Life as an Artificial Lifeform

Rising to prominence among the home video editors through its Scanner Darkly Remix contest that has been reported all over the place it gains popularity about as fast as YouTube did just 3 month ago. Now this in itself wouldn´t be worth reporting here but there are some ramifications that go along this that makes it a much more special case compared to the relatively straight forward YourTube.
First of all it gives all a new meaning to the "remixing is active consumption" metapher as it basically lets you remix all and every movie on the system inside the browser without further software and just a few mouseclicks all in the "easier is not possible" iMovie interface. So armchair cutters can now remix the wedding video of one guy with a porn scene and publish it on their site (I would think that there might be rules as its a "bussiness" and not a wild free internet website but its worth a try anyways). This puts YouTube with its closed you can never upload it to your iPod or do anything else with the watermarked blurry rererecompressed video concept in the backseat. Not only are the videos not watermarked they seem to be raw converted judging the quality of some (upload raw uncompressed and its compressed only once) hey and you can download them and without any investment in expensive hardware that delivers you the only software amateurs seem to be able to use sufficently these days (read the title) you can roll your own or destroy others. Very cool indeed.
But what is even more important about this - and forget about all this videosharing for a sec - is thats a fully functioning editing program (well almost) inside the browser. Well well that is what everyone wants - making software that runs without OSes in the browsers on some distant server - seeing that happening so fast surprises me a bit and makes me utterly scared - think of renting software by the hour and such things that are possible with that kind of technology. The software industry wants that - that has been stated more then once - it would put the death knell into software piracy without any way to escape and would make sure that all those monolpolies are nicely guarded against competition. Of course this is all a bit off - but that video editing is one of the first implementations of this strategy - even before word processing or spreadsheets (oh no google is supposed to make a spreadsheet I just read today somewhere) got there is a bit worrying as it demands much more data-throughput and processing power. Interesting times to come.

Link to JumCut

PS: Oh no they have the same green as the Lifeform - no I didn´t know before....