It’s like YouTube. But nerdier.

Echo360 recently introduced version 5.4 of their software. Best software release ever. Seriously. It’s washing my car and picking up my dry-cleaning right now.

OK. It might not be that good but it is pretty nice. One of the options it introduced is the ability to embed a recording (an Echo as they call it) in a blog. I can easily see a number of faculty wanting to do something similar if they wanted to show content on their professional blogs or if they ran a blog with Sakai and just wanted to re-use some content.

The one rather obvious catch is that the content has to be publicly accessible. Duh. If you want everyone to see it, everyone must be able to see it. Not sure how that is easily accomplished in our existing environment. Faculty have their classes recorded and can create their own content but they don’t have rights to copy and move that content around. Also, I’m not sure if you can get any real analytics about who’s been watching the video since it’s anonymous.

Anyway, the ability to do this at all is pretty neat and could have some potential use cases in academia. Nice to see it at all.