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

1. Register at The Salesforce Channel
2. Sign up to become an Editor

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.

It’s almost like peanut butter and jelly; two things that taste great alone, but taste even better together. The announcement today of Salesforce for Google Apps is an exciting one for multiple reasons. Google and Salesforce are two of my favorite companies with some of my absolute favorite applications. The combination of them is a powerful offering. What we’ll now need to watch and see is how the rest of the world, the “not as geeky as me” crowd embraces this alliance.

Two great videos will explain this alliance. (Both are well produced and impressive in their own ways)

Now the main question I have is, “Will companies adopt this offering?” With the wide range of size of companies using Salesforce, it’s a natural fit for those who are smaller and already using Google Apps. The tie is natural and probably one that they’ve wanted for some time. How about the mid-size to large company though? Will Gmail replace the use of Exchange or Lotus Notes? That’s a harder one to picture happening, but maybe there has to be a shift in process to blend them somehow.

On the document front, I can guess that you may see quicker adoption when you start looking at the value of collaborative docs, spreadsheets, and presentations rather than email attachment nightmares like we all deal with today. Since Google offers significant amounts of storage space, it kind of alleviates the Salesforce document storage caps as well.

Probably the most exciting thing in this offering for me is the integration of Google Talk. I already use Google Talk to communicate with our Salesforce program team. Now that I can communicate with them from within Salesforce, which is that much better. One of the desires I’ve had for a long time is to have Salesforce deal with presence management or “who’s online now?” With the integration of Google Talk, you can better collaborate on the work you’re already doing in Salesforce and get quick answers to move deals along.

To find out more info about Salesforce for Google Apps, visit the product home page. You can also participate in the Live Webinar today at 12 PM PDT. If you’re a developer, check out the Developer Documentation.

Imitation is a great form of flattery.  Last year at Dreamforce 06, Salesforce spent some bucks and came up with five well done videos highlighting the difference between an on demand application provider and the competition.  I had always wanted to see them again.  Guess which one is Salesforce and which one is the competition.

Actor Stephen Pawley has all five of them at his website. 

See the sessions you missed at Dreamforce 07.  They’re starting to show up on Google Video.  About 50 of the breakout sessions are available already and more will be added soon. 

To see what’s available now, search Google Video for Dreamforce and sort the results by Date.  If you’d like to know when new videos are posted, you can subscribe to the RSS feed for new videos with the Dreamforce tag.

You’ll also find some user submitted videos of the excitement of Dreamforce as well as some footage from the volunteer project run by the Salesforce Foundation held Saturday, September 15. 

As the keynote sessions are added, I’ll be sure to let you know as they are worth a second watch.

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