YouTube Hot Spots

This is a screencast of YouTube’s great new metric, Hot Spots which lets you see what parts of your videos connect with viewers and which parts don’t.

Video Vortex 3

Video Vortex 3

I’m really excited about going to Video Vortex 3 in Ankara, Turkey next week. I’ll be running a Videoblogging Boot Camp on Friday 10/10 and making a presentation about networked relationships on Saturday 10/11. I hope to get some video posted during and right after the conference but I’ll be stopping in London for a few days on the way back so I imagine that some will have to wait until I get back home.

Workshop – Videoblogging Boot Camp
This workshop will take participants through the entire videoblogging process — from setting up a blog, to shooting, editing and compressing video, to making them findable and searchable. This workshop will be a fast paced, practical, hands-on experience. We’ll survey a number of videoblogs that use a variety of storytelling methods before going off to shoot and edit a short video introduction. Participants will use that video to learn how to post to their own videoblogs (or add video to their existing blogs). We’ll also set up a collaborative videoblog that will collect participant’s impressions during and after the conference.

Conference Talk – Videoblogging: Networked Relationships
Video and sound offer such a rich experience that even small, compressed, web-cam clips provide an extraordinary level of intimacy. When you combine this with a network of over a billion people, the nature of self-awareness, relationships, community and our families begin to alter. This presentation will take a look at some of the consequences — both intended and unintended — of videoblogging and the unconstrained personal connection it offers.

An anthropological introduction to YouTube

This is a nearly hour long presentation to the Library of Congress by Michael Wesch who gave us The Machine is Us/ing Us last year. His talk is about his (and his students’) study of video practice on YouTube. I’ve never been a big contributer to YouTube but I have been seriously involved in videoblogging and web video for four years now. Most of that time has been spent contributing to and interacting with the community of people centered around the Videoblogging email list where we’ve seemed to have gone through an experience parallel to the one Wesch outlines in his talk.

One of the ideas Wesch brings up by way of McLuhan (at about 26:00) is that of new forms of self-awareness. I know I certainly have a much different view of myself today than I did four years ago. And now, not only how we view ourselves as individuals but also how we collectively view ourselves is becoming something that’s undergoing constant revision. What exactly this provides is hard to say because things are rushing along at such at such a rapid pace. Sometimes, like Reuben was talking about recently, it may make you feel a bit crazy but ultimately we want this because as my experience has shown me and what I think Wesch concludes is that, this will be an extraordinarily good thing.

Please Vote For My SXSW Panels

SXSW 09 Interactive Panel PickerI proposed two how to demonstrations:
Machinima Kung Fu – Sure machinima looks easy – record a game, drop it into iMovie and do some voices – but there’s actually a little more to it than that. This session will cover all the tech of making machinima – from hardware and software to in-game strategies to post production issues.

Custom Video Players For Your Show – You’ve got a unique video show, why not have a player that matches? This session will take you through detailed examples using two popular Flash video players. We’ll show you how to create custom skins and get them set up on your site.

Please vote for your favorites on the SXSW 09 Interactive Panel Picker.

Everyone’s Talking About Ubiquity


Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Ubiquity is another release from Mozilla Labs that, along with Aurora has me thinking about the future of not just how we’ll use the web but also everything on our computers.

Over the last few years web apps have really transformed the way I use a computer. Every day I have less and less need for actual desktop applications. If it weren’t for all the video production I do on a daily basis I could just grab most any computer with wifi and be instantly connected to just about all of my stuff. And now that the iPhone has a mostly usable web browser, most of the time I don’t even need to take my laptop with we me anywhere. I love that.

So in the middle of watching this demo I started thinking it would be great if all the applications on your computer, not just web apps, could play together like that or maybe all your apps would be web apps (more likely) and your operating system would be the “browser.” Then you could just invoke a new view, document, video, website, virtual world or whatever and combine information in whatever way you needed to right then instead of in whatever way a particular application lets you do it. I can’t wait.