Seesmic, the video conversation company, is one of the most interesting players in the online video world today. It is lead by Loic Le Meur, a French serial entrepreneur, who is committed to transparency, openness and video. This is how he described his company to Vator.TV:

Loic is practicing what he preaching, to the extent that he asked his community directly what should be the future of Seesmic:

As well as being extremely open about closing Seesmic's $6M financial round.

Seesmic Beyond Video Comments
However, not everything is bright in Seesmic Nation.

One of the major directions of the company, video comments, didn't prove to be popular with users. Even though there is a WordPress plugin for it, it is integrate with Diqus comments plugin, and used by more than 300 blogs including Techcrunch, Usage is slim. It seems that video blog comments are not as simple to use as text. My own push to my blog readers, asking them to leave video comments, was not successful at all. In a conversation with Loic (video chat over Skype) he sounded very positive about the future:

I have time - we are a small team, and we just raised money. As such we have enough time to find out what is working and what is not. We thought that video comments will be the right thing, but it didn't succeed as expected - so we are looking for the next thing.

Seesmic is planning on strengthening community features by creating closed and moderated video conversation groups. Users would be able to open a group, invite people to it and moderate the video conversation in it. This could be a very valuable feature, as it will enable new use cases:

- Events could create a pre and post event discussions (see my post about this topic)

- With enhanced privacy settings, study groups, classes and teachers could interact in a moderated and safe environment

- BBC were the first network that used Seesmic to collect viewers' feedback, edit it and broadcast it. It will be easier to do it with moderated groups

- Businesses could create a video based user community

I talked with Loic in January, and the community features are planned  to be released during February.
Loic is an extraordinary man, with an intriguing vision. I wonder what  the future holds for Seesmic. What's your opinion?

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• Seesmic wins at layoff spin [Great Moments In Pr] (valleywag.com)
• New Experimental Seesmic Site (Loïc Le Meur/Loic Le Meur Blog) (techmeme.com)

I read many blogs, but here are 5 ones that you probably missed:

Macblogz - cause in one site I have all the news I need

Macvideo - cause they have a lot of interesting interviews and analisys of the pro video industry

Techdirt - cause their cynicsm make me laugh in the morning

PDA - cause Jemima Kiss provide a lot of insight to the UK media industry

BBC Internet blog - cause BBC guys are doing some amazing things in the borderline of TV and Internet, and I love to get updates straight from the source.

Have a great day, and a happy blogday!

- Erik Huggers was announced as the BBC new media Tsar. Which actually means that he is the most influential person in the UK new media industry, replacing Ashley Highfield.

- Facebook is designing a new profile page

- Apple just can't get MobileMe to work properly

- Macromurs blogger is leaving his medical career for his blog.

- And if you are into Mac, and know some Hebrew, check out this video blog about Mac.

That's it for this morning, have a great week!