When we launched GetDemocracy.com, we included some discussion forums. The forums are a great place to talk about the platform, get help with Broadcast Machine or Democracy player, and discuss internet TV and where it’s headed. The forums are here.

Today I removed the discussion forum called ‘Code’ since it makes more sense for development discussions to happen on the development email list, and I added a forum for Video Bomb.

We made some updates to Video Bomb this week, mostly subtle or behind the scenes type stuff, but there’s also an important new feature: the bookmarklet.

The bookmarklet makes it easier to submit video to Video Bomb. To use it, you drag the link up to your bookmarks bar. Then, when you’re looking at a video that you want to submit, click the bookmarklet. It will take you to the submit page and fill in the URL of the video file.

This initial implementation of the bookmarklet is just a start– we’re going to be developing it further to make it even easier to submit videos and keep track of videos that you like.

To get the bookmarklet, go to Video Bomb and look in the right sidebar.

We’re looking for a few volunteers who could help moderate the Channel Guide. This is a great and easy way to get your feet wet, helping out with this free, nonprofit platform for Internet TV. Figure on spending 20 minutes, 3 or 4 days a week.

The Democracy Channel Guide is an open directory of video RSS feeds, built on the open source CMS Drupal. If you haven’t tried out Democracy yet, the Channel Guide is what greets you on startup (screenshot). People can browse through the offerings and subscribe with a single click. We have plans to build out the infrastructure so that the Channel Guide can be run by a large community of people. But in the meantime, we’re just looking for a few steady volunteers to mind the store.

If you’re interested, email or call: hw -at- pculture.org or +1 508-963-5645. Excellent.

We just released Democracy Player 0.8.1. The Windows version now has the playback controls you’d expect from a media player (fast forward, rewind, a working progress slider) and we fixed several of the most frequently-reported bugs that caused Democracy to crash. Stability and performance are still the big issues, for sure. So that’s what we’re focused on now. Expect a release in a week or so that’s a lot more stable.

On the Mac side, we finally were able to fix an elusive bug that had been driving us crazy for a while (the so called “unpickleable error”).

So download the latest version, and there’s more improvements on the way.