The mob is coming for you

It’s a pyrrhic victory when I find a cool new tech tool: more fun to be had but also more ways to procrastinate. Still, that doesn’t stop me from adding new sites to my diet:

Mobdub.com is a new (beta) startup where users add live captions to videos. You click on the video while it’s playing (say 39 seconds in) to add a caption, a relevant factoid or link and the next user sees your caption as a cartoon speech bubble embedded in the video, 39 seconds into the clip. For now, the clips on the site are all election related, but eventually–the founder tells me–there will be more diverse content. Other plans include sharing the software with other video sites, so that videos on YouTube! or hulu.com will have “dubbing” too.

When I showed MobDub to my sister, she thought it was a cool cross between Wikipedia and YouTube!. But when I saw it, the first thing I thought of was VH1’s PopUp Video. And anything that recalls ’80s music is in my good books.