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We last covered VodPod back in 2006, when the site launched as a YouTube competitor with some social bookmarking features. Since then the site has seen some major changes: CEO Mark Hall says that within a month or two after launching, VodPod decided to disable user-uploaded videos and to concentrate on its bookmarking functionality, which was quickly becoming the site’s most popular feature. The startup launched a widget that allows bloggers to include their most recently bookmarked videos into their sites, which Hall says is currently being used by over 40,000 bloggers.

In 2007, VodPod launched an API that allowed sites to manage their video content, drawing from videos that they’d either bookmarked on VodPod or uploaded themselves. The API has been used by Second Life, NewTeeVee and a number of other well known sites. But up until earlier this year, using the API required developer resources, which prevented many sites that would have otherwise benefited from having their own video portals from using it.

Around nine months ago VodPod launched an experimental version of VodSpot as a hosted solution that allowed publishers to build video portals with a minimal amount of work required (Hall compares this to WordPress.com’s hosted blogs versus WordPress.org). But at the time the customization options were limited, with only a handful of designs available. Today’s launch includes support for VodPod’s new template engine Laminate, which will allow publishers to fully customize the appearance of their sites.

In conjunction with today’s launch, VodSpot is also open-sourcing the Laminate template engine, and is launching a new version of its API that adds support for finding the most popular videos in a given subject (say, politics) across the thousands of video sites that VodSpot indexes.

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VodPod is heavily designed around social networking. Have a thing for birds? Join the bird “pod” and you’ll have an instantaneous collection of birding videos. Like unicycling? Some kids from Australia have started a pod around that pastime too. Users can join multiple groups that cluster videos around various subjects that allows them to post and collect new videos that pertain to that topic. Although you don’t have to join a pod or even sign up with VodPod to search pod videos. Users can “lurk” within the pods anonymously without being socially networked.

Videos added to a pod don’t have to be original VodPod material. They can come from other sharing sites like YouTube using the embed code.

“Basically it allows you to build a video collection from videos you find on MySpace or YouTube or over 100 of these sites on the Internet, or you can put video of your own up on VodPod as the host, and then build a mixture of them.” said Mark Hall, one of the three founders of VodPod, in a phone briefing last Friday.

Hall and his partners are big fans of Last.fm and wanted to create a similar experience where users can build networks of friends with similar tastes and watch what they watch. Although, users can’t necessarily watch everything their friends watch because it is possible to mark certain videos as private, making it impossible for others to know that you have watched them.

VodPod development began over the summer in San Francisco where the company has been privately funded. Philip Rosedale, founder and CEO of Linden Labs and Second Life, and Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic, which owns Wordpress, are both outside advisers to the company.

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