Keeping family traditions alive is what inspired Eric D. Alterman to start knowitallvideo.com. He had wanted to capture his 98-year-old grandmother on tape, talking about her matzo ball soup, but she died before he could train the camera on her.

He launched the site in the fall anyway, and immediately began receiving videos from people like Jason Klamm, an aspiring filmmaker who lives in - where else? - Los Angeles.

Mr. Klamm's video, "Dinosaurs: They Certainly Were Big," quickly became one of the most popular videos at the site, which gives viewers the chance to rate them.

He does not represent himself as a paleontologist. "It was just for a science class," said Mr. Klamm, 24, who moved west after graduating from Columbia College in Chicago. "The only thing I can do is make movies. I wrote it in, like, a night, and we shot it the next day. We lived on Michigan Avenue, right across the street from the Museum of Natural History."

He wound up working for a search engine, and his attention was piqued by a request to be listed from a company known as KnowItAllVideo. He submitted his video, now two years old, to the company. A few weeks ago, Mr. Alterman called to tell him that his was one of five videos chosen to be shown on Frontier Airlines beginning in January.

"It's insane exposure," Mr. Klamm said. "The reality of it is I'm not going to make money right away in film, so I had to set my goals just on getting people to like my stuff."

Nor does Mr. Alterman, an entrepreneur based in New York and Jupiter, Fla., expect to make money with his new Web venture right away. But he thinks the potential for amateur video online and on cellphones is enormous in an age of high-speed connections.

"In the Internet world, everyone can be a contributor," he said. "It's not just for Hollywood anymore."

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