Today is the third thrilling day of Sheeps Week. Today’s announcement is two very simple guides to creating and promoting video feeds. I decided to put these together because I felt like people still needed a good starting point for making internet TV channels. Things have changed a lot in the past year and it’s easier than ever to make a feed and there are lots of ways to share it with people. Here are the new sites:

10 Ways to Promote a Video Feed

How to Make a Video Feed

I hope these sites are useful for you or for that friend who’s been thinking about making a channel. Please let me know if I’ve missed anything important: nicholas-at-pculture.org.

Steven Ansell has made an alternate icon set for Democracy Player with an installer / uninstaller for the OSX version. It’s awesome! The installer and uninstaller both worked perfectly for me. Steven says “it’s currently only available for the Mac. But I am sure that a clever windows user could figure out how to install the icons in the PC version of Democracy.”

Get the Details and Download it Here

Update for Windows Users:

Cortechs says: “For windows:

* Unpack the dmg archive

* Copy all the .png files from the icons’ folder to C:\Program Files\Participatory Culture Foundation\Democracy Player\resources\images

* Copy “main.css” from the icons’folder to C:\Program Files\Participatory Culture Foundation\Democracy Player\resources\css

* Start Democracy and…

That’s it!”

We are very proud to announce a new project: The Channel Channel.

The Channel Channel is an internet TV channel that shows 60-second previews of internet TV channels. So meta, but so crucial.

We made this site because there are now more than 600 channels in the Democracy Channel Guide and hundreds more floating around the internet. It’s hard to know what’s good, what’s great, and what sucks, especially if you haven’t heard of something before. The Channel Channel let’s you watch previews of channels and subscribe to the ones that look good. Since we’re asking creators to keep their previews under 60 seconds, you can’t possibly get bored.

We have an awesome video preview of The Channel Channel, which is our first channel preview. The music is ‘Mountain’ by Professor Murder (buy their cd).

So take a look at our nice new site and then Subscribe to the Channel Channel.

Publishers! Send in your previews and we’ll put them on the site:
How to Submit a Preview of Your Video Channel.

Democracy Player 0.9 is a major update. We’ve added big new features while simplifying and improving the existing user flow. We’ve also polished the interface design in a few very nice ways.

Download it now: Democracy Player 0.9

See it in action: ScreenCastsOnline has made a nice video walkthrough of this new version– Watch it Here. Even better, subscribe to ScreenCastsOnline in Democracy Player.

WHAT’S NEW:

Playlists You can now create playlists to organize your favorite videos. I have a playlist called ‘Keepers’ that I’ve been using to keep track of videos that I like to show people as we’re sitting down to watch a movie at my house, kind of like previews, but better.

Folders To organize your channels and your new playlists, you can now create folders.

Flash Video Tons of video online is now in Flash format. The Windows and Linux versions of Democracy Player can now play Flash videos from most flash hosting sites. In addition, Google Video and Youtube have been added to the search choices. (The Mac version can’t play flash in the main window, but we’ve made it easy to launch it in a separate window.)

Drag and Drop Previous versions of Democracy Player didn’t let you select individual videos or drag anything around. But you can’t get videos into playlists or channels into channel folders without drag and drop. So we made drag and drop. This makes getting organized much easier and lets you move or delete big batches of stuff.

Menu Overhaul Menu options in Democracy Player have been a little neglected. They were inconsistent on different platforms and some of the options weren’t even connected to any functionality. We’ve organized, updated, and connected all the menus, which should make for a much better experience. We’ve also added some helpful right-click menu functionality on videos, channels, folders, and playlists.

Multiple Languages This is the first version of Democracy to support non-English languages on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Democracy is at least partially translated in over 30 languages. Check out the current language list and help translate.

Polish There’s a few other UI polishes, that look nice and improve usability. First, we have better, more useful error messages when a download fails for some reason. Second, we show available disk space in the downloads tab. Third, we made the orange, blue, and green circles in the sidebar prettier. We also mellowed out the top bar on individual channels (we got complaints that it was blindingly bright) and we made the divider bars silvery, to avoid a total blue overload that was happening when we introduced the new blue select state. Lastly, we’ve made lots of other small changes throughout the app that will make your experience smoother and more intuitive.

So go try it out. And don’t forget to check the Sheeps Week page tomorrow for more new stuff…