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In celebration of the 30th Anniversary of Star Wars, LucasFilm has created a Star Wars Mash Up site at mashup.starwars.com. LucasFilm has released hundreds of clips for users to trim, arrange and mix together to create their own Star Wars mash-ups, mix in your own content, and post on your own sites, social networks or anywhere else you please.

OVW experimented with the tools and clips to create our own mash-up. The tools work pretty well, and most of the editing is quick and responsive. There could be some better instructions,…

Paul McCartney debuted his Dance Tonight music video on YouTube ahead of the release of his new album. It has received more than 220,000 views and more than a thousand comments in two days.

Above: McCartney’s video is directed by Michel Gondry and features Natalie Portman.

Videos from last week’s Personal Democracy forum are now up on the PDF’s blip.tv channel. This is your chance to see Tom Friedman call the Bush administration braindead if you haven’t already.

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Above: Lawrence Lessig speaks at PDF2007

These have been around for a little while but for…

This week Google announced a test program to embed AdSense ad units into their Google Video player, rounding out their click-to-play video ad and video sponsorship offerings.

Contextually targeted text ads with video content seems to be the newest fad in video, replacing some of the short lived buzz about Flash layovers from the likes of VideoEgg or Pointroll’s TickerBoy, and the recently announced Adjustables.com. Google is the 800 lb. gorilla, driven by the popularity of the AdSense platform, but new competition from start-ups like ScanScout will at least make the space interesting.…

Video syndication company Roo Media continues its slide with another quarter in the red. According to a company filing, Roo’s revenue increased by 68%, yet slid another $6.5 million on operating losses for the quarter.

It won’t be long before Rupert Murdoch owns the whole thing for a song, and turns it into a profit center. But for now, syndication still seems to be a loss leader for anyone that isn’t distributing their own content. The CBS deal with 10 distribution platforms provided plenty of insight to the tight margins…

Online communities, web 2.0 and the two-way mass media conversation phenomenon have changed the way we communicate. This will become an even bigger deal as we get closer to cross-platform convergence and people start to have these conversations via their living room TVs.

The best framework I have come across for building a successful online community is Amy Jo Kim’s 5 Mechanics of compelling video games, which is a pretty good way to build a functioning online community. Thanks to Matt Lewis of Townhall.com for bringing these up at PDF2007.

The full deck of…

PoliticsTV produced this video for the PDF Conference yesterday, now on YouTube:

Funny story about Streaming Media East - Almost everyone had a big screen TV playing video in flash or windows media, but no one was actually streaming anything. Windows media and flash usually look great when played from the hard drive.

There were a ton of CDNs but there really weren’t too many other service providers. Aside from player builders like Maven, the Content Management companies like The Platform and a few others it was a pretty small group of exhibitors.

Notably missing were the rich media advertising agencies. The Search Engine Strategies conference had…

It’s great when political video goes viral. There is a legitimate value to the argument that some long-form content does better online. James Comey’s testimony (below) is a great example of news content which is not well served by network sound-bites but is widely viewed in its entirety online.

Comey, a former senior Justice Department official revealed what the Washington Post is calling “an account of Bush administration lawlessness so shocking it would have been unbelievable coming from a less reputable source.”

Comey details a late-night rush when he was acting Attorney General to…