The idea of having 'slam' type competitions is certainly not a new one. Years ago websites would run music clams whereby members would vote for their favourite band in a tournament format, with two bands going head to head, with the winner progressing to the next round whilst the loser was assigned to musical oblivion.
IBM took a similar approach with their Idea Jams. The concept was intended to tap into the knowledge of the thousands of IBM employees around the world. They provide an overview of Idea Jams in the video below.
Anyway, to YouTube. They have launched YouTube Slam this week. It's designed as a video discovery tool. It works by splitting a video in two, with their algorithm pitting the video you were watching against a related video. You vote on the one you enjoyed the most and a leaderboard will display the leading Slam Champs.
At the moment only 'cute', 'bizarre' or 'funny' videos are included in the Slam competition so personally it has limited appeal to me, but hopefully in time they'll expand things out to include a wider range of categories.
The concept of utilising games to sort and categorise content and ideas however is one that many businesses can utilise. By gamifying the process of idea generation you remove the tendancy for those in senior positions to dominate discussions and allow a much more meritocratic approch to flourish.
How can you use games at work?
Hmm, interesting move. How do you select your video to be included in one of these competitions?
Hi Vicky, you can see the official Google announcement on their blog
http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2011/12/introd…
It would appear as though Google will select which videos are included in the Slam contests, although it's not clear yet whether these are chosen by editors or by algorithm.
I wonder if this will eventually be part of the ranking algorithm on YouTube?
It's possible although with the number of categories, and therefore the number of videos, that are included so far in the Slam project it isn't going to happen yet. It makes sense for Google to know which videos are popular though.
What will be interesting though I think is how good the Slam platform becomes at predicting or even seeding viral movies before they go mainstream. At the moment most of the videos included in the project have been around the block a few times.
Not really all that different to the likes of Stumbleupon though is it? My initial play around with it didn't really provide me with anything sufficiently either interesting or entertaining enough to send me back on a regular basis.