The first and foremost is the player they are using for their shows (I believe they use Ooyala for streaming video). There are lots of ways to play video on the web and the experience is fairly consistent: buffering at the beginning and if you want to move to another part in the video then you can move the playhead to a new part of the timeline and the buffering starts again. Unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot that somebody can do about the buffering bit for now, but the VBS player does something very helpful that other players don’t do. It shows different thumbnails for different parts of the show so it takes a lot of guessing out of the equation in terms of where you will land when the video resumes.  Try it out in the embedded profile on surfer Dan Malloy below.

The second thing that the site is doing well is that they offer a wide variety of programming that scratches the niche itch. Examples include Hi Shredability (surfing), Motherboard (nerdy stuff), and Shot by Kern (boob alert!). Not all shows are updated on a regular basis but there seems to be enough new content on a weekly basis that it is worth a periodic visit or an RSS feed subscription.

The final thing I want to highlight is the fact that they enable the skipping of ads. The link to skip the ad shows up after just a few seconds. Okay, so they force you to watch a few seconds of an ad, but the fact that they allow a skip after a few seconds is cool by me.

VBS.tv has been around for a couple years already, but I just discovered them today.  If you’ve never seen it, it is definitely worth a quick look.  If you have seen it and have found other web networks or channels that are doing cool things, feel free to share your findings in the comments below!  Cheers.

I admit, I jumped on the joke bandwagon and made the Blue Steel face for a day or two after seeing the movie, but for some people the joke became ingrained into their muscle memory and it became more of a bad habit than a joke.  Some of them continue to make the face to this day and worse yet their friends are doing it too just to fit in.  In fact, it has become such a common facial expression, people have given it a name – “duckface.”

Antiduckface is a website that has taken up the noble cause of preventing duckface by highlighting it for what it truly is – an ugly distortion of one’s mouth that really does a disservice to your whole face.  On the website, you’ll see a bunch of user submitted photos of people suffering from duckface.  You’ll get a laugh for sure, but more importantly, you’ll have a great tool for illustrating the ugliness that is duckface.

Think of your friends that have continued to use Blue Steel way past its useful life and send them the link so that they can begin the road to recovery.  With your help, we can put an end to duckface.