Like Digg, Newsvine, and other community-driven content sites, woomu also allows users to vote on individual videos, determining which files appear on the homepage of the site. The woomu twist is that besides voting files up to the homepage, users can also vote an individual file down. This two-way-street approach is one that other community-driven sites have stayed away from for the most part, choosing instead to go with a weighted voting system that favors reporting bad links over straight down votes. woomu puts the yea vs. nay on an even keel- but will it work?

Dave McAdam, co-founder of woomu, took some time to answer some questions about the new service via email. In the interview, Dave talks about the difference between woomu and other video sites, how the service fits in with the emerging distributed content model, and what the name means. The entire interview appears after the break.

Jason Clarke: What is woomu? What does the name mean?

Dave McAdam, woomu: The short answer: Woomu is where you will find all the best video on the web.

The long answer: Woomu is a website where users can submit links to videos and then other users can vote for (woo) or against (mu) them. All submissions go into the “woomu queue”, and if they get enough votes they will make it to the main page. The result is a frequently updated collection of the best videos on the web.

The name “woomu” is a mashup of the words “woo” and “mu”
“woo” is what people say when they’re happy, like when Homer Simpson gets a free beer. Woo!

“mu” is a negative word, it means “to be lacking, or to be without.”

Jason: There’s a big list of video sharing sites out there, including YouTube, Google Video, and many more. How is woomu different and/or better?

Dave: Woomu is different than other video sharing sites like YouTube or Google Video, because you can find links to the best videos on the web wherever they might be. On YouTube, you will only find videos that are on YouTube.

Jason: Like Digg and other social content sites, woomo’s homepage videos are determined by voting them up. But woomu also includes the option to vote it down. How does a vote down button change the dynamic of the site’s community?

Dave: I’m a big fan of Digg, but many times I’ve found myself wishing there was a way to actually vote against a story, and I think many other people feel the same way. So I decided to give users the power to both vote for and against the videos that get submitted. I think being able to reward the good stuff by voting it up, and punish the bad stuff by voting it down adds a little extra spice to the community, especially since your votes are out in public for everyone to see.

“woomu is all about displaying the best videos wherever they might be on the web instead of just a single site. One of the biggest advantages is that we can link to copyrighted video.”
-Dave McAdam, founder, woomu

Jason: Video sharing site YouTube first made national news in December 2005 for its part in making the Saturday Night Video “Lazy Sunday” popular. Now, NBC has succeeded in getting YouTube to remove its content from the YouTube site. How will woomu deal with copyright infringement issues like this?

Dave: Woomu deals with copyright issues by simply not hosting anything. Woomu just links you to where the good stuff is, we don’t host it. Sites like YouTube actually host videos on their website, so they’re the ones who are distributing them, which is where the legal issues get a bit nasty…woomu is all about displaying the best videos wherever they might be on the web instead of just a single site. One of the biggest advantages is that we can link to copyrighted video.

An interesting example, this week NBC pursued legal action against YouTube for distributing their copyrighted Saturday Night Live videos on YouTube, specifically the very funny and popular “Lazy Sunday” video. So YouTube had to remove that content from their site, along with hundreds of other copyrighted videos. Now, if you’re looking for the Lazy Sunday video, you won’t be able to find it at YouTube. But since Woomu doesn’t host any of
the videos and just provides links, we’re still able to send you to the video.

Jason: Does woomu have any plans to offer tools for videobloggers or content creators?

Dave: One thing I’d like to do is create a section on the site that teaches people how to make great video for the web. Everything from shooting video, editing, encoding, hosting, etc… I’d also like to add a forum where users can discuss all things video related among themselves.

Jason: Sounds like some cool things coming. A related question- Sites like the new classifieds service Edgeio are breaking ground by allowing content creators to host their own works, while Edgeio uses RSS to pull it all together. What do you think about this approach for woomu?

At the moment, if content producers want to submit a link to their video, they have to login and fill out the submit form. I think that’s pretty easy, and most people are familiar with that process. I’ve read about edgio, and it sounds interesting, but I think it’s too early to tell if it will be a successul model for the future, but if the model that edgio is developing becomes popular, I’d be happy to enable similar functionality on woomu.

Jason: Can you talk about woomu’s plans to grow its community?

Dave: My plan to grow the community is to invite video bloggers (vloggers) to submit links to their video posts. Woomu is a great way to get some visitors to your video blog. Also, video bloggers are a group of people who are obviously passionate about video on the web, which is exactly the type of people I want.

Jason: What’s under woomu’s hood? PHP, Ruby, or something different? Any other technologies of note at work?

Dave: I’m a big promoter of anything open source, and woomu reflects that. We built the site on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP), also, the voting and a few other features make use of Ajax so you can vote without having to refresh the page.

Jason: Anything else you’d like to add?

Dave: We just launched the site, so anyone who wants to join and start voting and submitting is welcome!

Edgeio is still in beta, so you’ll need a password to check out the site. But without visiting it, you’ll have to trust me when I say that it’s not only a great new web-based classifieds service, it’s also a promosing hope for the future of distributed content and community on the web.

So that’s what makes edgeio so exciting, but what makes it tick? Simple. Instead of the ebay model, where you create a separate account, a separate identity, and sell your listings on their site, in their market, edgeio makes all of the web a market. Rather than posting an ad for sale on edgeio, you write a blog post listing your item, service, or job opening. Tag it with “listing” and other keywords, and edgeio reads your RSS feed and automatically lists your item. In my first test today, my listing- including the image I posted on it- appeared on edgeio within a few minutes.

After it appears, you can enhance your listing with graphics, keywords, by claiming it. The point is that while edgeio is a convenient place to search for and view items in context, the actual item itself is generated from within your own central place on the web.

Behind the simplicity of this difference lurks another tremendous benefit: identity.

When I create an item from my homepage, it is originating from my virtual “home” online, rather than from a username with no easily identifiable connection to its owner. Edgeio’s innovative approach to this identity system is not by accident, either. Updating your profile on the site allows you to specificy your Flickr, eBay, and LinkedIn ID’s, suggesting they plan to make identity a top priority on their service. Even it if was merely a focus, it would be a powerful step in the right direction.

I think Edgeio’s distributed content model will become increasingly popular over the next year as identity and attention gain traction, even it occurs at the nearly subconscious level as it has been so far. It’s already sort of happened to me, and I think others. If you’ve heard of a site called Squidoo, you might recall that it launched to some fanfare last year. The service describes itself as a “platform for meaning”, which means it’s a site where users go to post expert opinions and guidance on a huge array of topics. When it was released, I thought of it as an “About.com for Web 2.0″ because it allowed anybody to share their knowledge and even earn money for the hits they generated.

In my view though, despite some praise for it, the service ultimately failed to catch on due to a reason I read on a few blogs. Micropersuasion’s Steve Rubel captured the sentiment when he wrote “I really don’t see what the big deal is about this product. I tried it during the private beta and found it very confusing. I recommend having your own blog instead.” What Steve’s saying hints at this underlying apprehension among people who publish online: Why do I need to make a new account and join an entirely new community just to share another bit?

If it sounds like a whine, it’s not, and it’s going to become more articulate in the near term. The idea that as we become more comfortable publishing online, and as online publishing provides a simple means for broadcasting a wider variety of things, that we should continue to fracture and splinter off into increasingly walled communities simply does not fit in with the new direction that online communities are moving towards.

The concept of distributed content pulled together using existing, non-disruptive technologies (RSS, tags) even has the potential to stop other popular movements in their tracks. Here, I’m thinking specifically of user-generated news sites such as Digg and Newsvine.

Last fall, I practically begged Newsvine co-founder Mike Davidson for a beta invite because I was earnestly excited at the concept of a news site that, like Digg, was determined largely by user votes and comments but that covered everything imaginable beyond tech. It’s still a huge step for news to take, and although I’ve registered a complaint I’m more convinced than ever that the site is not only needed, but wanted by smart readers who want to help shape news for the better for themselves and others.

But now, having thought about edgeio’s approach, I am wondering how much more powerful a site like Newsvine or Digg could be if they allowed me to write a blog post, tag it ‘fornewsvine’, and have it automatically appear under my name on their site.

It’s not an impossible dream. It’s a probability, with the next generation of online services, if edgeio’s approach begins to pay off. I’m betting it will.

If you use one of these codes, please leave a comment here so I can update this post when all 3 codes are taken.

Thanks!

coComment invites codes- visit http://cocomment.com to use them:

1848-9898-3693
6373-5033-3319
9201-1893-4171

I know I don’t have to say this, but please consider your fellow human and only take one of these codes if you plan to try the service. Thanks!

If you haven’t heard, coComment sounds like quite a nifty new service…and it is. It’s a site that will help you keep track of all the comments you leave out there in blog-land.

Thanks to coComment’s Merlin, I was invited to beta test the service.

The idea behind coComment is simple, as as I’ve been commenting more lately, it’s something I was wishing before even before I knew it existed. Here’s the gist: coComment will save and contexualize all of the comments you leave out there on the web in one handy place for you.

The big question many people are wondering is, how do they do it? Well, it’s not fancy, but it does work…for the most part. How it works is you visit a site like normal. You type your comment as normal. Then, when you’ve finished typing- but before you click the ‘publish’ button- you click the coComment bookmark saved in your browser’s bookmarks toolbar. That step tells coComment to scrape the page, read your comment, and store it in your account at coComment’s site.

That’s a bit of a clunky process- I wish it didn’t allow for so much human error- but it’s simple, and it doesn’t require something far uglier like making you visit a separate site to leave comments.

Once your comment is saved, coComment does the rest. My favorite feature so far is the way the coComment site saves not only my comment, but the ones before and after it also, creating a contexual thread for me to view my comment within. If you leave multiple comments at multiple sites, you can already see the value of a site that collects all those streams into once place for you. I’m also a fan of the RSS feed they give me. Any service launching this year that doesn’t give me an RSS feed of my data, if it’s even remotely relevant, is not something I’d consider using. There’s just too much stuff out there to try things that I don’t think could become eventually uselful, and any service not offering RSS is ever going to fall into that category.

From what little testing I’ve done so far, I think the biggest drawback is that currently, coComment only works with a finite set of websites, mostly many of the top blogging platforms (WordPress, MovableType, etc.), along with some other notable non-blog sites such as Flickr and MySpace. This is a clear limitation on the service, as there are countless other places I’d potentially comment. As with its human-generated comment tracking method, here the service needs to expand not by adding more places, but by devising some method to cover any instance where commenting might happen. Not sure if that’s possible or not, but as the web itself gets bloggier, they might want to look into it.

In this early stage, I’m giving coComment a B. It’s getting crowded out there in social software land- I wonder if a service that does something as granular as tracking comments has enough relevancy to stick.

I’ve been using the site for a few weeks. I’ll post some thoughts here when I get a chance. My quick reaction is, I like it, though its early, and I’m hoping it continues to improve (and expecting it will).

Update: I should be clear that I’m offering these invites to friends and online associates whom I know and trust. That’s a request made by Newsvine on its “invite friends” page, in place, according to their reasoning, to keep the site’s community spam free. So if you know me, and you’d like to try Newsvine, let me know.

I’ve been using the service for about two weeks now (but I’ve only posted to once so far, to my detriment). My reaction is split down the middle, as I stated in my lone post at jasonclarke.wordpress.com:

1. The blogging interface in hosted WordPress is vastly improved, while looking quite similar (and that’s outstanding from a usability standpoint). Especially appreciated are two key features: the “add category” functionality and the “upload/add images” function.

2. Alternately, two major drawbacks made the WordPress hosted service largely undesirable for me. One was the inability to edit your templates- even font faces and sizes were blocked. The other was the inability to map a domain to the service.

Unfortunately, neither of my major cons have been addressed with the WordPress public launch. But I know that offering customziable templates has to be on their horizon; it’s only a matter of time. One major advtange of the service that I failed to mention in my initial review: the comment spam blocking seems to be around 1 million times better than it is for me on my installed version of WordPress.

Jeff writes:

“[T]here is one feature notably absent from Measure Map that I’ve missed already: the ability to see a list of users browsing your site right now.”

Thanks for the great review, Jason. I’m curious about the feature you describe above, however. Could you say more about it? What would you want to see – a list of IP addresses? And what would that information help you do?

Thanks for taking the time to comment, Jeff! To answer the question, first let me throw a caveat: as I said in my review, I’m talking about a pretty non-essential feature here- a bit of fun is the key. But since Measure Map’s big advantage is that its interface is far superior, why not throw in some fun features to further elighten the user, right?

So my answer. If I were to add a “current visitors” metric to Measure Map as it is now, I’d probably place it directly above the four main graphic headers on the account overvie page. Without hogging too much of that important screen space, I’d suggest:

A smallish, wide but not too tall horizontal graphic indicating, in linear fashion, each current user according to how long they’ve been on the site. This graphic, taken from a stats program I’ve used before called LiveStats, shows what I mean:

Below that graphic, It would also be neat to see a list of the top 5-10 users currently browsing the site, with at the least, the user’s hostname and time spent on the site. Above both the graphic and this list would be a big Measure Map-esque heading: “24 users are browsing your site right now.” And then perhaps below that (instead of the standard “That’s x more than the average day.”), something like: “Current users have spent an average of 24 minutes on your site.”

That’s today’s Measure Map minute. Thanks again to Jeff Veen for responding to my initial review.

By entering you email address at the service’s homepage, measuremap.com, you’ll be added to the waiting list to receive an invitation to test out the service. I’ve been lucky enought to receive an invitation, and today I finally opened the email and signed up for the service to track this blog.

My first impressions, after using it for just a few hours, are that it is quite usable and very attractive. Unfortunately, this blog generates such little traffic that I don’t quite have the data set I’d like (or is really necessary) for a proper experimentation. Nonetheless, I can comment on the interface, as sparsely full of data as it is, and what I’ve seen so far I really like.

First, the signup process. It’s quite easy until you reach the part about adding the neccessary bit of Javascript code to your site so that Measure Map can begin compiling data. By asking you what blog software you utilize, the service is able to direct you to a client-specific set of instructions (in my case, WordPress) for adding its needed code snippets to your blog templates.

The instructions provided were friendly and clear, yet I still hesitate just a bit at the fact that a user will need to add three separate code snippets into their blog in order for the service to work. I’m most likely overreacting, as most bloggers are either savvy enough on their own or know somebody who is, but still, this is a fairly complicated aspect of an otherwise quite easy service, so it does stand out more than a bit.

The most notable difference between Measure Map and other statistics tools I’ve used (and I’ve used quite a few) is that this one is written for humans, by humans. Most statistics tools provide massive amounts of data, in tiny fonts laid out in giant, barely readable lists. The occasional graph does little to improve the overall experience of navigating between relevant information.

Measure Map, to acclaim, changes that by vastly simplifying the interface to your stats. Data is presented in sentence format uniformly throughout the site. An example: rather than providing a graph of unique visitors for the current day, as many stats programs would, Measure Map speaks to you like this: 8 visitors came to your blog. That’s the same as an average day.

The visual cues do not end at the thoughtful way the stats are presented. Another improvement over the traditional stats service metaphors is how Measure Map organizes the main categories- or metrics- of data. “Visitors” – perhaps the most important bit of info you’ll track- is displayed as one of four large grapics representing the four main stat metrics viewable from your account homepage. The three other metrics- inbound links, comments, and per-post views- are organized in the same way. Subsequently, clicking on any of those four main metric headings provides detailed information about each. Other neat touches- such as highighted historical comparisons (“that’s 3 more than the average day”) and an extremely functional, draggable date sorter- make viewing the rise and fall of your visitors’ attention easy (and fun).

Of course, any application in “alpha” mode is bound to have some limitations, and Measure Map does. While the stats they do mine are displayed elegantly, there are the afforementioned challenges in setting up the code to work on a site (even my brilliant programmer co-worker fumbled, albiet briefly- but the point is made). Not to mention, there is one feature notably absent from Measure Map that I’ve missed already: the ability to see a list of users browsing your site right now. That may not be a particularly valuable feature, but it is a fun one.

Clearly, Measure Map is a blog-centric stats package (the service’s tagline is “get to know your blog”). That narrow focus allows for the blog specific “comments” and “posts” breakdown, yet it also (quite obviously) limits the application’s focus to sites that fit the blog format. By aiming at blogs, Measure Map will be competing with Site Meter, a free statistics service favored by thousands, if not millions, of bloggers. While Site Meter currently offers more data, Measure Map gets the win for interface.

I have two hopes for Measure Map as it moves towards public launch (the last time I heard, that was set for the “new year”). One, I hope that Adaptive Path elects not to charge for the service. Although I wouldn’t blame them if they did, I’d like to at least see a Flickr-style “free” and “pro” differentiation, allowing for advanced features (in the “pro” or paid version) while allowing wide access (the free version). My other hope is that down the road, Measure Map allows for authors to track multiple blogs from within a single account interface.

Using a service as fluid and as helpful as Measure Map really brings to light how popular blogging tools have failed at delivering on such an essential component as web stats. Perhaps Measure Map will lead a renewed focus on stats as the next generation of blogging tools (SixApart’s Project Comet, hosted WordPress, others) emerge.

I’ll continue to keep an eye on Measure Map and report back again.