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Starting today, CNN will allow all users to embed videos from CNN on their blogs or social network profiles. With this, CNN is following a growing trend among news organizations like MSNBC, FoxNews, and CBS. Judging from the wording of the announcement, CNN is clearly hoping to see some of its clips go viral, and with the political season in the U.S. heating up in the run-up to the November election, they might just have chosen the right time to enable this feature.

The embeddable viewer is pretty standard and currently only allows playing one single clip at 384x216. We weren't able to determine if CNN is restricting this service by geography, but at least our Canadian friends have reported that they could play play the embedded videos without a problem.

As Erik Berlin also points out, offering embeddable video should be a no-brainer for content producers. Indeed, one could argue that the success of entertainment sites like Hulu can at least be partly attributed to the fact that their videos can be embedded. Among some of the recent converts to embeddable video are the Internet outpost for South Park, which is making clips from all episodes of the popular animated show available for embedding. MSNBC enabled embedding in January this year and both CBS and ABC announced the availability of embeddable clips from news and entertainment programs.