Megite, a blog aggregation news service (see here for a comparison of Megite to its competitors) has launched a videos vertical that tracks popular videos in an interesting way. Unlike the Digg video channel, which ranks videos based solely on user voting, Megite’s ranking is based on what vidoes blogs are linking to or embedding into their sites (the same way Megite tracks other news). An authoritative blog linking to a video can drive it up in the rankings, as will a large number of less authoritative blogs. The “freshness” of the video is also important (meaning Megite is tracking newly uploaded videos). Megite is tracking 20 video sites, although understandably YouTube is currently dominating the results.
This is a good way to rank videos because it suffers from less potential voting fraud than, say, Digg. If an established blog links to a video there’s a very good chance it is a real vote for that video. Taking aggregate statistics from tens of thousands of blogs will tend to yield very good results.
More from Rex Dixon, who also links to an interview he recently conducted with Megite founder Matthew Chen.
Looks like an interesting service, though I would imagine there will be many spin-offs in the future since YouTube is so dominating. I certainly like the way the videos are ranked, by linking rather than votes.
Some suggested improvements:
I’d like to see unique user voting coupled with the current ranking system to slow voting abuse. In addition, I’m noticing some graphical bugs (in FireFox 1.5) when trying to drag the “…more discussions” pop-up box.
All-in-all, I think it’s a good service, I like the concept.
Cheers
Technorati has had that for some time, and theirs is much easier to peruse:
http://technora...om/pop/youtube/
Using blogs as an indication of popularity is a great idea but I have to agree with Ben, Technorati has been doing that for a while now.
They even also have popular movies, news, images, music, etc.
Just check out their home page.
Michael….
As I was saying on NewTeeVee just now we pushed out Tailrank video tonight.
http://video.tailrank.com
and here is our blog post on the subject:
http://www.feed...ank_21_now.html
This was actually going to be in out before xmas as a present for our users but we didn’t make it in time.
Though the people who are embedding videos in their blogs does seems to be real votes, but not everyone is embedding all the videos they like. So the service will yield good results for those videos which are blogged but will miss out on some great videos which are not being blogged.
Suggest you have a look at VideoSift – http://www.videosift.com They use voting to determine video popularity, but have a focus squarely on video, unlike Digg.
VideoSift was just named best video aggregator by PCWorld Magzine:
http://www.pcwo...es/article.html
yes but technorati ranks everything the same, nothing based on authority, and they only rank youtube. It would be very easy to game technorati.
simple, smart, has a chance
Thanks Michael. Megite Video (http://www.megite.com/video“> is launching today. Megite crawls hundreds of thousands of blogs for links to video on more than 20 video sharing services such as YouTube, Google Video, Daily Motion, Metacafe, Ifilm, Vimeo, Break, Revver, Grouper, Bolt, Yoqoo, 6Rooms, and more. Videos are ranked by the importance of the discussion blogs, the popularity of the discussion blogs, the number of blogs that are discussing, the freshness of the video, and the number of clicks we are planning to add in the near future. We are also working on to cluster the related videos that will be released in the near future.
“Megite’s ranking is based on what vidoes blogs are linking to or embedding into their sites (the same way Megite tracks other news).”
BlogRank — very much like Google’s PageRank
I wonder if someone is applying this logic to ranking News articles.
PS — Don’t you think Google and Stanford’s patent on PageRank will cover media and document of all types? Megite could be under huge trouble if that is the case.
people started to use link count way before pagerank
Take a look at http://www.viralvideochart.com too. Like Technorati’s service, it is more crudely democratic – one link / embed = one vote, no upweighting for authority – leading to a relatively large showing of MySpace videos due to the sheer volume of MySpace blogs.
We scan a couple of million blogs a day for links and embeds and have been live since mid-September.
sounds like a couple people have beaten them to the punch according to these comments MICHAEL!
Thanks for noting Technorati’s top videos, ben and Frank; also note we have videos integrated into tag results now (along with other media types). eg
http://technora...tag/James+Brown
I like this idea. Right now I don’t use video sites much b/c most of the content is wimpy. If there was a good organization to it, I’d be more likely to watch it.
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ounds like a couple people have beaten them to the punch according to these comments MICHAEL!