ToonTube Reborn!

I have been happy to see Wes Abrams's ToonTube site (http://www.toonlifeonline.com/toontube/) spring back to life over the past few weeks. ToonTube is an animation forum featuring family friendly animations in a variety of styles (2d, 3d, stop motion, hand drawn, digitally created, etc.) It was comatose for quite a while due to Magnify.net (which formerly powered the site) having imposed a 200 video limitation on their free accounts (and Wes's understandable reluctance to fork over $100 plus dollars a year for something that had previously been free).

Now, however, it's back in the form of a PHP-powered set forum and open to new videos once more. So if you are an animator or just like watching animations, I would encourage you to stop by. Please note the above url carefully as there are a number of other sites with similar names.

(Full disclosure: I'm an admin on ToonTube and an active participant, so I'm definitely not unbiased). *

ToonTube Reborn!

Revver Going Down for Planned Outage 1/28/2009, 5:00 pm-10:00 pm or so

I just saw a late posting on the Revver forums. The official word is that Revver and all related services (including video serving) are scheduled to go down at 5:00 pm on Wednesday, 1/28/2009 (as of right now that's in less than half an hour). They hope to be up and running again by 10:00 p.m. or so.

I'm not sure exactly what prompted this. Hopefully they are doing something which will make the system more stable in the long run :)

1/29/2009: At this point I don't know that the outage actually took place. I checked back 2 hours and 15 minutes after it was supposed to have started and Revver was (presumably still) up and running. I haven't seen any indication from anyone that it actually went down at any point during the planned time period.

1/29/2009, 4:47pm: Ok, now it seems that Revver and all related sites (and video serving) are down. If I knew more, I'd tell you :)

1/31/2009, 10:55am PST: Ok, now I know more (I think). Although Revver is still down, to the extent that the Brad Greenspan's quote in this article on CNet:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10153816-2.html

can be relied on, it looks like Revver will be back online soon (although it's already missed the time frame specified in the quote).


2/2/2009, 8:22 PST: I see Revver video serving is *FINALLY* back up again (along with Revver.com). No sign of the Revver forums, the Revver blog, or LiveUniverse.com and PageFlakes.com yet (not that I really care much one way or the other whether those last two non-Revver sites are up or not, but I checked out of curiousity). And I mean my heavily emphasized "finally" in the sense of "Good grief, it's about time!" rather than in the sense that I have any firm conviction that it won't go down again. *

Revver Going Down for Planned Outage 1/28/2009, 5:00 pm-10:00 pm or so

Video Liberty Project

The video featured in yesterday's post falls into the general category of "open-licensed video". If you are interested in this type of video for use in your own productions or if it's something you'd like to create and allow other people to use, I encourage you to take a look at Stuart Whitmore's Video Liberty Project

In addition to a brief explanation of the concept, the site offers some relevant articles, as well as some descriptions of and links to a number of Liberated Videos (typically available under the terms of one of the Creative Commons Licenses). *

Video Liberty Project

Site of the Day: Mefeedia.com

I recently signed up with the site Mefeedia.com. According to the site's "about" page, Mefeedia describes itself as "an aggregator, a video feedreader. It is a place to watch videobloggers". That's all true, but it doesn't begin to do the site justice.

If you produce videos and/or a video blog, Mefeedia is a great place to gain exposure. Like many good video sharing sites, they claim no ownership in your content, don't mess with any ads you've embedded in your videos, and provide you with a large and growing audience. Beyond that, there are some things that really set them apart from the crowd:

(1) Rather than having to manually submit your videos to Mefeedia one at a time, you can submit "feeds" (such as Revver collections) and presto! Mefeedia grabs the information just as if you'd gone and submitted all of the individual videos in the feed. Mefeedia grabs updates from the feed when you add new videos to it without any additional effort on your part (typically within a day or so).

(2) They seem to have a great community of video creators/bloggers. I've only been there a couple of days, and I already feel right at home.

(3) Their terms of service page is legible, seems fair and comprehensible to me, and is short enough that you can read the whole thing without even having to scroll down! I get the feeling that they actually designed the site with their users in mind :)


If you watch videos, Mefeedia lets you ad feeds to your "channel", so that the stuff you want gets aggregated in one place. They also have a nice feature called "guides" which aggregate recommended video and audio feeds in one place. As of this writing they have almost 300 guides for almost 1800 video feeds. So if you're looking for a particular category, there's a good chance that someone has done some of the leg work for you. On the other hand, if you want to share your tastes or expertise with the community, you can also create your own guides, as many as you wish.

There are other features at the site that I have not had time to explore, but based on what I've seen so far, I definitely plan to look into them :) *

Site of the Day: Mefeedia.com