September 12, 2007 9:03 AM

Brave New World Apparently Not So Brave After All

Talk about lame.

Yahoo's Democratic debate later this week has been billed as "the first-ever online-only presidential mashup." But on the eve of the debate, Yahoo has decided not to support citizen remixing of the footage -- reducing the once-bold experiment to little more than a fancy online version of an on-demand cable television offering...Yahoo said as recently as Friday that it would upload the raw footage from the online debate to its own web-based video editing service Jumpcut, to make it easy for the footage to be spliced and diced as citizen editors saw fit. "Users will be able to create their own mashups and post the footage onto their websites afterwards -- that's for the hardcore fans who want to engage with this video," spokesman Brian Nelson told Wired News.

But on Monday, Nelson called back to say the company had changed its mind. Instead the "mashup page" will only lets citizens pick and choose which candidates they want to hear from on particular issues, by pointing and clicking on a web interface.