I’ve been playing with the video clipping service, Redlasso. I got to meet Jim McCusker, the CTO, at Podcamp Philly and have stayed in touch since. It was good to see much of the team at Blog World Expo.

The essence of Redlasso for bloggers is that it indexes and makes searchable broadcast media. By making it searchable, it’s a wonderful way to find content that has aired over broadcast media. Taking it to the next level, they make it clippable so that you can capture exactly what you want and get unique embed codes for that clip.

For content owners, their content generally becomes unmonetizable after it airs. Redlasso seeks to provide a means for content owners to monetize their content, while providing content producers/syndicators, such as bloggers, a way to utilize content that otherwise is difficult to integrate without a lot of work.

Though Redlasso is still private, it’s been really quite nice to see the product develop from a prototype to a useful tool. As recently as this morning, I spoke with Jim and he is promising new functionality being rolled in.

As an example, I searched the Redlasso site for Blog World Expo specific to Fox News (I know they did a segment a few days ago), and I clipped it for display here:

There are still some problems. For one, search results only go back two weeks. This is a bit limiting. Also, the search does not seem to pull up very relevant searches. For instance, typical phrase searches requires quotes around the phrase (e.g. “Blog World Expo” in Google will pull up results containing Blog World Expo while simply searching for Blog World Expo will pull up search results containing blog or world or expo). This functionality does not seem to exist yet in Redlasso making the location of relevant clips difficult at best. Also, there seems to be lag between voice and lips moving. That’s distracting.

The player, while a vast improvement over the Windows Media only player in the prototype still is difficult to use. For instance, the clipping mechanism is small and should be easier to use. Screenshot included.

Finally, they need to open this up and get it out of private beta. More eyes need to be on this thing and while the concept and technology is fantastic (gotta love phoenetic search!), additional eyes will give it more traction and leg room.

Follow @redlasso on Twitter for updates and… request an invite. ;)