This is interesting: CNN.com will debut a new “clip-and-share” feature on the web livestream of tonight’s first presidential debate. It’ll feature DVR-like controls that’ll let you select any moment and embed video of it on another website:

… clip-and-share makes everyone a CNN editor. Users can quickly fast-forward and rewind to the perfect start and end points to create powerful video clips, straight from the live feed. Clips can be shared with friends and followers directly through Facebook and Twitter. Once shared to these social circles, users can watch back the moments and create a direct URL or embed code for blogs and websites, and share their must-see moments via email, LinkedIn, or Google+.

Promo video here.

One of the big stories of the past decade on the web has been the normalization of sharing video. What was once a messy mishmash of warring codecs mostly got sorted out by Flash and HTML5. Pipes got bigger to handle larger file sizes. YouTube built the common platform for uploading and, critically, embedding. But text still holds one big sharability edge: the ability to copy and paste excerpts, to blockquote the one key paragraph in a longer work. This is just one tool on one site for one set of events, but I suspect it’s an area where we’ll see a lot of progress in the coming year or two.