Category Archive

A slow project this one. Ask as many people as I can remember to do when I’ve got my camera with me to answer a “simple” question - “What is the web for?”

I tried it out at the Tuttle Club a few weeks ago. This is what came out of the mouths of some of the Smartest People in Social Media (TM)

So there are two ways I want to take this forward. I want to do it with a more diverse group of people, and I want to edit a bunch of them together in a watchable way. Your thoughts on how to do this are welcome.

I have more. I will release them. Soon.

Thayer asked for some tips on getting video from the HG10 in suitable form for uploading to YouTube or Blip.tv

Please do not take this as a definitive way of doing things - I AM FREQUENTLY WRONG! - However, it seems to have worked for me so far, though I had to bodge around for a bit, so there may well be better, easier ways to do it, so please let me know if you find them. Oh and I’m doing it on a PC running XP - iMovie doubtlessly cleans your shoes for you while it’s speedily encoding and compressing.

First off, I installed all of the software that came with the camera - I can’t remember what all of it was, but basically I chucked everything at it.

Then this is what I do. You get files off the camera in .mts format. I start up the Corel Ulead DVD Movie Factory and create a new project. Since we’re just going to export to another type of file I don’t think it matters whether you go for a DVD project or a AVCHD project so just choose whichever one you think goes best with your eyes.

Click on the Add Video Files icon (film strip) at the top left hand corner. Choose a file and then click on the Export Selected Clips icon about half way down. (You can process more than one clip at a time by the way - if you’ve got a bunch to do)

I choose Customize…

In the file save as dialog that comes up I give it a name and change the type to .avi.

Then click on Options. I scale the frame size down to 720 x 540 on the General Tab and on the AVI tab I choose the DivX Codec with standard settings.

Then click Save. Close down Movie Factory. Fire up Windows Movie Maker or your favourite video editing program and import the .avi file for editing. With these settings the .avi is about one-third the size of the .mts file.

You may find that different codecs with different settings give you better results but having stumbled over something that works well enough, I’m not going to start messing around.

Not much to see here, but I’m glad that this was a little less painful than my previous foray into HD.

For those not intimately following my every move, the simple version is, my camera broke, a nice friend lent me one, I used it at BarCamp but screwed aspect ratios, nice friend needed to have camera back, nice people at canoncamerabuzz (well, nice lady in particular - “Miss Jones”) said yup ok popsie, you can be in our review programme and have a Canon HG10 to play with.

This is what it spits out pretty much with all the defaults.

More over the weekend and coming month where I’ll be trying to stretch it a bit.

Before Christmas, I was introduced to Gerry Griffin CEO of Skill-Pill a mobile offering that provides downloadable and mobile-optimised, video shorts - “pills” for you to take when you want to brush up on something. Not quite Joe 90 and his electrode specs more like multimedia Cliffs Notes.

The main focus I think is on selling into larger organisations to be part of their development efforts but some are made publically available too. You can view the latest offering on Working with Americans online or download it to your phone by pointing your mobile browser at this page.

I don’t know. What do you think (of the content and the concept? I know I have American readers - how good is this?

mmm….massage…. and it works off a USB port (power only I think - but would be cool if it could receive messages too…)

If you need help not getting things done, feel free to use this in any way - I’ve made it cc-by so you can do what you will with it as long as I get a smidgen of blame.

David Lynch wants kids to learn TM in schools - I wish I could embed this, but I’ll have to send you via a link instead.

.

(disclosure, this vid was shot for friction.tv by my erstwhile partner in crime Debbie Davies - how *does* she find them?)

Anyway, puts me in mind of this…

and of course this…

Yesterday, I saw Loïc make a plea for people to come in & make video quickly to show to a journalist, Erika Brown, who he was talking to over breakfast.

So we piled in with gusto, naturally. This is not new. I’ve seen people ask for irc contributions, blog comments, blog posts using tags, tweets usually from the stage of a conference or a demo they’re doing somewhere, to show the network effect - that the net is alive and full of people and doing stuff all the time. I still think it’s cool.

Apparently later (according to Loïc’s daily summary) she was asking why we do this stuff - what’s in it for us. Good question. Don’t know the answer, but don’t think I’m not thinking about it. (BTW - I worry though that when someone outside the group asks “what’s in it for the people in this group?” they’re actually asking “and how can I exploit it in some way?” ie “What’s in this phenomenon for me?” but that’s a whole other lifetime’s blogging)

I have been thinking though about what happens when they try to scale seesmic up. Right now, there are two interfaces essentially - one is the public timeline with every post in it (though it can be filtered for friends and for my vids too) and the other is twitter which announces new videos if the user has provided her twitter details. I’m following this by tracking</a “seesmic” in twitter, so I see everyone regardless of whether I follow them in twitter or not (keep up!) *and* I see every other reference to the word “seesmic” too. Clearly I’m obsessed.

Now this is something we’ve seen before. What starts as a little trickle, becomes a steady stream, becomes a mighty torrent of unmanageable information. Weblogs.com started out like this but was in stream/minor tributary mode when I first saw it. Ah me, I used to love to sit at audio.weblogs.com late in 2004, CTRL+F5′ing to see what was new. When I joined twitter about a year ago I had about 10 friends and some of them were in way different time zones - minutes would go by without an update - now I have it running in my im window and it’s like a constant ticker tape - in fact it’s now going too fast.

Seesmic will (probably) follow the same pattern in terms of the increase in the number and rate of contributions. What I’m interested in, is what happens when seesmic becomes like audio.weblogs.com today. Now at the beginning, although there were some podcast directories, audio.weblogs.com was the best place to go because you could see everything and everything was worth at least a glance at the title. So what happens when the public timeline is whizzing past as fast as weblogs.com? What about when my friends list whizzes as fast as twitter. Well, I’ll miss stuff, that’s for sure, I’m missing stuff on twitter and in my feed reader right now because I’m writing, but the other problem is that while twitter can be scanned, if I want to find out what a seesmers just said, I have to click and open a video. The only way I can see is RSS (with enclosures, I think too - gulp!). This is why I’ve made a feature request for (at least) my feed, a feed of my friends and a public timeline feed. I also want to see feeds for particular tags. We can’t see this metadata at the moment, but I’m filling it in (are you?). And then I want a big tag cloud so that I can follow the zeitgeist of seesmic and dip into a feed based on tags. So I’m expecting that I will then subscribe to certain feeds and go to seesmic from time to time to dip into stuff that I’m not subscribed to. Oy! I think I might like to keep seesmic down to a manageable little community of 150 diverse international shiny new toy freaks

Now, this brings us back to Erika’s question: “What’s in it for us?” Why do I do this? Why am I obsessed with shiny new toys like this? Because I like being part of this little group - just like podcasting was 3 years ago. And I want everyone to have the chance to have this experience. Why do I choose some and not others. Well a big differentiating factor is in the previous paragraph - I’ll repeat it - I made a feature request and I’m sure it will be considered and may get somewhere if it’s thought a good idea by the community. Why am I sure? Because I made the feature request that we should have voting on feature request, and it was implemented. So now we’re voting on what things we’d like to see. That’s what’s in it for me, a small bit of satisfaction that an idea I had sitting at a screen in London could ping around the world and get created before my very eyes *and* I believe that I’m not special, if it can happen to me, it can happen for everyone, if they want it.

No screenshot to go with this, can’t be arsed to edit - is there a skitch clone for Windows?

Just in case anyone hasn’t seen my big chopper yet:

Really enjoying “pre-alpha” access to seesmic.com the new kid on the lifestream block courtesy of Loïc LeMeur. It’s a closed group for the time being and feels nicely diverse and international which makes a good change from the usual West Coast dominance. Halley Suitt’s french cracks me up as much as it did at the first Les Blogs.

The basic premise is like twitter, only in video - there’s a public timeline of new clips. Some are long and dribbly, some are short and snappy. There are lots of tests and mumbling into mics and stuff - good wholesome early day play stuff.

What Loïc’s done that’s really smart is that the outputs can leak even though the actual application is not available beyond 150 of us. So I can share a URL with you - here’s me & my ukulele. In fact, when I post a new clip this happens automagically through my twitter stream as I’ve shared my details with them. His other masterstroke is to do a daily video summary - how hard its this and how much buzz does it generate? Why don’t more startups do it? Why am I not doing it?

There are 3 options for providing video - you can share a YouTube clip, you can record using a webcam, or you can supply a .flv file. My webcam stuff has been frustrating because I can’t get the sound to work particularly well. I sound as if I have a serious lisp - whereas you all know that I actually have quite a trivial little sibilance problem… The audio ain’t great from the great MacBook iSight unwashed either, so I’m imagining it has something to do with the encoding at seesmic’s end.

So the uke clip was an experiment in getting round this by making a quick video on my camcorder capturing straight to my hard disk, quick editing & encoding as .wmv, uploading to blip.tv and then taking the resulting .flv and uploading to seesmic. Any suggestions on shortcutting this that don’t involve me buying new hardware or software are welcomed - I haven’t had a good experience yet with Riva the .flv encoder that is supposed to do the job of converting from .wmv to .flv I want to be able to do it quickly - that’s kind of the point.

There are some annoying things in the interface still. Though they’re getting fixed by the hour. I just saw Loïc twitter for example that profile pics are now working properly and sure enough they are I had some initial difficulties because I chose a weird user name - it all got sorted very quickly and patiently by Johann the tech guy.

Also as it’s such early days I don’t know what should work and what shouldn’t. Of course I’m willing to put up with pretty much anything. I can’t get YouTube vids to work in the seesmic screen, I have to watch them on youtube.com and some .flv uploads have stalled for me too. The buffering settings seem to need tweaking - it doesn’t download enough before starting to play so that it stalls too frequently.

It brings home for me again that you have to use these things to really grok them. If you just see someone else’s outputs, whether it’s seesmic, twitter or blogs it’s quite difficult to understand what’s going on. Let’s hope it’s open for more people soon. The really interesting behaviours will emerge I’m sure when we’ve loads of people playing. We’re still regularly finding new applications for twitter for example and I’ve been on that for nearly a year.

I just love the Carmen blog from the English National Opera.

It’s exactly what I was talking about here

Well done to the folk at interesource who got it going, but super well done to the ENO people who seem to have taken to it as naturally as I’d hoped. I was really grateful to get to talk to John Berry a few weeks ago and hear his take - I came away understanding that ENO was an obvious place to do this - democratisation of access to opera is one of their cornerstones. We also talked about ‘bootstrapping’ online and offline relationships and I thought I saw a small lightbulb go on.

There’s a ton of cool video on the site - perhaps too many talking heads (but who am I to talk!) but some fantastic music and behind the scenes action. Go look.

I think it’s a great example of post-geek bloggery - as I’ve been saying for a while, make your own fly-on-the-wall documentary of what you’re doing rather than getting a crew in to follow you around and then stitch you up after the event.

When I’ve pitched this idea to other people, the perceived barriers have been (lack of) editorial control and shining the light on the creative process too early. I don’t know what the process has been for creating content here, but I can’t imagine that Sally Potter has had to get her blog approved by a committee every time she writes.

One suggestion - a more obvious place to find CC-licenced images for bloggers to use to illustrate their posts about you

Regular readers will remember Ms Debbie Davies who used to hang around the Perfect Path making snowmen and feeding the ducks. She was last seen here being stalked by Clangers.

Oh, but now she’s got a sensible job - helping people make videos like this one for friction.tv

Do go along and have your say on the hottest debate of the century so far. Should Minty The Pug (pictured) have to wear these ridiculous outfits? Are pugs about as close to humans as you can get? Go! Don’t leave your asinine comments here, take them with you and deposit them on friction.tv’s doorstep, then set them on fire and ring the doorbell, they’ll come out and stamp on your comments to put the fire out only to find that they’ve got your words, burnt, all over their shoes.

Still musing on the fear of “dark forces”, “bad people”, shifts in power, and similar trivia.

In sorting out the Podcast Archive I listened again to Johnnie at “Blogging, A Real Conversation” from 2 years ago. He started with something like this video (though we didn’t have Youtube in them days).

Johnnie used it to illustrate the illusion of authority. I guess I’m surprised at how many people are still yet to acknowledge their Ceaucescu moment.

My old friends from the Guildford School of Acting got together in the Union Club in Greek Street (thanks Paul!) to compare grey hairs, pot-bellies and war-stories from our marriages, divorces and other relationships. We were also honoured by the appearance of our former principal Michael Gaunt and head of first year Ian Ricketts. We had a fabulous time, which stretched into the evening when we stumbled over the road into the nearest pub.

I shot some bits of video especially for those luvvies who weren’t able to make it - I hope these give a flavour of what it was like and give you even more encouragement to come along next time.

Angus Deuchar

Paul Spyker

A bunch of folk starting with Ian Tolmie

Another bunch of folk starting with Darren Ruston

Lucy Davidson

Ian Butler

Adam Tedder (and me)

At the end of the Skill Share last week, I asked three participants to reflect on what they’d got out of the day. Here’s the video:

I shot lots more footage in the sessions - that’s still coming through the sausage machine

Last week I spent a couple of days helping the Stormhoek guys out with their offering at the London Wine Fair. On the Thursday, I spent all day with Andrew Porton chasing round with a live video feed to a video-wall interviewing people on the stands for the official wine fair blog winefairlive.com. The first day I spent more time on my own doing much the same thing, but in a less formal way.

The first of these I’ve uploaded is unusual in that it features more of me than the peeps in the booth. You saw yesterday what I get up to in my leisure time. I thought you’d like to be reassured that it doesn’t get much better when I’m “working”. Hey, I don’t drink - I had to have some fun somehow

I went on Tuesday. I’m sure I should have gone on Wednesday when Chinwag had a thing about PPC and all of my twitter stream seemed to be there.

Actually no, I wish I hadn’t gone at all. The saving graces were unexpected meetups with Ged Carroll, Kevin Anderson and Ian Delaney and an expected meetup with Andy Hyde.

I wanted to interview the big fat blue mouse and the leopard girls (sorry rupert) but they’d gone on a break I think, so I started shooting this B roll stuff and then…

thank god it was free to get in (and out again)

I’ve been invited to a screening of Surveillance this Saturday (14th April) at midday at the NFT but I have a prior commitment.

According to the blurb the film was well received at the Berlin Film Festival recently and I just spoke to Paul the Director who tells me that it’ll be going to Seattle and Chicago later in the year. I have been given a DVD copy (and watched the first 20 minutes, which hooked me) so I’m going to blog about it when I’ve had a proper look.

If you’d like to go see it (and if you blog about it that would be lovely too) then give me a shout and I’ll put you in touch with the production team.

It’s not nice to snicker at people having fun at work and loving their employer. I just wanted to remind you of that while I pass this on from Ben Casnocha

Ladles & Jellyspoons,

give a big blogosphere welcome to Katie Ledger who has quietly started making some social media, firstly with her blog which has been running for a month or so now and now with her youtube debut on the Government’s Nursery Education Grant where she interviews the owner of a local nursery school on how the NEG (you couldn’t make this stuff up could you?) is having, shall we say, some unintended consequences.

The Social Media Club motto is “If you get it, share it”

I prefer “If you get it, MAKE it… and share it”

Nice one, Katie

No I’m not using adwords on this site, but I wanted to share the selection that came up on a ning social network I’ve just set up for SMC London. All there is on the page for reference is my picture and an introductory post from me, and the title with strap “If you get it, share it (in London!)” which still doesn’t quite explain (at least to me) the link to gay bikini wearing chauffeurs with ringworm.

Btw, of course, if you’re interested in joining the network and thereby generating some more relevant advertising, please do get over there and sign up.

The London experiment with weekly media-making meetups continued this evening with another member getting his first taste of videoblogging. Guy West has been a regular at our discussion groups and kindly recorded some audio at one of the meetings.

We sat in the brand new foyer of the British Film Institute/National Film Theatre which only opened last week and chatted about our social use of the internet. I was showing off a bit pointing the camera in my general direction which results in the people standing behind me being beautifully in focus, but my face (some will no doubt say this is a blessing) is a bit blurry.

No Palme D’or for this one, but at least we had some footage - and it wasn’t just of me! I showed Guy how to transfer from the camera to PC and then do some simple editing tasks and then we topped and tailed it with some titles and credits. We’d stood around for long enough, occasionally getting odd stares from the patrons of the Lesbian & Gay film festival that’s currently running there so I didn’t make Guy watch while we uploaded it to YouTube - he knew how to do that bit anyway.Next week the clocks will have gone forward, we’ll be into British Summer Time, and hopefully it will be a bit warmer for our first Blogwalk.

Cross posted from the Social Media Club blog

I was very impressed by Open Coffee last week as you may have noticed, so I went back with more time to spend chatting to VCs, recruiters and entrepreneurs than before.

At the end I was really pleased to get to talk on camera to Sam Sethi of Vecosys and Paul Youlten of Yellowikis about what they’re finding exciting in this whole crazy web scene at the moment.

Good to see John Hornbaker again, not least because it gives me the opportunity to apologise for not linking to him before.

I also talked to:

Rupesh Chatwani of Lonsdale Capital about how the rest of the world is catching up with social media and that humanisation is the next big thing.

Brett Putter of Forsyth Group was he scouting for talent or clients or both? And how about Bright Young Things Clare Johnston and Agnes Greaves? I suspect I’m neither bright enough or young enough to qualify, but we talked a lot about using social media to engage with customers.

Ed Hodges of Voible (formerly blackfin.co.uk) - cool flash conferencing and some other smart applications for mobile, launching sometime in the next 6-8 weeks.

Alastair Mitchell & Andy McLoughlin of the online document management/groupware 2.0 (”like basecamp only more around documents and including workflow” - and British) solution huddle

Briefly at the end Ryan Gallagher and Paul Maitland of ConnectMeAnywhere.com who Sam speaks highly of above and nice to bump into Paul Miller again who is now doing School of Everything as namechecked in the Paul Youlten video.

My most excitable moment was meeting Jamie Wallace of walkit.com - I just love it, love it, love it and it’s so nice when you meet the faces behind great applications, particularly when they’re so self-effacingly surprised to meet a raving fan like me

Blimey! I’m out of Moo Cards.

[update: gaaaah! also had a fantastic chat with Ian Forrester (such. a. nice. man.) from bbc backstage and he indulged my ranting and raving about theatre blogging - forgotten in the first draft because we didn't swap business cards - Oli Barrett, Paul Birch and Steve Moore also fall into this category - phew!]

via tunatheday - Thanks Ade!