Via George Kelly, just came across TechSmith's t he jing project, an experiment that seems to take the beloved snagit web capture tool for images and video and turn it into a web app, with hosting, and then easily share what you create. There's a blog and lots of how to, and a note on uploading jing captures directly to flickr (clearly this is one of their success metrics, flickr presence) and lots of calls for community input.

(Note: From a tech perspective, jing is rich because it saves data as an SWF, which means you can embed it using the SWF object, a small Javascript file used for embedding Macromedia Flash content. )

Susan says: What particularly strikes me here is not the product, which is useful, but the smart--and integrated marketing approach. Some of the themes I see that others would do well to replicate:

• Offer something for free to build usage and participation
• Engage the community in refining the project; solicit lots of feedback
• Informal and engaging tone to the marketing
• Treat the audience as one, developers and consumers
• Celebrate the team, suggest authenticity

Ian Kennedy @ MyBlogLog is doing similar things with the news/lifestreaming feature just added to that service(see my page and understand how similar it feels to friendfeed) , but he's more on the one man band tip; you have the sense that the much smaller TechSmith team has carved out support for Jing that MyBlogLog can only dream of.