Wannabe Viral Videos Battle It Out in YouTube Slam

Google is reintroducing the idea of the video slam, this time focusing on YouTube videos that may go viral. The idea of the new site is simple, two videos are pitted against each other and users have to vote on the ones they like the most.

The interesting part happens behind the scenes in the way YouTube picks the videos that get to fight it out.

"Have some free time this week? Think you can find the next singing sensation, viral video like Charlie bit my finger or Surprised Kitty?," YouTube asks.

"Then come play YouTube Slam—a video discovery experiment we cooked up with folks from Google Research. Each week a new crop of videos battles head-to-head in Comedy, Cute, Music, Bizarre and Dance Slams, where your votes determine who wins the Slam and gets featured on the leaderboard," it writes.

You earn points for any of the video you pick that goes on to be the most popular and there's even a leaderboard for the best 'pickers.'

Of course, the site also ensures that you get to see the funniest or coolest new videos on YouTube before most of your friends do. You don't even have to vote to find the best videos, in fact, it's easier to just check out the week's winners every time.

The really fun part about all of this is that it's essentially an experiment by Google Research to find out if algorithms can pick out the really talented people from the many, many 'singing at home' videos hitting YouTube.

The first part of the experiment was finding videos that feature people playing their favorite songs or even their own creations. Clues such as the lighting, the head and shoulders view of the person and so on, were used to discover these videos.

Then, the researchers used acoustic analysis along with some human input to determine whether listeners would like the performance. In order to put the results of the algorithms to the test, YouTube Slam was created and later expanded to include more categories of videos.