AOL Debuts Bluestring at TechCrunch40

Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski is blogging from TechCrunch40 in San Francisco. Technical difficulties at the conference site prevent him from live-blogging, so he summarized this demo of AOL’s new Bluestring “personal media service,” which the company says will enable users to upload photos, music and video files to the Web and create multimedia shows to post and share.

AOL’s new product is called Bluestring. The demo begins with a few rhetorical questions: “We’re here today to talk about your memories … Why do multimedia memories matter? … How do we share and preserve them?”

The presentation includes comments on the proliferation of media sites and media storage and the need for a single application that unifies access to all of them and connects all its users.

According to AOL, Bluestring enables you to upload and store your digital media and to access digital media stored elsewhere–on Flickr, for example. It’s available as a Web and desktop application.

The demo shows how the application involves the association of digital music files with a slideshow to create a “show” that is then shared with a friend, who can add new photo and video assets and ultimately publish it to a blog.

Bluestring went live earlier this afternoon and is free.