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February 17, 2004
why i don't think videoblogging is ready for alpha release.
the dowbrigade piece on why we need video aggregators really got me thinking so i went back to take another gander. i still think it's the boodiggity, but the more i read it, the more i realize that i don't agree with his final conclusion that everyone will become a video blogger. but there is nothing wrong with that.
i agree that most media consumers don't want to hear other viewpoints. as much as my neighbor likes to think that he reads Time in order to stay informed, it is more likely that he is reading in order to reinforce his current viewpoints on the world. And that isn't some elitist crap about the masses - the same is true for the person who listens to democracy now and the person who reads the village voice. anyone who sips their media from the same bottle every day is looking for a particular perspective and ultimately reinforcing existing behavior.
i also don't think it's always the high-IQs who want interactivity. smart people i know are still consumers who use the media they consume to shape the work that they do in another medium.
it is for this reason why i think that most people will not want to, as dowbrigade put it, get inside the tube. that sort of thing already exists. it's called public access tv and i don't see the masses pounding on their door anytime soon. sure, imovie and isight have made self production possible, but you still need to have the fundamental skills necessary to understand how to put together something flashy enough that people will watch.
and i guess that's been my major disconnect with the whole videoblog thing. text blogging works because we know how to write. most of us bloggers have been writing since elementary school. we write papers, we take grammar classes. we've learned how to form a proper sentence, how to structure a written argument, and how to write a good story. we know how to convert the thoughts in our head into text. we can talk with text.
most people can't talk with video. those who do have the skills are professionals - they're anti-bloggers.
add this to the fact that the tools that enabled the blog community explosion (easy content searches and rss metadata) don't exist in the video sphere. There is no google for video (or at least, there isn't one at the price point we need -- free.) Sure, metadata for video is starting to emerge, but we still need to deal with the fact that most potential videobloggers can't edit together a proper video "sentence."
but don't get me wrong - we can still have an unmediated revolution. we just have to take it one step at a time. if we continue to make the tools for expressing oneself through video available to the community from an early age, we may one day see a generation ready to express themselves through video blogs. the camcorder generation is now in their 30's. the imovie generation is just getting into high school and college. if we want to know how to better shape the coming video blog revolution, we need to take a look at the literacy revolution first. figure out how that went the way it did and see if we can tweak media literacy to get us there faster.
in the meantime, we can still effect immediate slow-moving change by leveraging the existing rss framework to create a community-based content filter for the stuff already out there. by using things like XMLTV and RSSTV to create a system for recommending and referencing existing media, we point people to what's good on the channelspace, making the act of teevee watching a bit more community-centric. so it's less triciaandthecity (personal blog) and more boingboing (metablog).
while i would love to see more personal VJs a la browsetv, i don't think it is going to happen anytime soon. you can't expect someone to express themselves effectively through video if they aren't already doing it in everyday life. like i said, public access has already tried it with the current general population, and their success has been nominal at best. so we take a step back and give folks training wheels first. we get them referencing the media that's already there. this way, when we get to the point where we're all posting rough but convincing arguments through video, we have the tools in place for hyperlinking whatever media we want to blog about.
Posted by yatta at 2:11 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
February 12, 2004
brave new video.
funny how things work. i was typing notes for a paper on the future of video distribution when i came across andrew grumet's proposal for an RSS scheme for PVRs. Makes sense. Sounds familiar to eli's thoughts on video metadata. Browsing andrew's blog, I also came across a dowbrigade post about why we need video aggregators in order to decentralize the media, moving control away from the center. politically and technically, i agree with most everything he says.
my personal take on the thing is that once we open up the bandwidth to the last mile and video goes ip, anyone with a streaming server can be a quote-unqoute-broadcaster. more importantly, anyone who can read someone else's rss video metadata feed and aggregate their favorite content can become a video "channel." (video boingboing anyone?)
and therein lies the true disruption of a marriage between rss and video over ip: in a world where there is more bandwidth than video cache (on-demand content) and the number of distribution points (blogs) are near infinite, finite channel space (broadcast, cable) becomes irrelevant.
more importantly, branding becomes king. even if you've never distributed video before, if you have an audience that already trusts you for a particular opinion on whatever it is that you do, they will continue to go to you when you diversify into a different medium. that is why vice magazine can have a clothing store in nyc. if you trust their taste in music and movies, you'll probably be open to the idea of having them sell you a pair of pants.
it is the reason why the audience followed cnn from their cable box to the browser and it is why i think entities as diverse in purpose as wbai, the catholic church, the nra, and eyebeam will all have "video feeds" within the next 5-10 years. when you marry decent downstream bandwidth with the ease of weblog publishing and the simplicity of rss aggregation, anyone can be a rich-media content distributor. anyone can be a "teevee channel."
there will always be a need for live video events (sports, presidential speeches, the victoria's secret fashion show.) but if the video isn't time sensitive, it won't be distributed through a TV lineup. one day the idea of waiting until 8PM to watch the latest episode of My Favorite Sitcom will seem as antiquated as contacting a switchboard to put a local telephone call through for you.
i can't wait for the day that my grandchildren laugh at me when i tell them how video channels were once programmed in sequence. ; )
Posted by yatta at 1:48 AM | TrackBack
February 10, 2004
Josh's Map Server Hacking
check it:
I've been experimenting with the US Census Bureau's Online Mapping Tool. The great thing about it is that its totally hack-able! Its easy to tell from the URL exactly what information is needed to return a map image. In fact, you can get it to simply return a .GIF of a specific size in a specific location with a marker in a specific location and a label of your choice. Pretty cool!
Posted by yatta at 9:32 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
February 5, 2004
cnn develops a wearable vj pack
go cnn! i figured if anyone was going to beat drazen and i to the wifitv end product, it would probably be them. found at chapmanlogic & lostremote:
The new DNG system enables correspondents to edit packages and file reports on the scene without carrying bulky edit equipment or traveling to satellite feed points. The system integrates a software-based videophone into a laptop computer. With the addition of editing and transmission software, the laptop becomes CNN's single-solution platform for editing, compression, transmission and live shots.
the best part is that they did it all with off the shelf technology. i'm glad someone else in broadcast/cablecast gets it in a big way.
Posted by yatta at 2:05 PM | TrackBack
when's my bus arriving? fluidtime public transport app
the fluidtime public transport torino, a visual representation of arrival times of buses in Torino, Italy.
"Fluidtime supports flexible planning by providing people with personalised, accurate time-based information directly from the real-time databases of the services they are seeking."
yury and i had talked about the feasibility of doing real data version of this kinda app with the subway system here in nyc. install rfid tags on the lead car of each train, install ez-pass readers every 500 feet or so to capture positioning data that would be relayed to monitors in each station. but according to mr. gitman, it'd be almost impossible. he's spoken to folks in it over at the mta. it turns out that every new technology has a seven year evaluation period before it can be considered for implementation in the system. that means that most likely, something smaller, faster, better would be impossible to use once the testing phase was complete. what a pain in the ass. perhaps we need to put a test system into play anyway, get critical mass in support of such a system just to prove our point. found at nosenseofplace
Posted by yatta at 1:59 PM | TrackBack
February 4, 2004
metablogging with reblog
okay, this is pretty high on my pragmatic coolness list for the year: a meta blog for taking rss feeds and republishing them to your site (with the proper citations, of course. we didn't take library science classes for nothing, ya know.) eyebeam reblog, mike frumin's clever hack of the feed on feeds rss aggregator that pulls entries from feed on feeds and inserts them into movable type as new database entries. i can think of at least two dozen individuals or communities who could use this immediately, including myself. nice.
Posted by yatta at 7:12 PM | TrackBack
kunglog becomes ecto
okay. now that i have a laptop again, i can say that i'm fully settled into the new digs at eyebeam. now all i have to do is start posting to the braintag again regularly. but when i went to d/l a copy of kunglog and i come to find that it's been evolved into ecto. although it's no longer free (now $18), kunglog was so worth it that the money for ecto has already left my pocket.
Posted by yatta at 1:30 PM