This post from Techcrunch is a great up to date summary of the current state of play in online video sites. It highlights ‘Jumpcut’ - a new site which allows for collaborative online editing and mashing-up of content submitted by users. I wonder will video/political activist mobs parasite on this to rapidly turn over content without having to gather in one place?

One of the developers ‘jump-cuts’ in to the comments on the post and suggests that turning the audience into collaborative filmmakers in the same way that blogs have turned readers into collaborating citizen-journalists is what is conceptually driving the software they’re developing. Very interesting. Even professionals uploading footage from a variety of locations with burnt in timecode could leverage productivity out of something like this.

Editing on jumpcut is, believe it or not, much easier and faster than using even simplified desktop editing programs like iMovie and MovieMaker. I made a 20 minute video today out of dozeons of different assets and timed it to music in about 10 minutes; there are no missing core features, everything you need is there, and editing is instant, no rendering, no large files. As an added *bonus* on top of all that your friends and family might actually get to see the movie you made, and (wait there’s more) even add their stuff and make their own version. And thats not to mention the creative and artistic aspect of making and editing movies (documentary shorts, music videos, etc), where the community and the access to a huge library of media plays a much larger role. The idea isn’t just about sharing video, or making slideshows, the idea is to open up video as a new medium which is as easy to edit as the comments in this thread, or an article in Wikipedia.