Hello, all! Happy New Year!

It’s been a while since we’ve rolled out some interesting features on BTV and I think it’s time to do it. So, today we’ve rolled out new minor release of BTV site with quite a few changes, which were annoying us and our users. Here is some short summary:

• Custom user feeds are fixed now (yes - shame on us - they were broken). They’re updated live now so sign up, create your own feed and watch new videos only on topics you like!
• Video posting made a bit simpler now - permalinks are not required anymore, few bugs in posting were fixed, tags are made unique automagically and some other interesting stuff was added.
• We’ve added ‘rippers’ feature - it you’re site owner and would like your videos to be posted on BTV but don’t like an idea of going and posting your videos manually, ping us (in comments or by email) and we’ll give you an ability to post your videos on our site in one click - ripper code will take all required info and links from your site automatically!
• Many small problems with feed manager, custom feeds and video posting were fixed.

So, stay tuned and let’s make BTV better - we’re waiting for your comments!

From now on main BTV feed will be mixed with BTV blog feed so all subscribers would be able to read all news just along with new videos announcements.

Many thanks to Yahoo for their great Yahoo Pipes service!

Yes! We did it! Just before I went to bed at 3:40AM, heh, I noticed, that someone submitted new video to BTV. I’ve approved it instantly and then noticed a following information in the top part of the site: “We have 1000 videos / 569+ hours of high-quality content!” So, we broke trough 1k videos barrier! Let’s do 2k videos before the end of this year, what do you think?

Thanks to all our users for their contributions and support! Stay with us and we’ll try to give you more features really soon.

Do you like to eat tasty food? Do you like to cook? Or, maybe, your wife, girlfriend or mother likes to cook? Then you definitely need to take a look at new site started by the team of creators of the “Best Tech Videos”. Welcome to the “Best Cooking Videos” site! Here you can find tons of high-quality videos about cooking, free lessons from professional chefs, interviews and much more. Really soon we’ll release more features like favorite videos bookmarking, videos filtering and even posting your own videos!

Join us today - subscribe to our RSS feed or simply visit us from time to time to get more interesting information on cooking!

After the new site engine release many people asked us, how they can use new site now if they used to simply browse old site from start page looking for new videos and not using our RSS feeds. They missed old blog-like view with new videos added to the top of the main page.

Today we released new version of the site where you can use “Recent Videos” link on the top of the pages and browse all videos page by page.

If you want us to add something else to the site or change something, just ask and we’ll try to do what we can.

We’re really glad to see, that our users just started posting their videos on our service. First user who submitted his (her?) videos is  fets07 from Belgium. His posted videos could be found here and you can subscribe to this user submissions here.

If you want to post you own videos or videos you’ve found on the Net, just signup and use “Post New Video” link on the top bar.

Thanks to all our users for support.

So, we did it! New Best Tech Videos site version has been released today. Of course, it could have some issues, and we are really looking forward for your feedback on our support forums.

Let’s review main improvements we’ve made here:

• First of all, I want to mention our first step to socialization of the BTV - all our users could signup now and get their own lists of favorited, commented and voted videos and much more - they could have their own personal RSS feeds.
• Next cool thing we’ve prepared for you is user-generated content! You can find some great videos on the Net and share them with fellow BTV readers. At this moment our posting system works in pre-moderated mode to keep really high level of videos we post here, but later we want to delegate moderation to our most active members.
• As I mentioned before - we have our own video rating system. All our users could vote for videos they like and then we’ll let users to decide, what videos they would like to watch based on these votes.

So, these are just small part (but most valuable) of our ideas. If you want to have a look at all of them, just sign up and start using the service - you gonna like it, we’re sure!

Thanks to all our readers, without your help this release would not happen!

We’ve decided to start a support forums to let our users to report any problems with the main site. So, welcome to the Best Tech Videos Support Forums!

We’ve moved our blog to separate domain and preparing to deploy new release of the BestTechVideos to let you enjoy the best video content on the Net.

It’s been a long time since last news about BTV development, but it really worth it! Now I want to spoil some of coming changes with this site…First of all, we’ve started development of completely new BTV engine with completely different ideology than this site has now. Thanks to great tools (Ruby on Rails) and my friend Dmytro Shteflyuk we’ve already implemented most of new functionality planned for initial release and going to roll out new release really soon (looks like it’ll take 2-3 weeks because of high load of project developers). So, what you’ll get in new release?

First of all, we’re going to ’socialize’ this site - all of our reader would be able to register here and get highly customizable interface along with really cool feature - customizable RSS feeds. You’ll be able to select just what you like to read here on site and in your RSS readers and engine would show you all newly posted videos in categories/tags/etc you’ve asked it to show. Along with customization, you’ll be able to save videos you loved on this site to your favorite videos list and watch them again when you want.

Next ’social’ feature would be user groups - it will be neat idea of grouping users with similar interests and sharing great videos between them. Every user group will get its own start page and RSS feed, so you’be able to add this feed to your personal page and watch videos your fellow users like to watch.

Of course, we’re going to add voting for videos to let you, our users, to vote for videos you like and share your impressions with other site users. Later we’ll be able to suggest you new cool videos to watch based on your favorites and positive votes.

And last but not least for the first release would be maybe of the most valuable features of new BTV - user-generated content. Service users and video author would be able to post here videos they saw somewhere and share their experience with their friends and other people who like to watch Best Tech Videos. To keep high level of quality of our service, we’ve invented set of rules and user levels that will guarantee only the best videos will be posted here.

If you’re an author of one screencast or even big screencasts site owner, you’ll be able to register here and we’ll give you set of really cool tools for videos sharing to post your new videos here. Of course we’ll help you to import your old videos here to help you to drive more traffic to your site and to share your knowledge with constantly growing userbase of this service.

So, as you can see, we’ve prepared lots of new features for first release of new completely redone BTV. So, stay tuned and we promise - you’ll be impressed with new service! If you want to participate in closed beta testing phase of new service development (both as author or as generic user), drop me a line on beta at bestechvideos dot com or leave comment here.