My friends over at Dabble face a typical challenge. How to punch through the clutter and attract people to their site.

Dabble is a social video site. They’re providing ways to create community around video on the net. One simple way of doing that is the ability create playlists of your favorite videos that you can then share, much like iPod playlists. Love reef tanks? Then make a playlist of your favorite reef tanks (corals, fish, clams, etc.), tag it, and share it. Get people to share their playlists and more people will want to take part. To get more people making playlists, Dabble is running a contest each day in December. They give you a topic, you make a playlist. Daily winners get a t-shirt and then a shot at the grand prize: 500 smackers. The runner up gets a video iPod.

Is Dabble a glimpse into TV 2.0? That is, social networking and TV? Maybe. It shares a vision with Jane McGonigal, newly minted Berkely SIMS School PhD. In a post from last year, she wrote:

Whenever I’m with VCs or entrepreneurs who want to know what to make, I always say IM for live TV. PLEASE!!! I want my buddy list for who’s watching what. (Read the original here; paragraph numbered “1″.)

Play the contest to get a glimpse of what TV could be like. Think I’m off my rocker? Who would have thought in 1995 that SMS text messaging would have been the killer app of mobile phones worldwide?