I have been playing around with the Yahoo/Huffington Post/Slate presidential debate “mashup†site and I can tell you that it is not for the weak of heart.
The debate has been billed as “the first-ever online-only presidential mashup“.
The raw footage from the online debate in which Charlie Rose and Bill Maher ask the candidates questions on the usual topics has now been uploaded by Yahoo to its own web-based video editing service Jumpcut.
By login into this service one can “grab” the different videos and “splice and dice” the footage to create your own mashup.
According to Yahoo’s spokesman Brian Nelson,
“Users will be able to create their own mashups and post the footage onto their websites afterwards — that’s for the hardcore fans who want to engage with this video”.
And you have to be a “hardcore fan” to go through the entire process of grabbing, remixing and publishing a video because the interface is not very intuitive and the instructions are hard to find and follow.
It took me a while to put together this mashup where John Edwards, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton give their views of the insurance and drug industries lobbies’ roles in the creation of a new universal healthcare system.
I am sure that I have not yet scratched the surface regarding the potential of this new online video editing tool but I have to admit that despite all the problems it is pretty cool.