Just as we start getting our heads around blogs, websites, podcasts, maybe even the idea of myspace.com, along comes the next wave. For the past year video sharing sites have been popping up all over the Internet and they are all the rage with the student demograph. The basic premise is that you upload your video to a video sharing website that hosts it for you and makes it available to share, rate and comment. If you have a blog you can just take some supplied code to embed the video on your site.

The best way to get used to and understand these new services is to surf and search for content that interests you. You can see an example of what an embedded video looks like on my blog about the visit of the Sultan's Elephant to London.

Take your time and visit video sharing sites including youtube, castpost, clipshack, googlevideo, dailymotion, grouper, ourmedia, revver, sharkle, vimeo, and vsocial. It is truly staggering how much video content has been made available in such a short time. Most of these sites use some form of tagging to describe the videos so the implications for multimedia social representations of concepts, words and ideas are obvious.

Finally TechCrunch offers a nice table showing the different capacities of some of the sites. Interesting to note that none yet offer creation tools, so we can all read and share using the tools but writing requires further skills and knowledge.