Microsoft’s Channel 9 is a video blog which discusses various aspects of Microsoft’s technology and products. In “their words”:1…

bq.. Channel 9 is all about the conversation. Channel 9 should inspire Microsoft and our customers to talk in an honest and human voice. Channel 9 is not a marketing tool, not a PR tool, not a lead generation tool.

p. One interesting feature of Channel 9 is called “clipster”:2. The clipster feature allows users to “microchunk”:7 (aka, excerpt) Channel 9 videos to highlight certain segments in the video. For example, “here”:3 is a video that is 31 minutes long which goes over Vista’s new UI. I’ve watched the video, and it’s pretty interesting.

Channel 9 user “AdamKinney “:5 also watched this video and found “this one minute 46 second part”:4 to be particularly interesting, so he _clipped_ it.

The Channel 9 implementation of microchunking has some obvious issues — it only works in IE… surprise!, you can’t embedded the videos or clips on your site, it’s not as easy as “cutting and pasting”:6, etc. — but it shows the power of microchunking to enhance the distribution of video (and audio) media. Mirochunking is the equivalent of textual quoting and linking.

How about being able to microchunk a TV show and embed that chunk on your site? Features like this will be part of the new marketing paradigm — “viral”, word-of-mouth microchunking to build traffic and users.

[7(AVC blog on the future of media)]http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2005/11/the_future_of_m.html

[6(Wikipedia on cut and paste)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut_and_paste

[5(AdamKinneys Channel 9 page)]http://channel9.msdn.com/Niners/AdamKinney

[4(Microchunked excerpt from Vista UI video)]http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=114694&pvrid=5

[3(Channel 9 post on Looking at Windows Vista's user interface AERO)]http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=114694

[2(Clipster screencast)]http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=126227

[1(About Channel 9)]http://channel9.msdn.com/about.aspx