Big ups to Tom for pointing me toward Mojiti, which allows you to to all sorts of nifty overlays atop preexisting Web video. Among other things, that enables the functionality I’d pleaded for in the vlog below to provide hyperlinks within a video, much as a textual blog post would have. But what’s actually even more interesting, to my mind, is that Mojiti creates a “community set” for each video in its system, effectively turning each into a sort of Wiki. I realize this would primarily be used for a mix of drawing attention to flaws and holes in my arguments and drawing pairs of testicles on my video-chin, but I’m still seeing some interesting potential here. I’d likely keep the locked, private overlay-set as the default one, and imagine most vloggers would do the same, but the communal one remains as an alternative, and might enable a form of collaborative annotation that would provide vlogging with richness and density, incorporating the dispersed expertise of the whole viewing community back into the original video. For instance, commenter Laure offered a link to a site for documentary filmmakers with lots of useful information about fair use in copyright law. So I decided to add a hotlinked subtitle pointing there to the segment of the video where I mentioned fair use. With the “community” set, viewers can just do that sort of things themselves. (Though minor quibble, Mojti: I can import from the community set to a private one; why not vice-versa?)

Update: Now, that’s what I call responsive! Within 48 hours of this post, I got an email from someone at Mojiti letting me know they’d added the functionality I’d asked for. So now you can add your own links and commentary to a community set. As an experiment, next time I do a vlog (which is to say, when there’s a topic other than vlogging itself that seems conducive to the form) I’ll post the community spot to see whether what people have to add, and just switch it to the locked one if it gets vandalized or whatever.