Bored? Yeah, me too. Which is why I just killed nearly 30 minutes doing mindless web surfing on Facebook, Reddit and Amazon. But it looks like YouTube would like a little of my holiday downtime clicks – and yours, too. The company just blogged about YouTube Slam, a game that involves pairing up two videos and voting for your favorites.
I guess you could call YouTube Slam a “Hot or Not” for videos. Except in this case, you’re not picking the hottest/sexiest face, you’re picking the funniest clip (Comedy Slam), the best dancer (Dance Slam), the cutest kitten (Cute Slam), best music (Music Slam) or weirdest video (Bizarre Slam).
Here’s how it works:
Click on the category of videos you want to watch. View them both and vote for your favorites.
Wow, that was hard.
The top-rated videos are then featured on the “slam leaderboard,” which is great, but nothing like getting onto the YouTube homepage, of course.
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The site was cooked up by YouTube with folks from Google Research, and has actually been around since this fall, when Google Research used it as the output destination of a machine ranking project. The project analyzed “singing at home” videos and attempted to surface those that belonged to truly talented musicians. The results were then spit out to YouTube Slam to help crowdsource the discovery of the “hidden gems.”
So there you go: mindless web surfing. For science! Slam away.
