I caught up with Mike Sommers, VP of Product Management for KickApps also at at the 2010 Online Video Platform Summit, who talked about the growing importance of curation, specifically social video curation. With the prolferation of video on the web, Sommers said, it's getting more and more difficult for consumers to find the good content they are looking for. He noted that a long time ago curation of content on the web was done by editors at AOL or Yahoo, and there would be a bunch of links to point the way to that content. Then Google came along with its bots that automated search, and its algorithm became the main curator of content through keyword searches. But as Sommers noted, the problem with video is that Google's search engine bots can't understand what video content is about as well as humans can. "So, what's happening today is that we're going from search engine optimization – which is a practice of building your website in a certain way that makes it understandable to search engines – to friend engine optimization – which is building your website in way that makes it sharable, that invites people to take our content, notify your friends about it and then drive traffic back to your website." KickApps was founded in 2005, and is a leading provider of customizable social software solutions and was acquired by KIT digital on January 28, 2011. KickApps CEO Alex Blum was named has been appointed to the new position of global chief operating officer of KIT digital. Distributed by Tubemogul.
