Team Ziddio - The Blog

Here’s the complete list of WWE events where you’ll be able to meet some of the Ziddio video crew and shoot your very own “WWE Biggest Fan” video!

June 3: Jacksonville, FL
June 12: Philadelphia, PA
June 18: Richmond, VA
June 24: Houston, TX
July 2: Dallas, TX
July 22: San Jose, CA

Not near any of those cities - you can still shoot your own video and upload it to Ziddio for a chance to win $25,000!

Wrestling fans, Ziddio has just launched with the WWE YOUR contest.  Together we’re looking for the WWE’s biggest fan - submit us your video at http://www.ziddio.com/wwe and show us WHY you’re the WWE’s biggest fan and you might just find yourself being flown to NYC this summer for the premiere event Summer Slam 2007!

As an added bonus to WWE fans in St. Louis on May 20th for Judgment Day - look for the Ziddio crew there and shoot your video entry in between matches!  For more info visit http://www.wwe.com/schedules/events/eventdetail/?id=4124376

…we promise it’ll be worth it!

Sadly one of Team Ziddio’s superstar staffer was diagnosed recently with Leukemia, so everyone please give a shout-out to Seth as we all wish him a fast, quick and effective fight through this.  Seth was key to the look and feel of Ziddio and has been instrumental in helping us roll out spiffy new features.  We’re pulling for you buddy!

PHEW - its been a long week but a great week here in Ziddioland. Yes we’ve been negligent in updating the blog - but that’s only because we’ve been so busy we haven’t had a chance to update it (yeah that’s the ticket, thats our story and we’re sticking to it!).

So what new things have we been slaving over since our last update back in 2006 (sad isn’t it) well new on the site there’s;

• Non-contest Upload - Ziddio set out to be a competition driven user-generated site because we wanted to offer really unique experiences that only we could hook our users up with like getting on TV…well it dawned on us, there’s plenty of great video out there that might not fit into some of our competitions so we opened-up the flood gates, bring on your videos. Find the “Upload Video” button in the header
• Search - ahhh search, no longer will you have to hunt around our galleries looking for that one video you wanted to show your Uncle Bob.
• Favorites - think of it as a bookmark - for videos, this feature we think goes hand in hand with search, save all your favorite videos to your account and have easy access to them. look for the heart icon in the video toolbar.
• New Contests - wheee we had a bunch of contests close recently, and what fun would it be if we didn’t replace ‘em with some new contests. Check out Date-a-Model and Urban Legend: Redux.

Oh yeah…and we’ve sort-a been working on this little thing with a small company called Facebook, yeah you might’ve heard of them:-). We’re excited about Facebook Diaries its an amazing little competition and partnership we’ve been cooking up with the premiere social-networking tool. I could ramble on about what the partnership entails but why not let our PR get some credit - read the press release for all the details.

No new builds for Ziddio this week and no new contests (but we have been slaving away over a REALLY great partnership with a REALLY big partner for a REALLY nifty new competition that’ll hit in early 2007).

As you may know Ziddio is being brought to the masses by Comcast, which means Ziddio development is part of a spiffy little department within Comcast call Comcast Interactive Media - or since we all love acronyms CIM. (Check out some of the other nifty things the CIM team is building - at CIM Labs) That being said, check out CIM’s holiday greeting to our family - which now includes you (you uploaded a video to Ziddio (right), that makes you part of the family!). Cheers, we all here at Team Ziddio wish you and your family a safe and wonderful holiday season…

http://www.cimlabs.com/holiday2006/

It’s been a busy week here at Ziddio HQ we launched three competitions;

• No Talent Nation - a call out to be funny on video. The prize is a trip to the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen to perform
• Ten Day Take - a major production company in LA is looking for the next TV show idea, submit it and they’ll help you make the pilot
• Holiday Wishlist - The Wii is one of the hottest items right now, tell us about not getting what you wanted for the holidays to win one

Plus we rolled out not one but two new updated to Ziddio, tons of bug fixes and even more features added like;

• the almighty Ziddio embeddable player - yup finally you can add videos inline on your blogs/web pages/profiles!
• expanded player - a pop-up player, since we can serve up 640×480 videos why not make sure those with the screen real estate can enjoy the video in all its glory

it finally ducked into the mid 20s overnight here in Philly and well thats just plain cold.  So team Ziddio is staying in and gathered around the warmth of our computers (its really kind-a sad how we don’t need space heaters anymore - we just use the heat streaming out the bottom of our laptops) - but what does that mean for you our loyal Ziddio users?  We’ll get a new build of the site out to you this weekend!  I don’t want to spoil the surprise for you but check back Monday morning and you just might see the long awaited embeddable Ziddio player, some bug fixes and two other little surprises…

Gobble gobble! For those who are morbidly curious, here’s exactly what we tweaked in the latest version of the site currently @ www.ziddio.com

• Report Offensive Content
• Contact Us Form
• Broad-based Omniture Tagging
• Comments (deactivated until we can control Comments with the Admin UI)
• Static direct Links to Contest Home Pages
• Updated Synching
• Progressive Delivery of newly uploaded content
• Filename changed to timestamp (to avoid Fan Player problems)
• Bug Fixes 174, 172, 171, 50

So yes, this does mean comments are coming soon!  YAY!  Now back to the leftover turkey and stuffing…

PS: here’s a picture from the Star Wars event we blogged about earlier - its Ziddio’s fearless leader w/ Chewie!

Gobble gobble! Here’s a turkey-day present to Ziddio users. We just rolled out a new build of the site @ www.ziddio.com. It added a few bug fixes and random features that users have been requesting (like now when you click “More Info” on a video - it doesn’t wisk you away to another page). Play with it, and if you see any weird bugs sprout up please let us know - info@ziddio.com.