The Jing Project is something I have been meaning to talk about for awhile. It's from the folks at TechSmith, who make the fantastic SnagIt and Camtasia products for screen saving and making online movies and such. Jing does the same thing, but is a lot easier to use. Here's how it works.
Once you install it on your computer, a little yellow sphere sits at the top of your screen (or the other four sides, wherever you want to put it). Let's say you're visiting a website and want to quickly capture something you see there -- or you're chatting with someone by IM, and want to show them something on your computer. Just click the Jing button, then the Capture button, and you can easily highlight whatever's on your screen. Jing then gives you the option of creating an image or video out of it. If you just want a screen shot, click Image, and you can add annotations to it if you want -- arrows, boxes, text, etc.
Next comes the cool part. Once you're done with your image or movie, you can either Save the file to your computer, or Share it. If you choose to share it, the file is uploaded to a website, and you get a special URL that you can send to others. Here's an example: I created a short videocast demonstrating how easy it is to customize your Excel 2007 button bar -- it's nothing special, but the videocast took about 40 seconds, and uploading it took about another 30 seconds. So in just over a minute I created and shared a video with anyone on the Internet. Cool, huh?