Story Blender is an online collaborative video production site where you can work together with others to "blend" your, and others media for rich, interactive storytelling. COOL!
Story Blender CEO Hyoung Yong Joon is the original founder of cyworldcom, saycupid.com , kukubox.com, and nplugs.com. Although the site is "beta," Yong's experience shines through - the tutorials, Blend Studio, overall layout, ease of use are all first class. There is really no need to spend time with the tutorials if you already have some (rudimentary) video making experience online.
And to show that he does do what he preaches, here is his own video, the Santa Cons and Salvation Army:
Your challenge, if you feel brave enough to accept it, is to remake this (hint: use the green Remake button) skit into the kind of Christmas story even the real Santa Claus could be proud of. Don't worry, you have a whole year to do it....
Besides the standard (by now) webcam and voice inputs, you can also "blend" in Google Maps overlays and data, which is something I have not seen yet on other sites covered earlier, like Animoto or JibJab.
I fully expect other, useful and fun features in the final 1.0 version, and will report on them as they appear.
Google's popular video sharing site is now giving away tools that let you tap its underlying database functions, in effect allowing you to build your own YouTube. They call it "YouTube Everywhere."
You now have full access to YouTube's extensive video library, global audience, and the underlying video hosting and streaming network that powers YouTube. The move goes significantly beyond the current access to videos in which any Web user can copy and embed selected videos onto their own Web pages.
YouTube says the new offerings allow anyone building a Web site or application to upload videos straight to YouTube. Also, you can fetch video feeds, comments, responses or playlists from YouTube.
What YouTube is offering parallels an earlier move by Yahoo to open up the ability of its Flickr photo-sharing site to provide deep access to Web developers in order to embed underlying features of Flickr in other sites.
Developers can build in functions to let users rate videos or add them to a favorites list embedded within their own sites. They can customize and control the Adobe Flash video player through which videos are viewed. The APIs (Application Programmer Interfaces) let you build a so-called "chromeless" Flash player -- a video-viewing window that is stripped of formatting such as title bar, browser buttons or status bars, meaning that you can create your own player.
These free customization features can be used in conjunction with the existing APIs which launched last year and which provide the ability to view videos on other sites and to search for videos on YouTube.
COOL! Upload videos directly from mobile phone devices:
One of these features and functions enables you and your site users to publish videos directly from their mobile phone devices or encourage new users to share videos to the Web site, as if they were on YouTube itself.
The number of possible new applications is endless. Electronic Arts has enabled gamers to capture videos of fantastical user-generated creatures from their upcoming game, Spore, and publish these directly to YouTube. Here are a few scenes from the highly anticipated game:
The University of California, Berkeley is bringing free educational content to the world, enhancing their open source lecture capture and delivery system to publish videos automatically into YouTube. Animoto enables its users to create personalized, professional-quality music videos from their own photos and upload them directly to YouTube. Tivo is providing its users a rich and highly participative YouTube viewing experience on the television.
