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The new tools don’t always make sense right away and I tend to be a bit hesitant rather than “rah rah rah” check this out.   And if I don’t get it, I tend to put it on the back burner for a while and then come back later with a fresh viewpoint.  In fact, with delicious, one of my most popular tags is “comebacktolater” because I can see possible potential in the site but am not able to put my finger on just what that potential is.

And it is important at times to marinade.  To take the time to figure it out and not put a stamp of approval on a tool that perhaps should not carry that stamp.  My teachers depend a lot on my help and trust that when I present to them, it is tried and true and not just a whim.  So, it it good sometimes, to not rush into the “newest and best” until I can say for sure that it is.

If there's one bothersome side effect of getting a long Web video sent to you, it's getting to the good parts. In some cases, the part your friend wanted you to see could be a few minutes in, and you might not have the time (or patience) to sit through the rest. A service called Splicd fixes this, by letting anyone drop in a YouTube video URL, then pick the start and end point.

It's not a very pretty implementation, but it works. You've got to manually plug in the start and end times, which requires skipping around to the part you want in YouTube, then heading back to Splicd. Once it's worked it through, you get a permalinked page that you can share with friends.

What's nice about this system is that it doesn't require extra time to re-encode the video; when you've put in those changes it's instantaneous. The downside to that is that the finished product cannot be shared outside of Splicd's site.