Video is finally making it into the mainstream for organisations to see and hear, almost first hand, the experiences of their colleagues. The availability of reasonably priced video capture and editing solutions are now available. It is simple for someone to pick up a video recorder, film a colleague, download the video to a computer and make the clip available for anyone to view. There is an interesting video-driven lesson learning activity occurring on the web called Channel 9 run by Robert Scoble at Microsoft (see http://channel9.msdn.com/). Robert is visiting his Microsoft colleagues and asking them to talk about their projects. There are many interesting features of what has been built on Channel 9, but the most important is the efforts to build community around the video with features such as the ability for anyone to comment and rate each video posted.

While I was reading through some of the comments of a clip of Bill Staples talking about Microsoft’s web server (some commenters suggests that the first bit of the video was slow and uninformative but the second half was great), it occurred to me that a useful enhancement to the site would be to enable people to edit a clip so they can cut out the bit they found most useful. Then invite people to resubmit their edited versions. Add to this a way to rate the interestingness (concept at Flickr) and useful clips would bubble to the surface.