Caught in my tech news net over the last week:

Via Boing Boing, another new ‘meta’ service launches into public beta:

Dabble, a site that makes it possible to search, recommend, rate, discuss and be sociable about video hosted anywhere on the the net, has come out of private beta and launched for public use. Dabbler Lisa Rein sez,

Dabble collects metadata detailing the location, authoring, licensing information, and user-generated tags associated with hundreds of thousands of short video clips. Users visiting Dabble will see a search box allowing them to do a simple keyword search for online video clips. Their results, including both amateur and professional video, will be pulled from hosting sites all over the web. Users can then begin to collect their favorite web videos, adding new videos to their collection at will as they surf other websites.
Already, hundreds of hosting sites exist where users can upload their own videos to the web and thousands of independent sites. Dabble solves the problem of navigating through all these videos, no matter where they are hosted.

By the way, VideoBomb does a similar thing – allows you to ‘republish’ online video from any source without actually copying it (i.e. remains on original server), and then users collaboratively tag and rate it (like social bookmarking services – del.icio.us, digg, reddit – for ‘ordinary’ web content). VideoBomb is a not-for-profit enterprise that also makes the Democracy Player, which is the web’s most popular RSS reader for video content (in effect, a very schmick dynamic web video player for the desktop).

The other day there were some big claims going around for Gotuit – ‘premium content’ video service – being the ‘death of TV’ (because TV is just content, right?) on that basis of offering quantitatively popular commercial content, good user interface, and SUPER fast high quality playback (which I can attest to after playing with it for 5 minutes):

Boston based Gotuit Media launched Gotuit late Sunday evening. Gotuit offers users on-demand free premium content like music videos, sports clips and short films (the stuff that gets deleted from YouTube). Find what you want, click it and watch it immediately.The site is Flash based and will have a familiar interface for YouTube users. This isn’t about long tail user generated content, though. Gotuit has struck licensing deals with labels and other content owners to show a deep library of premium content.

Full story at TechCrunch.

And (it had to happen) see this article, also from TechCrunch on PornoTube. Note the old ‘porn as technological avant-garde’ discourse.