Kaltura: Wiki meets YouTube by way of Yochai Benkler

One of the most interesting presentations at the Web Video Summit today was Shay David, Chief Technology Officer of Kaltura, talking about their business, which they summarize in one phrase as “Wiki meets YouTube.” Their site provide a set of tools that allows groups of users to collaborate online in the creation and remixing of rich media. They are capturing the synergy between two macro trends, peer production and video sharing. Kaltura offers an SDK and is engaging partners to build collaborative video authoring capabilities into their sites. Among their goals is to build the largest network of remixable materials. I think this would be of interest to video journalists, documentary filmmakers, and mission based organizations. I also find it very interesting that Shay is inspired by the ideas of shared cultural production which have been eloquently articulated by Yochai Benkler.

Linking those who make media with those who need media

The web video explosion is creating demand for content and service exchanges that work at internet speed. Two among the many players in this space are bid4vid and Cutcaster. Cutcaster was established a year ago as an exchange for professional video and photos that allows buyers and sellers to set licensing terms and price, and helps media makers find the right price based on current market conditions. bid4vid is a nascent Los Gatos, California start-up, might be on to something, they are building a video exchange linking those who make media with those who need media. It’s too early in their evolution to know how well it’s going to work out, but it’s certainly a good idea. Right now their web site is very sparse, but more information should be available soon.

Organizing a gel collection

As you collect more and more gels and diffusion, organization and storage becomes important. I store my gels and diffusion using the following two holding methods (as far as rolls go, those usually live in their original boxes).
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Jottit is to web tools what haiku is to poetry

I recently discovered Jottit, a minimalist web site creation tool that makes adding content as simple as writing an email. My immediate reaction was that Jottit is to web tools what haiku is to poetry, try it out, it’s the zen alternative to wiki tools, and the instant feedback is sublime (when you use the editor, you can simply enter text, but if you choose to type HTML, what you write on the left is displayed on the right as the browser will render it in real time, a sublime use of Ajax, I presume).

I asked Aaron Swartz about the genesis of Jottit and he explained to me that he had a site called Google Weblog with a submit form for people to submit ideas for posts. And he found that, “people coming to the site through Google kept submitting their stories of their day,” and so on and so forth. Aaron explained that they thought, “it was just the way to post stuff to the internet.” So he thought, “why not just make posting to the internet that simple?” And thus Jottit was born. Code is poetry and Jottit is the latest haiku.