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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Online video: Can you Digg it?

The Spokesman-Review

The Digg Reel: Best of video from Digg.com

“Web:

http://revision3.com/ diggreel/

Web tracking service comScore said the average U.S. citizen watches about 3.25 hours of online video per month. We’d guess most of that time goes to videos featuring cats and dogs.

This week’s featured podcast is a weekly video production that summarizes, digest-style, some of the most amusing or riveting videos bouncing around the Web.

The podcast is Digg Reel, just launched by popular bookmarking site Digg. Essentially Digg allows users and members to rank or “digg” stories or videos and then it ranks those stories or videos based on total votes.

The podcast is, in effect, a weekly “what’s hot” list for Digg’s videos.

This seems like a great idea, but all we’ve seen so far is the debut episode. Based on that, it’s worth watching but has some problems, too.

The weekly podcast does two things well. It doesn’t make us watch the full videos, providing instead pruned clips to get the main idea across. The Digg Reel also shows some of the online comments posted by Digg members about that particular video – which sometimes are funnier than the video.

Still, we’re not ready to call this a hit. No matter if the videos are funny, smarmy or outrageous, this format relies on a host who knows how to walk the fine line between being cute and smarmy. Jessica Corbin, who’s done podhosting elsewhere on the Web, was hired for this role. So far, Corbin isn’t capable of walking that line.

Will she improve? Will Digg Reel save itself from extreme hipness? Time will tell.

Overall rating: Three stars (out of five).

Host temperament: Two stars.

Production: Four stars. In high-definition.