Video Sift is a social video site that I mentioned in a post on How To Split An Atom’s main page. This service allows its user to sift through the content on other social video sites and vote on what should be posted on the main page. Brian Houston, one of the creators of Video Sift was kind enough to sit down and talk with us.

Thanks for joining us Brian, tell us a little about yourself and how your company came into being.

I started VideoSift back in February of this year. I had just come
off a round the world trip with my family. I wasn’t working at the
time, but had the itch to create something. I was following the
interesting developments over at pligg.com. Pligg is a software
framework that allows anyone to roll their own Digg-esque site. With
the spare time on my hands I buried myself in the code trying to tease
out a framework that fused the voting of Digg, with elements from
other community sites that I enjoy.

Shortly after launch, the site was deluged with traffic. I was
completely taken by surprise, as it was meant to be just a little
coding project. My US VideoSift partner, James put it this way:
“Sometimes the Internet is crying out for something that it doesn’t
know it needs.”

James came on board about a week after launch by way of a community
site that we both love, MetaFilter. I noticed that most of my traffic
happens while I am asleep here in Australia. James is able to manage
the site during those peak hours when I’m snoozing. We share a common
political slant and a love of nerdy things, so it makes for a very
smooth operation.

The internet is such a great tool for collaboration. I have only recently been introduced to your site but I really like what I see so far. Tell me, what made you decide to get into the social video space and did you take any cues from any of the other sites that are currently available?

In my previous life, I worked for the largest Satellite TV broadcaster
here in Australia, AUSTAR. (http://www.austar.com.au) Part of my
brief there was to push new technologies for delivering video. I
spent a lot of time trying to convince the company to make an Internet
Video play. Unfortunately I think they were averse to the risk of
going down such an untested path. I parted ways amicably with AUSTAR,
having done a lot of research in this area and keen to put it to use
somewhere. VideoSift was a natural offshoot of that.

I have to ask, everyone knows about social video sites like You Tube and Google Video. Fewer people have heard about Video Sift. What makes you folks different? I noticed, specifically, that it seems like you have cut out a lot of the truly derivative junk that you usually have to sift through on those other sites. How have you designed your interface to do this?

We’ve taken a lot of cues from community sites. We decided early on
that the videos are not the most important part of VideoSift – instead
it’s the conversations and interactions that happen around the videos
that count. We have a very loyal cadre of Sifters that share our
passion for quality videos. Instead of taking a top-down admin
approach, we have empowered our members to control VideoSift
themselves. We have a ranking system for members based on how many
videos they have had published on VideoSift. Once a member reaches a
Gold Star rank, they pretty much run the site. They can delete videos
that are dupes or unsuitable, promote old “classic” videos back to the
front page, and much more. It’s a meritocratic system that is shaping
up really nicely. James thinks there might be a book in there
somewhere, I’m just happy not to spend my life deleting lip-synch
videos.

Yea, I can name a few sites that could take a cue from you on that front. One last question, as an entrepreneur, do you have any advice for people who have an idea but just don’t know where to start or how to get it off the ground?

I’m about as much of an entrepreneur as Karl Marx. I will say that
popularity on the net does not automatically lead to financial
success. We get around 1.6 million page views per month at VideoSift,
but this has not led to large sums of money, nor are we aiming for
that. We make enough to cover our server costs, and a bit more. We
have text link advertising for non-logged on visitors. We remove all
advertising once you log on.

I suggest trying them out for yourself, you will be pleasantly surprised.

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