You could say we were less than enthused when writing about the launch of Graspr last September. The nascent instructional video site captured our attention because it was led by an ex-Yahoo VP, but it didn’t really do anything to stand out from the crowd.

It turns out we weren’t the only ones to notice the service needed a little something extra. Graspr has shifted its strategy away from developing a destination site for instructional videos and towards an aggregation and syndication network for those videos. Along the way, it has also picked up $2.5 million in Series A funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and angels. And it’s rolled out a new design with additional functionality centered around what it’s calling “connected learning”.

Graspr now has a feed tool that pulls instructional videos from across the web and includes them in its repository of content. These videos fall into 17 categories such as home improvement, food and drink, sports and recreation, and crafts. They are then syndicated out to a network of publishers that want to compliment their existing content. About 200 such publishers have signed up during a closed beta period of the syndication service, although CEO Teresa Phillips thinks there are about 2,000 sites per category that would make good partners. These are mostly sites that provide text-based instructions and want to integrate more rich media into their offerings.

As for making money off this network, Graspr intends to run video overlays and split the revenue three ways between itself, the content producers, and the end publishers. There is also an opportunity for advertisers to sponsor video players and wrap them in their branding (apparently educational service companies are the most eager to build their brands in this manner). In the longer term, Phillips anticipates that product placement will become an increasingly important way for Graspr to monetize its videos.

Will the strategy succeed? It’s too early to tell, but if Brightcove is any indication, Graspr should resist setting its expectations too high. We hear that its syndication platform – albeit intended for a broader range of content – has been only a modest success. Perhaps Graspr will find that its publisher niche is particularly eager to integrate 3rd party video content – especially if that video can be monetized effectively.

Teresa Phillips, founder and CEO of Graspr and one-time Yahoo VP, says that “Graspr is not just another video site or social networking community.” I’m not so sure.

The company has granted me access to Graspr prior to its presentation at Demo this afternoon and its public unveiling later this evening. I’ve kicked the tires, and while Graspr explicitly claims to be “the social media and learning company with the Internet’s largest user-generated video showcase for instructional content,” the site could probably be rebranded for any other purpose involving video and members.

This would be totally fine if there didn’t already exist a good video social network for instructional content. But several good ones do exist, including 5min, eHow, Sclipo, SuTree, Expert Village, Instructables, and VideoJug.

To be sure, Graspr works well enough. Everything revolves around instructional videos, so in many ways its like YouTube, et al. In addition to simply browsing and viewing videos, users can jump to particular scenes within videos, add notes to video segments, view related videos, open supplementary files attached to videos, and participate in discussion threads and chat rooms attached to the videos.

On the social networking side of things, users can create profiles and make friends. Their profile pages show all of the videos they have contributed, any of which can be grouped into series.

I’m tempted to label Graspr YASN, but to be fair they will provide an online video editing tool, which helps to differentiate them (well, maybe not from YouTube itself). They also have an ad-revenue sharing scheme in place to incentivise the production of content. I only wish their were more innovative aspects to Graspr that could get me more excited about it.

Update: One of our readers, Tony Hirst, has designed a search interface to crawl all of the instructional video websites mentioned in this article. Check it out.