1.0 version today! Congrats Miro team!!!

Mefeedia + Miro = the game-changing “open social media platform”.

UPDATE 2: Techcrunch wrote about it here.

UPDATE 3: GigaOm has written about Bebo and Open Media. How can it be open when it is put into a closed social network? I’ve never seen a Bebo RSS feed coming out - ever. Please leave a comment if you know of a way to get data OUT of Bebo. Open = Data In / Data Out.

UPDATE 4: Marshall over at R/W Web has done a good analysis of the new platforms - is Bebo’s “Open Media” really a platform?

UPDATE 5:  On a roll today - TechCrunch just wrote about Bebo’s video push, which is really what this about (not a platform).

See more in:bebo, gigaom, mefeedia, miro, paidcontent

As of today, Mefeedia’s market-leading media aggregation technology has undergone a significant upgrade. While our service was already pulling in video from more disparate sources (15,000) than any other video aggregator in the market, we were not satisfied with that. We have now upgraded the backend technology. Among the improvements are:

• Support for Brightcove feeds, Viddler feeds, Clipshack, as well as better support for Dailymotion, Metacafe, Veoh, and others (over 350 video sharing sites, over 15,000 video websites).
• Tag aggregation has also been improved, with support for aggregating multi-word tags (Blip and several others have this functionality).
• Better thumbnail and feed image aggregation
• Many other bug fixes.

Working through such a technological challenge was hard work, so many props goes to the mefeedia team for pulling this together.See more in:aggregation, mefeedia

First Odeo was sold, bought, sold, then bought again. Now Yahoo Podcasts is shutting down. What is the future of audio podcasting? The market is clearly a video game, but is there a need for audio podcasts and can they be monetized? Our answer is a resounding YES! It is like saying “radio is dead” - which, of course, it is alive and kicking and transforming as well with HD Radio and Sirius/XM. This leads me to the following question:

Why are we still calling it “pod”casting? Why not just call audio “audio” and “video” video? Audio is more than just one device - it is about listening, and the last i checked, music discovery sites are being funded continuously.

Conclusion : we plan to continue to extend both our video AND audio capabilities. Audio travel stories, meditations, learning - all very popular audio programs - will continue to flourish. Video stories, vlogs, shows, and viral videos will, of course, grab the headlines. “All of your media in one place” is still a vision that is extremely attractive - and useful - to users.

See more in:mefeedia, odeo, podcasts, yahoo

Mefeedia just became more social! We have been swamped here at mefeedia creating some exciting new features and an easier interface for everyone to interact with their media friends. This past week, we launched the first of a series of new releases of mefeedia. We are taking this iterative approach so that we can receive feedback quickly and react rapidly.

In this release:

1. New Home Page (both logged in and not logged in).
2. OPML Import - import your iTunes, Odeo, Bloglines, and other podcast and vlog subscriptions!
3. What are my friends watching? (my meeps = mefeedia media meeps) - particularly, each member has “activity among my meeps” - a social discovery tool to see what your friends are watching!
4. Overall site design updates, particularly all meeps pages.
5. Channels home page redesign
6. Tons of small updates, tweaks, and bug fixes.

We plan to have a new release each week for the next 4 weeks until we officially “launch”. Please let us know how you like the new site!

See more in:channels, itunes, mefeedia, odeo, opml, social discovery, social networks

I am pleased to let everyone know that we have partnered with Miro and have been added to the Miro player’s search. See release here of all of the great new features and fixes for this new Miro release, including Mefeedia video search!

If you are unfamiliar with Miro (used to be Democracy Player), it is a free, open-source player that enables you to download and watch video in fullscreen. It is a great solution for bringing your Mefeedia personal channel and subscriptions offline and easily watchable in a great player. We plan to continue to work with the Miro team and offer even better integration and interoperability between Mefeedia and Miro in the future.See more in:mefeedia, miro, search