Its not the first video-editing app for the iPad, but Avid Studio, which was released earlier today, stands out as one of the more sophisticated offerings out there. Its interface will be familiar to anybody who uses Avid's desktop video-editing suite, or even products like iMovie or Final Cut Pro X.

At the end of the day, any professional-quality video editing is going to be done on a desktop suite like Avid Pro or Final Cut Pro X. Avid realizes this and, in addition to Facebook, email and YouTube exports, it lets you push projects to their desktop application to take things to the next level.

But if you have basic or even somewhat sophisticated editing needs, this app will do it. For second generation iPads that come equipped with a camera, it offers a great way to shoot a few basic angles of video, cut it up and patch it all together on the go.

Very seldom is the raw video you shoot on an iOS or Android device ready for prime time once the record button stops. The ability to edit it directly on the iPad offers a nice middle ground between uploading junk and importing everything to the desktop for more extensive modifications.

At $4.99, Avid Studio for iPad is much more affordable than its desktop counterpart, although clearly Avid hopes you'll spring for that too if you like the tablet version. The company plans on raising the iOS app's price to $7.99 in a few weeks.

Previously, if a YouTube user wanted to change a video, it had to be edited with other software and re-uploaded, meaning all the views, comments and links would be lost. Not only does built-in editing offer a much more convenient workflow, these basic features could probably replace outside video editing software altogether for everyday users.

YouTube video pages now have an 'Edit video' button, which brings up the editing tools. The controls operate with simple sliders, and the window below displays a preview. In a cute touch, there's also an automatic color correction button labeled 'I'm Feeling Lucky,' just like the button on the Google search page that takes you straight to a result page Google thinks you want.

When you click 'Save,' YouTube begins processing the edits, but you still have the option to revert to the original if the edits are not quite right. You can also save the edits as a new version for comparison. There is a policy, though, that 'popular videos' - those with over 1,000 views - and third-party content can only be saved as a new video. In other words, you can't change a video that has become a real eyeball-magnet.

Native light video editors, like Apple's iMovie, offer more features and power, but for everyday YouTube use, these tools ought to save users plenty of time and effort (and keep their eyeballs on YouTube.com, too).

Do these features look useful to you? Let us know in the comments.

The upcoming design called "Vector" has been in use over the past six months by a group of 500,000 beta testers. Included in the update are changes like simplified navigation, a relocated search box, clutter reduction and even an updated Wikipedia logo. Also, all English Wikipedia users will soon be able to create PDFs and printed books from Wikipedia articles, a service previously available only to logged-in users.

However, the most interesting change is how Wikipedia is making the page edit functions easier. A new toolbar will be provided which lets editors more easily insert links and tables, and an included cheatsheet will help users access the most commonly used functions.

These editing changes launching next month are only the beginning, notes Naoko Komura on the Wikimedia blog. Later this year, the site will see even more radical revamps to the editing process. This includes the following:

• Reducing the amount of wiki code users see in the edit system and making it possible to change data in tables and information boxes through simple forms.
• Cleaning up the edit page itself, to use more understandable language and get rid of confusing clutter.
• Providing a new outline tool to navigate a long article while you're editing it.

Wikipedia Needs More Editors

Now the question is whether or not these changes will encourage more people to actually edit the online encyclopedia because, surprisingly, few users actually do.

Wikipedia is often heralded as a shining example of how there's power in the "wisdom of the crowds," a phrase that implies how a diverse collection of individuals can be more accurate than individuals or even experts. However, the dirty little secret about the supposedly "crowd-edited" online encyclopedia is that, even though anyone and everyone can edit it, few do so. In fact, only 1% of Wikipedia users are responsible for half of the site's edits. Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, has even been quoted as saying that the site is really written by a community, "a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers."

Given these statistics, it's no surprise that Wikipedia wants to make some changes. Recent reports point to slowed growth, a downward trend that may be partly to blame on the increasingly complex editing process, according to some experts.

Dr. Ed H Chi, a scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center in California, told the Telegraph that the site had become a "more exclusive place", where only a handful of the most experienced editors were responsible for editing and maintaining the site.

In other words, Wikipedia became a site that wasn't representing the "wisdom of the crowds" anymore, but the "wisdom of an elite group." That in, turn, may have caused the slowdown. Over the past several years, the number of new articles per day has dropped from 2,200 in July of 2007 to 1,300 today.

Is It Too Late? Or Just in Time?

By simplifying the editing process, Wikipedia could potentially reverse this trend -  at least, that's likely what they're hoping will occur. According to the Q&A on the changes, the organization is aware of these very issues:

When knowledgeable people cannot participate in editing Wikipedia because they find it too confusing or difficult to edit articles, it is a serious problem that undermines the potential quality, breadth and depth of the content that we can offer to you [...] When it was first developed, the software running Wikipedia was considered reasonably user-friendly. By today's standards, it is not as streamlined nor user-friendly as other software.

But has the organization waited too long? Have mainstream Internet users already given up on being a part of the editing process and are now happy just to read? We'll know soon enough. Rollouts begin in April, starting first with media repository Wikimedia Commons and then followed by Wikipedia itself later that month.

• TextFlow is still an AIR application. If you were a TextFlow user before, nothing critical has changed in this regard. Most of TextFlow's competitors are online-only.
• Although you can invite people to edit a document online, they basically get their own view of the document. Once they are finished editing, they would click share to push those changes back to the master document. In other words, this isn't live collaboration.
• Collaborators that you send an email invite to will be able to work on a web-based version of TextFlow that just supports editing the current document.

Going back through the TextFlow blog, it appears that they have addressed our initial complaint of only being able to successfully edit limited document length files, as well as a number of Microsoft Word document compatibility fixes among other changes.

Overall, we think TextFlow is moving in the right direction, and sticking with a workflow idea that works really well with certain people's method of collaborating on documents. TextFlow comes in a business edition at $99 per user/year and a free personal edition.

Here's where the gooseGrade WordPress plugin comes in. Extending gooseGrade's philosophy of harnessing the power of the Internet to help catch and correct these issues, this plugin closes the loop on WordPress stand-alone blogs, allowing submitted corrections to be seen from within the WordPress dashboard. The corrections list is very Wikipedia-like, showing the original block of text on the left, and the corrected block on the right. One more click and the edit is committed to the post and you are done. Brilliant!

If you have a hosted WordPress blog, and you weren't a newspaper writer or editor in a previous life, we recommend you check out the gooseGrade plugin. And keep in mind that gooseGrade has a code snippet you can drop in to your site's HTML if you use something other than WP, like Blogger or TypePad.