Cool stuff going on with Yurth, in the form of development (new tricks and gizmos in the works) and investors to fund it. All of which means that priorities get scrambled up. Although we’re still focused on making Yurth easy, easy for fun, personal video. Like quick little rants, missed connections, people connecting with people… We’re working on a mobile upload thing, for example. And we’re working on a cool way for each user to have their own personalized map (tabs, favorites, default location, etc.) Takes a hell of a lot of time and some extra $$ but very fun and we can see light at the end of the tunnel.
Thanks for your stuff and we want see more.

It’s… a different contest.

In addition to casting our net for any- and everyone we can find to share their vids with the world on Yurth, we want to explore letting Yurth grow in very specific ways. Some call this editorial direction. We, too, call it editorial direction. We also call it playing to our strengths.

Before leaping headlong, caution-to-the-wind into Web 2.0, we produced TV shows (still do, truth be told). In the past month or so, Yurth has made an impression on certain agents and producing partners, as well as the afore-mentioned Web gurus. With their guidance we’ve put into development a TV series based on our favorite-est of all personals categories: Missed Connections.

Now this is where you come in: your Video Missed Connection post. (“Whole Foods, last Friday. I was near the aovcados, you looked up from the bulk dried fruits. Our eyes met…”) It’s GOLD. Potential gold, anyway. Pull out your Webcam, your camera phone or your camcorder, record your missed connection story, then upload it to Yurth.

Then comes the fun part. Get your friends in on the act, build some word of mouth and try to track down your missed connection.

We’ll be flagging the best missed connections and watching the responses — from friends, from witnesses, from rivals. It’ll all go into the mix as we piece together stories for Missed Connections, the series.

Your Missed Connection video on Yurth: free. Hearing back from the one that got away him- or herself… priceless.

From our Digg about the Venue songs:

The complete series of animated shorts, “Venue Songs” salute each stop on a TMBG tour a couple years back. John Hodgman is a deranged millionaire who puts them up to it. On Yurth.com each short is pinned to the tour city that inspired it. Yurth is a map-based site for uploading, browsing and sharing vids, YouTube meets Craigslist with a cool map to navigate.



read more | digg story

If you…

a) Live Someplace on the Earth
b) Fit Any of the Above Categories
c) Can Get Your Claws on a Video Camera

…Then Shout it out loud on Yurth.com.

Go to www.Yurth.com to get the lowdown on our fantastically fun and easy-to-win Contest. Start posting video, get your crowd in on it. On June 1 someone’s gonna walk with a sweet Apple MacBook.

And if you don’t quite win, but get close, you win stuff for that, too.

Might as well have something to show for your Public Display of whatever.

Go on! That address again: www.yurth.com

So for the time being, we’ve got a great solution.

We like Twango a lot. It’s a great place to upload video straight from your mobile phone before posting it to Yurth.

First, set up a Twango account and create your own channel(s). This takes all of about 48 seconds, even for the likes of us.

Next, we’ll hand it over the Twango folks to do the rest of the ‘splaining:

One of the most fun ways to get media into Twango is directly from your camera phone. Camera phones do not yet have the photo quality of dedicated digital still cameras, but your camera phone has one key advantage: You always have it with you! And as photography enthusiasts often say, the best camera in the world is the one you actually have with you.

All modern camera phones have the ability to send photos, videos, audio clips and other media via the Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS). And most also have the ability to send email. After you’ve captured media, there is usually an option to send it via MMS or email.

To upload media to one of your Twango channels from your camera phone, you will need to know your channel’s email upload address, which you can find on the channel settings page. When you want to upload media from your phone, simply specify that address and the media will be placed in your channel.

So you’re on the go, you capture something earthshattering on your video-capable mobile phone or PDA, and in a few thumbstrokes voila, it’s in your Twango media box. From there, you log on to Yurth and uplaod freely!

“This is the kind of spontaneous publicity that makes people!”

–Steve Martin, The Jerk

Listen here to Yurth co-Founder Rob Long giving the Yurth elevator pitch on American Public Media’s Marketplace, Thursday March 15, 2007.

And sure enough, there were none. So we nosed around the 60 million other video sites and found that many of them use tabs. But they use them in a real “who cares” way. We’ve got a way better way of doing tabs.

Coming the first week of November, we’ll go live with a truly unique tab-based video categorization capability. At first, every clip in Yurth will be categorized and the map will be filterable by clicking the tabs across the top of the screen.

Then, it gets better. More about that later.

Now the map is filling up. It looks more like this:

The red dots are the YouTube videos. Blue are our own local clips.

We can’t wait to shed our old skin and slip into this one. It’s courtesy of our crack design team at kapow.

It caught ours.