This week over at Wikispaces we launched support for embedded media. This means you can put YouTube videos, Google Calendars, Odeo podcasts, Flickr slideshows, and just about anything else you can imagine in your wiki page.

Now you might be thinking: “well, duh - I can do that with any wiki that supports HTML.” But we chose to do embedded media in a smarter way.

If you’re just pasting HTML in your wiki page, you’ll see something like this when editing your page:

<embed
style=”width:400px; height:326px;”
id=”VideoPlayback”
type=”application/x-shockwave-flash”
src=”http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-8224040487342942414″>

Not so pretty, and really confusing for other people who might be editing your page. Put ten of these on a page, and you’ve got a real mess.

Here’s what the same embed looks like on Wikispaces:

[[media type=”google” key=”-8224040487342942414″]]

YouTube?

[[media type=”youtube” key=”UnFV-fvgOu0″]]

Nice and clean. Paste in a URL instead of the embedded HTML code and we’ll convert it automatically into the correct tag. Paste in something we don’t yet understand and we’ll add it to our database for the future.

Long-time Wikispaces user Sean FitzGerald has a great demo page showing what happens when you unleash media on wiki pages. Awesome!