Amateur Hour on the Web

Say good-bye to 500 cable channels -- the Internet has thousands of video producers. But is there anything on?

By Wade Roush

If there's room for one startup in a particular niche on the Web, there's room for 15 or 20. At least that seems to be the Net's resurrected credo.

And in some niches, it may even be true. When it comes to online photo storage and community photo sharing, for instance, the burgeoning population of amateur digital photographers is supporting many more sites than might be apparent at first, especially given all the media attention focused on one site: Yahoo's Flickr. There's also Bubbleshare, Fotki, Fotolog, Funtigo, Parazz, Phanfare, Photobucket, PhotoShow, PicPix, Picturecloud, Picturetrail, Pixagogo, Riya, Shutterfly, Smugmug, Snapfish, Tabblo, Webshots, and Zooomr, to name a few.

Now the boom in photo sharing has spread to the area of video sharing. New sites have been appearing every month, creating additional outlets and content choices for consumers who are snapping up -- and using -- increasingly affordable digital camcorders, video-recording cell phones, and portable media players. Most of these sites are free, to boot, and offer members the ability to upload their own digital videos to personal accounts, browse and search other members' videos, and download video files to hard drives or watch streaming-media versions.

A partial list of new entrants: AOL UnCut Video, blip.tv, Buzznet, CastPost, ClipShack, Dailymotion, Google Video, Jumpcut, Ourmedia, Revver, Streamload, Veoh, VideoEgg, Vimeo, vpod.tv, vSocial, the just-refurbished Yahoo Video, and, most popular, YouTube. And more video sites are in the works, but haven't officially launched, including Motionbox and Wallop. (Some of these sites also store photos, and vice-versa.

technorati tags:video, photos, web, 2.0

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