Harold Jarche via Twitter pointed me to this video with Jay Cross. As he points out on Informal Learning Blog, it’s a demonstration of “direct to the cloud” — nobody had to save the video and then upload it.

Sun’s Charles Beckham says this feature means that making your video available becomes a kind of utility — encoding and streaming happen on the fly. (Since the video ends up on a server, it’s not exactly true that there’s no file — but it is true that you don’t have to worry about the file.)

I believe it’s the voice of Sun’s Karie Willyerd asking about the next level of applying this. She’s addressing what I think of as the lining around the cloud. Honestly, my first reaction to this demo was dismay: “Dear lord — now millions of people can crank unedited stream-of-consciousness and call it ‘online learning.'”

But nothing in this technology requires that you just shoot your mouth off, just as (Edward Tufte notwithstanding) nothing about PowerPoint requires that you bore people to death). As Beckham says toward the end of the video, “The real expert who can use Camtasia — knock it out.” I take that to mean, hey, we’ve got this tool to make it easy to publish video. Whether it’s boring video or pretty-good video or transformative video is up to you. “If we have to teach ’em how to produce something, it’s a bug…. all we care about is the IP and the brain cells of everybody who works here.”