Update - 11-11-05 - OK I haven't received one email from you guys - is it that you don't have time? That you can't email movies from your phone? That you think your movies aren't good enough? :-)

No seriously, just shoot some video and email it to "demo@vemobile.com" and then wait to get the SMS message back, retrieve it, and email me at "lisa@lisarein.com" with the Video ID number. -- thanks!

I've been messing around with Type Pad's new video upload feature, courtesy of Video Egg, but my friends close by with camera phones are having trouble emailing their videos to me...

So I'm just going to put out a general call to my readers to please email their camera phone video to demo@vemobile.com, and then email me the "Video ID" they will SMS back to you. Then I can enter it into my test blog interface. (See my test blog here to bring up the clip.)

So far, I'm both excited and discouraged by this video upload implementation. It's definitely exciting for Type Pad to offer this kind of service -- a packaged blogging and video upload service.
It's the right idea, for sure. But there are a few annoying details of the implementation.

For instance, only clips of two minutes or less are permitted (which greatly reduces the probability of my using the service, to be honest), but that's not my main concern, which is this; I have a problem with the use of Flash as the delivery format, because it effectively kills any hope for reuse of the video footage.

In addition, Video Egg is compressing the video before it wraps it up in Flash, and the effect it has on the video is quite significant.

Check out the original version of this clip (Wendy Seltzer from Foo Camp 2003). Then compare it to the VideoEgged version on my typepad blog.

Nevertheless, this development is quite significant, and I'm looking forward to testing out the Mobile upload feature. I had to borrow a PC from a friend, since Type Pad's Video Egg plug-in doesn't work on the Macintosh platform yet. There are some features I haven't tested yet, like the Digital Camera upload, or the Mobile Phone upload, which I hope you're going to help me sort out today and tomorrow (while I've got my friend's PC laptop close by).

Thanks in advance for sending me some great videos!

lisa