If you follow me on Twitter, it’s hard to miss my regular status updates like, “21 videos were posted to The Salesforce Channel today,” but what’s that all about? The Salesforce Channel is a website where I curate Salesforce videos from all over the Internet into one place so you don’t have to do the searching. My motto is, “Your single source for Salesforce video.”
I found that while many videos about Salesforce.com exist in large repositories like YouTube, searching for Salesforce-specific videos can be rather daunting and downright difficult. You may find a user or playlist with some videos you like, but how do you look for more? Salesforce embeds many of their videos into sites like their main site and the Community site, yet, there wasn’t a great place for user generated content from administrators, developers, or AppExchange partners anywhere I looked.
The Salesforce Channel is now that one place to find it all. There I collect Salesforce related videos from YouTube, Vimeo, Hulu, eHow, Metacafe, Dailymotion, Howcast and many more sites. I tag them with full names, companies, topics, features and more. I organize them into playlists and groups as well as publish more than a dozen different RSS feeds to help you stay on top of what’s current. (For example, the RSS feed and playlist of 100 videos in Japanese)
The Salesforce Channel, by the numbers
- Videos available in September 2009 – 1,200
- Videos available in May 2010 – 2,731
- Videos “in queue,” yet to be published – 439
- Playlists available – 71
- Unique tags on videos – 5,907
- Videos viewed in April 2010 – 4,485
As you can see, The Salesforce Channel has grown tremendously in the last 8 months and that’s why I need you. Come join The Salesforce Channel Community and take on the role of either a Reviewer or Editor.
A Reviewer watches videos, puts a rating on the best ones and puts comments or reviews on individual videos to add value to the rest of the community. They can also create playlists to further organize videos and even group their favorites.
An Editor helps search for videos, tags them, reviews them, and finally publishes them. As you can tell from the huge addition of videos in the past 8 months as well as the number of videos I have “on deck” waiting to be published, this is where I could really use the help. I’ll provide you with a wiki and help on how to do it all. Joining me this way and helping publish more videos, make them easier to search, better organized, and contributing to the overall Salesforce.com global community would be a fantastic way I’d like to get you involved.
It’s easy to get started
There’s a lot of video to watch; a lot to curate; and a lot of information, knowledge and education contained in this one site. Please help spread the word about “Your single source for Salesforce video.”
If you come across more videos about Salesforce that you’d like to add, you can submit them one of two ways. Use the Submit page to link to your video or drop the bookmarklet on your browser and simply click it when you’re viewing a video you’d like to add to The Salesforce Channel.
If you’re a developer and have some great ideas on ways to use video from The Salesforce Channel in creative ways, there’s also an API available that we can discuss the possibilities of utilizing. I’d like to brainstorm with you about possible ways to extend the reach and value of these videos. Just email me at jeff<at>crmfyi<dot>com to check it out.
Earlier this year, I wrote about 
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