Who will find the best videos first?

As the battles escalate among text and photo aggregation sites, competition is just beginning to heat up in video.

VideoSift and Viral Video Chart are examples of two approaches that have emerged in this space. The latter, which just launched, appears to use a more traditional method of indexing to scan "several million blogs a day to see which online videos people are talking about the most."

VideoSift, by contrast, is an open-source system based on submissions by its members. Viewers vote for their favorites--whether they be on YouTube, MySpace, Google Videos or anywhere else--and the highest-ranked videos are featured on the front page.

Regardless which approach proves more popular, these sites will eventually need to confront the growth of single-page aggregators--one-stop indexes that list a variety of real-time feeds. Those aggregators threaten to intercept traffic that would otherwise go directly to the Diggs of the world, especially if they provide summaries when you mouse over the headlines. Already, for example, Popurls includes VideoSift among its many feeds of news, photo, podcast and video sites.

But video sites may be able to overcome this obstacle more easily than news and photo networks for one simple reason: People often still need to actually view the material to see what it's really about, as opposed to text headlines and even photo thumbnails that can frequently provide enough up-front information to avoid clicking through.

Perhaps videos will prove to be unique experiences that are best found through specialty sites, rather than catch-all aggregators. Case in point: Rooftop Comedy, as cited in this post by Rafe Needleman yesterday.