Vimeo

Sure, the YouTube video "Where the Hell is Matt 2008" is clever and maybe even inspirational, but what's been overlooked in all the hoopla over the clip is how technology contributed to its popularity.

Matt Harding first earned fame two years ago by filming himself dancing in exotic locales all over the world and posting the video montage to YouTube. Everyone from the The New York Times to National Public Radio has swooned over Harding's latest clip since it first appeared on YouTube three weeks ago.

In less than a month, the video has been viewed … Read more

NEW YORK--If there were a meter of Internet "fameballing," as Gawker likes to dub those fine folks who get famous on the Internet for something and keep getting more and more notorious even though most people aren't really sure why, it would've been flying off the charts on Sunday night.

The reason? Two of the tech-gossip circuit's most popular poster boys, dapper Mashable exec Pete Cashmore and eccentric Vimeo founder Jakob Lodwick took the stage together in a game of Rock Band.

The performance of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "Maps," with Cashmore on … Read more

Media "discovery" site StumbleUpon announced Tuesday that its video service, Stumble Video, has a host of new content available: content sites College Humor, Funny or Die, and VBS.tv, as well as video-hosting sites Vimeo, DailyMotion, and Veoh.

Stumble Video, which uses past preferences to pick out videos that a member might like--in other words, a nifty procrastination tool--already amasses content from big sites like YouTube, MySpaceTV, and Metacafe.

StumbleUpon was acquired by eBay last year, about six months after it debuted the Stumble Video feature. There's also a specialized version of Stumble Video for Nintendo's … Read more

Vimeo is a video hosting and sharing site. Users can upload as much as 2GB of video a month, including high-definition video that plays in a gorgeous wide-screen player. One thing that sets it apart from other services is that it gives video creators the option to share the digital copies of their videos with others--not just the streaming version. When enabled, it lets registered Vimeo users download the original file to their hard drive for offline viewing.

Vimeo is also a social network, with a friends and subscription service, along with a way to both rate and favorite videos. … Read more

For quite some time I've been playing with Tumblr, the latest darling of the New York tech scene.

Tumblr (earlier coverage here), founded by 21-year-old David Karp, has been making headlines because of its interesting not-quite-a-blog-platform format and its big-name investors: Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital, Next New Networks co-founder Fred Seibert, and Vimeo founder Jakob Lodwick. (Lodwick recently started a Tumblr blog with his girlfriend, Star magazine editor-at-large Julia Allison, and everyone around the Alley likes to pretend they don't read it.)

I like Tumblr. I think it could be a whole lot more "social," … Read more

The New York Post reported on Tuesday morning that New York-based video-hosting community site Vimeo plans to announce this week that it will be distributing videos at a high-definition resolution of 1,280x720 pixels, making it apparently the first user-generated video-sharing site to do so.

The Post's Peter Lauria connects the new push for making high-definition technology available on user-generated video sites to the ongoing price drop in consumer-grade HD cameras--an inarguably hot item this holiday season.

But back to Vimeo--it's an interesting site. Originally a side project for CollegeHumor exec Jakob Lodwick, the site's close-knit community, … Read more

Earlier this month, 25-year-old Star magazine editor-at-large and dating columnist Julia Allison posted a blog entry about the swift end to her short relationship with Vimeo founder Jakob Lodwick. The word count? 1,195, not counting the e-mail exchange between the two of them that Allison had copy-pasted.

Lodwick, 26, posted only 164 words in return on his blog. But considering Lodwick's blog is dedicated less to the profusion of words and more to a series of daily photographic self-portraits, that's understandable.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is my generation. Allison and Lodwick are my contemporaries, both in age … Read more

Let's just say this Superbad flick, which opens August 17, is pretty highly anticipated. Comedy fans are psyched because it's produced by Judd Apatow of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up fame. And geeks have been equally pumped to see teen nerd icon Michael Cera, formerly of Arrested Development and more recently of the CBS Web series Clark and Michael, doing what he does best--spending long durations of onscreen time acting as awkward as possible.

So, as you can imagine, the atmosphere was decently enthusiastic when the crew behind National Lampoon heir apparent CollegeHumor threw an advance screening … Read more

The BBC's iPlayer will be making it's official, public beta debut July 27 to U.K. residents who are legal TV license holders--a yearly taxation system that pays for TV ownership and usage. The small desktop software client allows users to download and view episodes or entire series of BBC television programming on their PCs.

In addition to launching the Windows client, the BBC will also be rolling out integration of the iPlayer to the BBC's U.K. site, and later to YouTube. The team behind it is also working on versions of the iPlayer client … Read more