vilodex: ‘Get off my lawn’ – actually not

history internet technology

A couple of years ago, during those preYouTube days – in case your memory goes that far back – I thought it would be neat if there would be a site where people could store videos and share them. I wrote a quick little thing, called it vilodex and shared with a couple of people. It’s by invitation only. Some people watched, it has an RSS feed with media enclosures. So you can subsrcibe to it via iTunes for instance. All this was, as said earlier, a very long time ago. I still use it to keep copies of interesting things that I find. It did annoy me that I could not find a link, or that content simply had vanished, when I wanted to reference it.

Something else had happened as well. I noticed, but did not care. Nor do I know. A couple of Skate Board Enthousiasts started to use it. There are more than 200 logins in Vilodex, created by people posting videos like this. Why they would not use one of the gzillion video sharing sites that bloated with VC millions all want to become the next youTube (good Luck)? I have no idea.

It would have been nice if I could have let this continue to grow. The problem is that links to those skate boarder clips appeared in their forums. That I can totally understand as well: You want to share what you did. But it also means that there could be significant bandwidth uses. In the end something I would need to pay for. Digg hits one cool clip and overnight I have amused some hundred thousand US teens. Nothing wrong with that part, but paying for it? No, thanks. Ask Murdoch or Google to do that. Please.

So I started to move the clips around. They are still all there. When you login to vilodex then they work as usual. It’s only 16GB. I couldn’t care less about that part. But all those links to those clips do no work anymore. Updating them would be short sighted: I could tell the computer to move them automatically to random positions. So, kids, sorry:
Stay on my lawn, but no more free Pizza deliveries on my account.