Just let me lie here on the tile

I've put my vids up on Imeem: marycrawford.imeem.com.

Imeem plays streaming video. It's like YouTube, but better quality, as long as you let the vid load first and then play it.

So far, the main advantages I've seen are:

• you can rec and link directly to a vid, your own or someone else's, without compromising the vidder's bandwidth.
• it's a lot easier to get an idea of a vidder's work, without having to remember passwords or navigate through a tiny-blinky-text website.
• it's easy to drop the vidder a comment, for quick feedback; on LJ, it can feel odd to drop a comment on a vid post that's a year old, because LJ is so now-oriented, and it can also be difficult to find the vid post in the first place. On Imeem the vids and the comment box are right there. I do wish they'd make comments threaded, and include email notification. Right now there's no way to answer if someone leaves you feedback, and I really really want to be able to say thanks.
• you can make playlists of both your own and other people's vids: fandom-specific playlists, 'favorite mood-lifting vids', 'personal top 10', 'scary vids' and so on, and then share those playlists with other people.

So far, many people have been using the 'vidding' tag on Imeem to differentiate between vids and other fanworks such as machinima (game engine animation) and fan films. There's more discussion on making vids accessible to a wider audience in the vidding community: You Can't Stop The Signal, and on the Vidding meme on Imeem.

My vids will remain available as downloads on my website, both high-quality versions and small versions for dialup. I really hope other vidders will keep putting up files for download, too: there's nothing like a high-quality fullscreen vid that you can download and play again and again without adding to anyone's bandwidth. I won't be fully satisfied with services like Imeem until they can offer full screen streaming video files that are as good-looking as a 60 Mb Xvid encoded download.