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Client: Independent Film Channel
Publisher(s): Ziddio

When my big brother Patrick started wearing Black Flag shirts and showing me videos of Henry Rollins, I knew I would grow to love this tattooed, loud and hot tempered man. This newest partnership with IFC and Ziddio has allowed others to be just as forthright and bombastic in a contest to host the "Henry Rollins Show," on IFC and fly to Los Angeles to meet Henry.

Ziddio fosters the rant process, giving users topics to choose from in which Henry asks his audience to disagree, if they dare, with his own opinion. Only the first 30 seconds are judged (never thought Rollins would be one to ascribe to the 30-second-spot, but hey!)

Once you have uploaded the video, audience members can share it with Facebook or embed it into their blogs. There is a rating system, comments and all the other bells and whistles you can imagine.

It's a great way to get audience members involved, and it successfully adheres to the identity of the show and IFC.
-- Krisserin Canary, associate editor, iMedia Communications

Seriously, who does a better angry man than Henry Rollins? That guy is flat out frightening when he wants to be. And fortunately for him, his job is safe.

In the Henry Rollins Show promo "My Rollins Rant," users are asked to upload their own 30-second rants, a la Henry, on a variety of topics ranging form the war in Iraq to reproductive rights to teen behavior from exposure to mature content to "Is America a Dumb Country?" Those videos are then viewable on the Ziddio site, where users can watch and rate the submissions. The winner gets flown to LA to host the Henry Rollins Show marathon on IFC.

What do I like about the "My Rollins Rant" promo? It's user-generated content done right. The contest makes sense in light of the show's format, so anyone even loosely familiar with the show understands the contest. You can also easily embed any rant onto your blog or webpage, email one to your friends or automatically put one into your Facebook. The "view video information" button, however, just reset the video. Minor glitch, but I didn't really care what format the video was uploaded in or what bitrate it was recorded in anyway.

I only have two reservations about the promo, and the first is with the player. After you select your first video, you lose the library that lived underneath the player, so getting to the next video, if it isn't presented to you directly in the player, requires using your browser's "back" button. Nitpicky, I know, but it's the little things that make the difference between watching one or two videos and spending a half hour with them. My other qualm is the risk of user-generated content anywhere. The majority of these rants are just plain bad. Not funny. Not original. Not Henry. But, who is?
-- Corey Kronengold, director of corporate communications, Tremor Media

Without turning this review into a rant on the Rollins Rant, overall I found this site fairly thin; a one-trick pony. I work with video sites all day long and this is one of the more basic. Perhaps that was the design, but there's no meat here and doesn't compare with the hundreds of other video sites on the web. I did like that fact that Henry explained the purpose of the site in the beginning to help set the stage; that was great. But once he signed off, the rest is just a collection of videos from ranting viewers. You can sort by most viewed and highest rated. Nothing new here.
-- Matt Wright, director of online video strategy, HowStuffWorks