Early this morning, Mary Hodder announced that Dabble had finally gone live. Dabble is a social media site that allows you to organize and share your collection of online vids. I’ve been working with a beta account for a couple of months (note my nifty collection of YearlyKos video), and it’s great to finally be able to share my video playlists with people outside the beta wall.
While I was looking at my Dabble account just now, it occured to me that this is a nifty way for people to create a video event that’s greater than the sum of its parts. Dabble enables you to collect clips and re-arrange them into a meaningful blend of perspectives. If someone wants to get into videoblogging without worrying too much about bandwidth and loadtimes, they could host their videos on YouTube, use Dabble to construct a playlist, and then present the feed of the playlist on their blog. This would be, in effect, running your own TV station on your blog.
This approach could be used for awesome social and political effect. Think of combining clips from Witness with hip political vids. Another model is Link TV’s Mosaic, which remixes news segments from all over the Middle East. I just tried the Dabble bookmarklet (one-click button to add videos to your Dabble playlists) on the Mosaic page, and it worked fine after I remembered to stop the video that was streaming on the front page. Anyway – grab clips from here, there, and that other Web 2.0 place, and you have your own mash up TV station. Crank up the volume!