BLOOFY

Positioned conceptually midway between Twitter and Blogger, with a dash of search and a helping of Wiki, bloofy (always lc & ital) accepts short posts (though size is not limited quite so severely as in Twitter), photos, video, and audio posts. Interactive videos (IV's)(eg Flash with video) are also hosted, allowing users to upload games and interactive tutorials.

bloof's (posts on bloofy, also called bloo's or blo's) can be formatted, and special words and terms (eg replys -- twitter @, tagwords -- twitter #, and URL links) can be separated from the main text, improving readability, clarity and appearance.

It is possible to aggregate a series of selected posts from all over bloofy, then publish and annotate them in a section (called a stream) of the user's home site, effectively making the user an editorial director for that topic. (See ** below.)

Similarly one can re-edit certain "designated" videos from bloofy -- Designated Videos (DV's) uploaded to bloofy for re-mixing are considered to be essentially in the public domain.

All DV's, IV's, and Designated Audio must however, be certified as original by the uploader, and must be accepted (manually) by bloofy. The search tags (and navigation) for Designated Audio and Video files are also created by bloofy to facilitate accurate and efficient audio and video retrieval. So, in addition to essentially unlimited user contributed content (non-designated), there is also carefully selected and valuable designated material.

Sorting this all out would be a monumental task if it were all handled by the staff, so in fact these tasks are initially handled by users, in a similar manner to the way imdb was created and Wiki's are run.

The "premium" section of bloofy -- as a source of information -- is like a multimedia Wiki encyclopedia, and -- as a source of entertainment -- is becoming a premiere online site for quality, independent films (short films, feature length films, and episodic series), games, and some new forms of fun.

A rich, open, free Development Kit allows extensive user-enhancements to the site, including tie-ins with Dev Kits for some other sites. That enables some extremely interesting compound applications.

** One very interesting application makes it easy to take IV's DV's DA's and streams, and publish them as a multimedia e-book!

One outstanding feature of bloofy is that it automatically collects accurate and informative statistics of traffic. This facilitates a growing amount of advertising that is appearing on the site. (When DV's are re-edited, a portion of the ad revenue from the re-mix flows back to the original creator.)

In one of the most popular features of bloofy -- commonly called "don't ask, just tell" -- users enter a simple fact of which they have personal knowledge each time they login, and receive a random, personal fact from someone else. Many friendships and even some marriages began this way! (But also at least one divorce.)

Though it maintained a low profile for some time, bloofy was recently outed by Stephen Colbert in the June 15 issue of Newsweek. "Bloofy" has been defined as something like "sleepy." The new bloofy is anything but asleep!