With the number of media being shared on Zoopy growing every day, we’ve decided to highlight the most interesting contributions for you.  As such, we’ve removed ‘Latest Uploads’ from the home page and replaced it with ‘Featured Uploads’.  We’ll continually sift through thousands of Zoopy media items and update the list of featured items.

You’ll still be able to view the latest items uploaded to Zoopy by visiting http://www.zoopy.com/media/list/filter/Latest or by clicking on Latest in the Zoopy navigation bar.

After attending the broad focus Web 2.0 Expo New York 2008 event last week, we’ve now moved on to San Jose (on the the other side of the US coast, 30 miles from San Francisco in California) for a conference specifically structured around the business and technology of online video: Streaming Media West 2008.

The name of the conference is a little misleading, as Streaming Media West covers much, much more than just streaming. It has become the authority event on downloading, webcasting, internet TV, IPTV, and mobile video too, covering both corporate and consumer business, technology, and content issues in the enterprise, advertising, media and entertainment, broadcast, and education markets.

We’re looking forward to attending an event filled with giants in the business. We’ll be watching, learning, asking, reflecting and considering advancements in technology that could in any way improve the overall product and service that Zoopy delivers to its users.

Tomorrow’s the last day of the Web 2.0 Expo 2008 in New York and it’s been a conference filled with interesting sessions. From panel discussions on the video content ecosystem through to iconoclastic presentations on breaking the web 2.0 design mould, this event has delivered on its objective to push a forward-thinking industry even further. We’re thrilled to have been a part of it.

I was interviewed yesterday by Ulrike Reinhard, a journalist and blogger from whoisTV in Germany who focuses on the digital world around us. Here’s what we chatted about:

If you can’t see the video, view the original here.

Zoopy has launched a new video player with a fresh, modern look and a stack of new features.  If you still see the old player when viewing Zoopy videos, just refresh the page and you’ll see the new one.

Among the player’s new features is the info button, which shows

1. Information about the video currently being viewed, including title, description, view count and uploader
2. A list of related videos, including their titles, descriptions, uploaders and preview thumbnails

The player also gives you more detailed feedback about loading and buffering.

If you’ve embedded Zoopy videos on your blog or website, there’s no need to do any updates: the player will update on its own.  So try it out, and let us know what you think, either by commenting on this post or by emailing us at info@zoopy.com.

After 18 hours of flying, a Bourne Ultimatum cab ride to the hotel and three Gray’s Papaya hot dogs (of which there is no equal, anywhere on earth) we’re safe and sound in the Big Apple. This is our first stop of two in the USA over the next two weeks, this one being to attend the Web 2.0 Expo New York 2008 - a new media, new thinking conference being held at the Javits Center in Manhattan from 16 to 19 September..

To quote the organisers: “Web 2.0 Expo was launched to connect the builders of the web with the brightest minds, hottest ideas, and most valuable tools - and with each other. New York has long been where the world’s biggest industries go online, and as Web 2.0 grows up and gets serious, the time is right to convene the East Coast web communities under the umbrella of the next generation web.”

As we continue to improve and expand Zoopy, we can never stop learning. Learning from our users on the one hand (about what they like, need and want) and on the other hand, learning from some of the smartest fellow minds in this amazing, pioneering, dream-it-do-it industry of ours. This expo will be both a valuable source of inspiration and a yardstick by which to measure our current and future strategies as well. If there are things we’ve marked as important milestones for Zoopy that are backed up by global leaders in the new media space, then all the better for us and our users.

And more than anything (yes, even more than Gray’s Papaya hot dogs) our users are at the top of the list for us being here.

When Vodacom invested in Zoopy just over two months ago, we hinted at the great opportunities that lay ahead. Today, we’re introducing two of the large scale community improvements that mark the beginning of many more good things to come for our users.

Until now, visitors from South Africa have been viewing and contributing to Zoopy using international bandwidth to connect to Zoopy’s overseas servers. This is pretty much standard practice for most medium to large online businesses in SA, who are often left with little option but to host internationally when faced with much higher local hosting fees.

The downside to hosting outside of the country, however, is reduced loading speed of websites and, in Zoopy’s case, media files like videos and photos.

Local hosting. Amazing speed.

We’re happy to say that this is now a thing of the past for Zoopy visitors. As of today, we have servers in South Africa that will deliver Zoopy content using local bandwidth for South Africans. The significantly slower international speeds and low bandwidth caps in SA (many users only budget for the 3gb they receive per month) have left us as frustrated as any other internet user in the country. So
we’re prepared to do what it takes to deliver our media at amazing speeds, whether viewed on Zoopy.com or embedded on other sites or blogs. And for our members, an increase in upload speeds when adding media to your Zoopy profile will make things quicker and more
convenient too.

Bigger file sizes. More expression.

We’ve also now increased our upload file size limit from 100mb to 200mb. If we’re giving visitors a quicker and more comfortable experience over local bandwidth, we wanted to add to the enjoyment by giving them more space to express themselves as well.

Members now have 200mb to play with and can upload longer or better quality versions of your videos, for example. As always, this service remains completely free.

These improvements are part of a determined plan to bring the Zoopy community everything you need to manage, view and share your media in all the ways you’ve hoped for, and more.

If there’s something you think we should be doing but aren’t, or are doing but shouldn’t, please let us know. We read every mail and always reply.

We hope that you enjoy the bigger, faster Zoopy and that you keep coming back for more

After attending and covering the annual DCI and Highway Africa conferences in Grahamstown last year (both managed and hosted by Rhodes University) we are very pleased to be their social media partner again this year for DCI 3.0.

Their social media page will aggregate all videos, photos and blog posts added to Zoopy that contain the dci2008 tag. The page will be populated by Rhodes journalism students as well as DCI attendees throughout the conference.

Also featured on the page is something we’ll be doing more and more on Zoopy landing pages: a Twitter stream. This helps to really pull together a full spectrum of audio, video, text and live elements on the day and will make for a richer experience for delegates and those following from home.

This is one of Africa’s leading web technology events and we look forward to helping play a part in making it enjoyable and memorable in time to come.

If you haven’t been following the buzz surrounding Mozilla Labs‘ new addon for Firefox - Ubiquity - then I suggest you head on over to their blog to read the introduction.  Ubiquity is a tool that allows you to perform certain defined functions in your browser by typing in natural language.  For instance, “email this to info@zoopy.com” would take whatever text you’ve selected in your browser and prepare it for an email to info@zoopy.com in Gmail.

What makes Ubiquity so powerful, is that anyone can create custom commands and share them.  As such, Zoopy is proud to make available the “zoopy” command for Ubiquity users.  Using the command will bring up the latest eight results that match your search query.

To install, follow these simple steps:

1. Install Ubiquity, which can be downloaded here.
2. Go to http://www.zoopy.com/ubiquity/index.html
3. If Ubiquity is installed correctly, a bar should appear across the top of the browser window with a Subscribe… button. Click it.
4. A window will appear telling you that Zoopy is not a trusted source.  You may ignore this by clicking on I know what I’m doing. Subscribe to it!.
5. The “zoopy” command is now available.  You may access it by bringing up the Ubiquity interface (the default key combination is alt + space), and typing in “zoopy” followed by any search term.  Please note that if you press Enter after typing in your search phrase, you’ll be taken to the Zoopy search page.  If you don’t you’ll see the latest eight thumbnails matching your search query in the Ubiquity interface.

Please note that both Ubiquity and the “zoopy” command are in their early developmental phases, and so may behave unexpectedly at times.  If you have any difficulties, please send an email to info@zoopy.com, and we’ll do our best to assist you.