Another 'Clean' site takes on YouTube

Another 'Clean' site takes on YouTube
Christian competitor launches alternative

After years of carefully monitoring his training and performance as a triathlete, Brian Bozarth has taken his skills of oversight and discipline to the Internet, employing a touch of moral scrutiny to create clean alternatives to the wildly popular websites MySpace and YouTube.

Just weeks ago, Bozarth – who launched the social networking site DittyTalk last year – introduced VideoPile.com as a new destination for video sharers.

"I believe MySpace is an incredible invention. YouTube is great media. But at the same time, it's very difficult to go to the home pages without seeing something scandalous," Bozarth told WND. "I found myself saying, 'I don't want to come here."

Bozarth's main concerns are the lack of content oversight and lewd advertisements peppering the pages of YouTube; but he hardly believes in throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Hence, VideoPile.

After spending a mere 250 hours on the project, Videopile.com was launched into cyberspace with enormous success in mid-May.

"In the first three weeks, we had 1 million hits from about 30,000 individual people," Bozarth said. "Over 5,000 videos have been uploaded to the site: Anything clean goes – Christian music videos and pets doing tricks, and, most of all, evangelism."

Bozarth hopes missionaries will use his site to "share what the Lord is doing in the world."

"I want VideoPile to excite people," he said. "Through missionaries and pastors, people will get excited about God. That is the point of what I do, and if people are not being evangelized and encouraged, I will gladly and immediately close down both sites."

Bozarth began competing in the triathlon as a concentrated weight-loss program in high school and soon found a talent, eventually living it up on the swim-bike-run circuit all year long.

"I went to Oregon State University, but I found myself kind of bored, so I kind of packed up and went to Australia. I'd race in Europe and North America during the northern hemisphere's summer and in Australia and South America during the southern hemisphere's summer," said Bozarth, who won the Asian Triathlon Championship.

Competing in triathlons enabled Bozarth to visit nearly 50 countries, but his unique exposure to the world began much earlier, growing up as the child of an American resort manager and a professional tennis player in Hong Kong and Macao.

"It's a great way to experience the world, for a kid, since it all just comes to you," Bozarth said.

Bozarth's global sojourn took him to Hawaii, where, as a teacher at Calvary Chapel Bible College, he grew concerned for students getting hooked on the Web.

"It was Maui! The sun was out! It was beautiful! And there are my students, sitting inside in dark rooms, talking to each other from five feet away; and what do you know – it was MySpace."

After a student was expelled for serious indiscretions linked to MySpace, Bozarth realized he was watching his students destroy themselves. On another student's suggestion, he came up with a solution.

Called DittyTalk, the site incorporates accountability and careful monitoring of content and users. Since launching last February, it has grown, mostly by word of mouth, to receive more than 30 million hits a month.

The average user is between 16 and 18, drawing from the many families in which parents have banned MySpace. More than 100 monitors read every post, profile and blog, evaluating them by specific biblical standards and flagging the inappropriate ones to receive immediate attention.

Users on both of Bozarth's sites tout them as clean, wholesome, and, most of all, uplifting.

"DittyTalk won't put up with online predators, obscenity, profanity or otherwise disrespectful behavior that MySpace all but condones … ," wrote 29-year-old Indiana user Shaun Sullivan on the website's forum. "DittyTalk is here to point people toward a personal relationship with the LORD through His Son Jesus Christ as revealed in the living truth of the Bible, and to encourage fellowship and growth in the Holy Spirit."

Tennessee user Keith Buckner heard of Bozarth's sites through WND's story last year. He likes to browse VideoPile for videos "because I know they will be clean. … I wouldn't mind if my children had accounts."

Younger users agree, including 15-year-old Californian "Lolo," who wrote of MySpace and YouTube in a DittyTalk forum post: "i look back and i want to puke, the level of pervertedness is off the charts." The Christian sites, by contrast, are "kind of like my comfort food. it's like chicken noodle soup. lol."

Like YouTube, MySpace and its co-founder and public face Tom Anderson are not for everyone. As user LovelyLauren posted recently, "Who needs Tom when you've got Jesus?"