Announced Tuesday at
DEMO,
SplashCast is a Portland, Oregon start-up bringing a new publishing platform to the masses. Users create "channels" - a collection of audio clips, photos, video clips, text, or an RSS feed of content, which you can share or embed into your blog. The content is presented in slide show format and you have the option to include background music. As far as content goes, either upload your own, or you can pull photos and video directly off Flickr and YouTube, respectively.
I think that this is a really ambitious but really cool idea - it provides a place where user-generated content can be user-rebroadcast and reach a broader audience. Instead of people nibbling away at single videos on YouTube, or single photos on Flickr, they can bring it all together into one easy to digest kibble of media. It's like a simple to use mash up interface.
The one thing that concerns me is that it doesn't seem to have any controls in relation to copyrights. There's a cute warning when you go to upload media which says, "We don't allow copyright infringement, porn, or hateful stuff." but that seems pretty weak. I can only assume that they are monitoring uploaded content, which seems like a daunting task when faced with policing user-generated content. It would be cool if it endorsed Creative Commons licensing, or was able to detect CC content. Also, the entire interface is Flash based, which can be a turn off for some folks. It's also not as flexible as I would have expected (I can't specify a Podcast RSS feed, for example). All my gripes aside, it looks like a cool concept and will be interesting to see where it heads.
[Via PodTech.net]
