There are already a bunch of sites that mashup video streaming giants like YouTube, everything from digg-like video ranking to automatic downloading. Another natural type of mashup is the video aggregator. YouTube does a good job of categorizing and tagging their videos already, creating online channels (although I hate to use that word in the context of the web). But of course, there will always be people who are unsatisfied, and attempt to make their own remix. Thus was born videws, which aggregates videos from YouTube and other video services to form their own mix of “cool videos and better news.”

Videws grabs news items from the AP newswire and other sources, and finds videos that are similar in nature to the article. I’m pretty sure it’s a simple keyword analysis, because more often than not, the videos are only slightly related. The interface is in a two-column format, which shows a YouTube video on the left, and a stream of news items and video links on the right.

The idea behind videws is that “news is dull without videos.” I really like the idea of aggregating video news clips, which ideally could be a video version of TechMeme. In its current state, videws just isn’t compelling enough for me to use, due mostly to its poor relevancy algorithm, and perhaps also to the relatively few user uploaded news items. The site is also rather slow.

As users upload more content to YouTube, which is serving upwards of 100 million videos a day, services like videws can really start leveraging the massive amount of content through aggregation. Bloggers are increasingly linking and embedding more videos from services like YouTube, and, tracking the popular video discussions with an aggregator like TechMeme will be valuable.