One of our photojournalists here at Channel 8 recently asked me about sharing video on the Web, so I started looking into the latest options.

You're probably already familiar with a few of the many free photo-sharing sites out there like Flickr, Photobucket and Picasa. Each has its charms and any would be a good starting point for managing still images.

Video clips are another matter entirely, for a wide variety of reasons.

FORMAT: There are an alphabetic United Nations of digital video formats out there, including MPEG, WMV, AVI and MOV. (For some reason, the world seems to have standardized on JPG format for most digital photos.)

PARAMETERS: Will that be 4:3 or 16:9? 200 x 150 pixels or 800 x 600? How much compression? Stereo or mono? Standard definition? High def?

FILE SIZE: Wow, digital video files can be BIG!

All of these have been impediments to developing a useful video sharing site, but YouTube showed that with some clever software engineering, it can be (relatively) easy to upload a wide variety of video formats, which are then transcoded into a universal playback medium (Flash video) for distribution to the masses.

All of this would not have been possible, of course, without the high speed Internet connections which have become commonplace and relatively inexpensive.

Last year, jumpcut debuted, adding a new dimension to online videos—online editing.

If you're already registered with Yahoo, it's a snap to log in to jumpcut (which was recently gobbled up by the same company that made Mark Cuban a billionaire). From there, it's a simple matter of clicking the "upload" button and finding the file you'd like to send to the service.

Jumpcut (which gets its name from a disconcerting montage of images) recognizes just about anything you can throw at it (including still photos and audio files), although I'm still having a problem playing back some video files I uploaded earlier today.

Now the fun begins. Click the EDIT button on a video clip window and you'll see a simple but remarkably sophisticated video editing window pop up in your browser. You can mark in and out points, add transitions, add background music—even have jumpcut add the "Ken Burns effect," slowly zooming in and out of existing content.

When you're satisfied with your creation, save it for others to see. Help them find it on jumpcut by adding descriptive keywords and a brief summary.

Once your masterpiece is found, you may never see it the same way again. That's because jumpcut users are empowered to hit the REMIX button and do their own editing to create something new.

Even with a fast connection, it can still take a while to upload a clip to jumpcut, and—as I found out—there are still head-scratching problems that can keep your video from playing back.

But this is a cool idea that brings a new level of interactivity to moving pictures. It's not likely to replace YouTube as a primary source for online video, but jumpcut is an easy way to share, collaborate, and learn about video editing.

If you want to practice, let's see what you can do with this week's edition of Computer Corner which is available on jumpcut.

Our pals at Google recently came up with a little something they like to call Google Moon .

If you've used Google Maps, you'll be entirely comfortable with Google Moon's simple interface.

It simply plots America's six manned landing spots on our lunar neighbor and lets you use the familiar Google Maps tools to move around and even to zoom in.

Just don't zoom in too far, or you will see revealed NASA's long-hidden secret about the moon's true composition.

It was an iconic moment of the 20th century: Neil Armstrong's first step on the moon on July 20, 1969.

Nearly everyone remembers Armstrong's slightly garbled audio transmission accompanied by a shadowy, ghost-like black-and-white TV image relayed 239,000 miles from the lunar surface and then flashed around the world.

But as primitive as that picture was, the astronauts were also toting some sophisticated film cameras capable of producing still images that would put HDTV to shame.

So now, almost four decades later, technicians are getting canisters of film out of the deep freeze at the Johnson Space Center in Houston and scanning them to produce the best possible digital copies of the original negatives and transparencies.

And these 20,000 photos will soon no longer be the exclusive domain of a small group of researchers, because they are being added to the online Apollo Image Archive.

NASA, Arizona State University and the Lunar Planetary Institute have teamed up to open up the space agency's image vault to the general public.

The resulting photos are nothing short of stunning. Every detail of every crater, right down to the grains of lunar soil can be seen in the images, which are being made available at several quality levels. A single uncompressed photo can be 1,300 megabytes or more—that's about two full CDs of data.

For casual browsers, less detailed but still very high quality images are available (screensavers, anyone?) and a simple interface lets you browse available photos before downloading.

The Apollo Image Library is a revelation for those of us who probably won't be able to travel to our orbiting neighbor.

And it will be a gold rush for the skeptics who still believe that the lunar landings were all a hoax staged in a secret government studio.

Stay tuned; it's estimated that technicians will be scanning new Apollo images and adding them to the site for the next three years.

Watch Computer Corner every week on News 8 Midday at noon, or online any time.

E-mail askwalt@wfaa.com