Chris NiXoN | nixonbyname.com

Vod:Pod Rediscovered

At the end of last year I started using a video sharing site, Vod Pod. It was a nice service that let me store and share the videos I found from around the web. It was partly a collecting thing and partly a sharing thing.

I enjoyed using it, but at the time I was blogging on Vox, and they didn’t play well together, so I stopped using it. I posted about my reasons for dropping the service briefly here.

I no longer use Vox, and so I thought it was about time to revisit an old friend. I’m really glad I did. It a great way to share video, especially here on a hosted Wordpress site, where if a video isn’t on YouTube or Google Video, it’s a real pain to post.

Vod Pod’s integration with Wordpress makes it a dream to post videos from every video sharing site I have tried so far, either from the site, or through a Firefox plug-in. It’s also simple to post to many other blog platforms

I’m not, however, just using Vod Pod to post to my blogs. It’s nice to share videos within the site itself. You search for videos around the web, and simply click to add them to your channel, or pod as they call it, in the same way you post items to Delicious. Other users browse your videos and they can make comments, or even add the video to their own pods.

I’ve created a few pods so far. One for each of my blogs (posted in the sidebar of both) one for my favorite music videos, one for random cool stuff, as well as another for videos I have made. Once you have signed up, it’s very easy to subscribe to other people’s pods, and follow what is being added to them. Vod Pod also allow collaboration on pods, which makes for a nice social experience.

Vod Pod works well. I’m visiting it a couple of times a day, and also regularly using it to post videos here (you may have noticed and abundance of vids being posted here and on Photografr.com recently). It’s ease of use makes me think I’ll be using it for a while to come.