Flickr, as planned, has partnered with Picnik to bring online editing of photos to its users. Interesting that Yahoo went for a partnership than purchasing the company outright or developing its own editing program. Flickr's George Oates says, "Rather than Flickr diverting from our speciality to enter a realm we had no (particular) expertise in, the thought of a partnership seemed much more sensible." Which would make sense if Yahoo didn't own Jumpcut, a site which provides online video-editing tools. [Flickr Blog]

Mitt Romney's campaign is airing a user-generated advertisement, solicited from users of Yahoo's YouTube-like Jumpcut service, for the Republican presidential candidate. This is, of course, a refreshing change from politicians passing lobbyist-generated bills. [Advertising Age]

While video giant YouTube stays indie, the mob of smaller video sharing services is selling out, one by one (Grouper to Sony, for example). Today, video mixing service Jumpcut announced that Yahoo bought it, celebrating with a cute video, remixable like all vids on the service.

The point of schwag (and the reason the Valley is buried in it) is to remind a consumer of an otherwise ethereal product or service. The less physical (or popular) the thing the schwag markets, the more the burden of cost falls on the schwag giver. (This is why Apple can sell its t-shirts while, say, Browster.com must give them away.)

Foosball games in the dot-com-heavy South Park neighborhood don't mean there's a bubble — it'll be a bubble when a San Francisco startup has room for ping-pong tourneys. But it still felt like 1993 (for those of us who weren't still in grade school) at the offices of Jumpcut.com today. A team from the online-video-editing startup battled the guys from Valleyschwag (the schwag-magazine division of web-dev company Rubyred Labs, which lives across the street). It was a foosball tournament for the ages — or at least for the weekend.