VideoEgg: Hassle-Free Video Blogging

As I once mentioned here, I like capturing teeny-tiny video clips with my digital camera. My only problem is that after I've viewed those clips once or twice, they tend to sit on my hard drive where nobody--including me--gets much enjoyment out of them.

That could change. A startup called VideoEgg offers a system that makes getting video onto the Web ridiculously easy, and today it's announcing a partnership with blog powerhouse Six Apart to make video publishing available (at typepad.videoegg.com) to users of the TypePad blogging service.

Before you use VideoEgg, you need to download and install a little piece of Windows software (the company says a Mac version is in the works), but once you do, it's entirely browser-based. And putting a video online is, literally, a one-click process--the software handles resizing and format conversion on the fly, squishing clips down to a managable size and uploading them directly into a TypePad blog post. Publishing large clips may take a bit of time (a few minutes apiece for the ones I tried, some of which started out as big as 175MB), but there's virtually no work involved, and no technical knowledge required.

I tried the service by dragging some .AVI videos I shot with a Canon Digital Elph camera off my hard drive and into the browser. The VideoEgg software can handle clips in various formats used by different cameras (including camera phones) and can capture video directly from a Webcam or camcorder.

Except for letting you chop off the start and/or end of a clip, VideoEgg doesn't give you any control over the resulting video's look and feel. But that's sort of the point--it makes all the decisions involved in making sure the results will look good. (It uploads low- and high-quality versions of clips, showing the higher-quality ones to people whose PCs are running Flash Player 8, and lower-quality ones to folks who have Flash 7.)

The VideoEgg-TypePad service actually resides at VideoEgg's site, which gives you a basic blogging tool but doesn't include all of TypePad's features. (Once a blog entry's up, you can edit it from within TypePad.) Videos are hosted by VideoEgg; the service is free to TypePad users, but when you upload a clip, VideoEgg tells you that it reserves the option of adding ads to it later. (It does say it will offer an ad-free service for an unspecified small fee.)

TypePad users are among the first to get their hands on VideoEgg's service, but the company says it's working on making it available elsewhere, too. Below is a look at what the user interface looks like--yup, it really is simple. Defintely worth a look if you want to go from thinking about video blogging to doing it as quickly and easily as possible.