Gnomedex is in 1 week! See you there!
On another note, Vloggercue, formerly known as Summer of Vlog, is gearing up for multiple meetups across the country that we’re going to tie together via a Flashmeeting. Mel and I will be at the New York meetup, staying a Adam Quirk’s. Gnomedex and Vloggercue within two weeks of each other! My brain is going into overload from excitement!
The real news behind Google’s video upload program is here. Appears they’re only going to offer snippets of the video you upload to return as search results, unless you want to enter into a pay-for-play agreement to host your video. This would mean your subscribers pay to watch your videos and Google takes their cut.
A good quote:
“The ultimate endgame is streaming video, otherwise Google can’t get video advertising dollars,” said one source. “They have to figure a way to get video into their world to capture those dollars.”
When are people going to get it through their skulls that streaming video is not it? Besides the poor experience generally offered by streaming video (due to a lack of QoS deployed on the Internet), people like to be able to take stuff off-line.
Another good line:
Unlike Yahoo, which already has submission deals with companies such as Reuters, Google will avoid mining the Internet for video clips and will use only video clips that have been submitted by their producers.
What kind of strategy is this for a search company? They’re not going to mine the Internet? Isn’t that their business? I’m not all that interested in uploading my video to Google when it’s already being made freely available from my website. This leads into yet another quote which totally blew me away:
Eventually, Google plans to leapfrog its competitors by creating a “walled garden” of video content hosted on its servers. The content will originate both from independent and A-list video producers, sources say. That way, Google can eventually sell access and video advertising, or online commercials.
Google plans to leapfrog its competitors by becoming a video portal? Is that what they’re saying? So the company that destroyed the portal plans to beat its competitors by becoming what its competitors used to be? I’m thoroughly confused. I’m becoming more and more convinced that Google had a couple of hits and the best is not yet to come. Seriously, they’ve destroyed Blogger, the new Google Groups is way more confusing than the original, Google New still offers no syndication making it almost useless, and their Fusion project is a joke.
Jeremy Zawodny has some good comments as well.
Looks like Eric’s having the same problems I am. I posted about this to the videoblog list a while back. How should I present my content to my users? Should my videos go one place and my blog another? How do my users, which are blog readers and videoblog watchers, get my content? They’re two different audiences aren’t they?
In the end, I’ve decided to leave it all up here at clintsharp.com. Eric looks like he’s going to be using his blog as a pointer to where he exists other places. That’s a pretty good idea, and I might end up doing the same. I’m setting up a wiki on my site as well as a place to put my well-formed ideas and a place where people can edit those, refine them, and make suggestions. Blogs are just poor content management systems for anything than what they were originally intended to be, which was a log of what you found on the web.
So, in the end, mix your media I think. Throw it all together, mash it up, let the consumers sort it out. If it’s too messy, we’ll clean it up later. Your subscribers are coming to see about you, and if I’m interested in reading what someone has to say I’m also interested in watching what they vlog and listening to what they podcast. That’s the beauty of the blogopodovlogopshere. It’s about individuals and authenticity. Way to go Eric! Best of luck.
Rick Segal over at his blog Post Money Value The writes about FeedBurner’s new efforts to allow you migrate off FeedBurner. Cool! I was just talking to Markus Sandy about my objections to FeedBurner. This answers a lot of my concerns about their service. Maybe I’ll start throwing my stuff over to FeedBurner now through a 301 redirect.
I’ve been wanting to start a new series of “Shows” where I cover tech topics of interest to me. Today, I’m covering using your iPod as a recording device using a free distribution of Linux for the iPod called podzilla. It’s very simple to install and use, and it will turn your normal headphone jack on your iPod into a Mic or Line-level recording input. Unfortunately, there’s no gain control, so recordings come out a bit quiet on my microphone, but you can adjust it up a bit in post-production without distortion. It’s definitely good enough for voice, not sure about music quality. Definitely worth it for an on-the-go recording solution.
John Hart’s project has been halted due to his funding being pulled. This is a direct result of the Yahoo Videoblogging Group’s efforts to get him to stop using the term “Blogumentary, after Chuck Olsen asked him for help. My favorite quote from his rant (which is amusingly worded):
In the first week of June 2005, the mighty Chuck Olsen, who operates this blog, emailed me, John Hart, not claiming ownership of the word “blogumentary,” mind you, not claiming infringement, not asking for a cease and desist of the word, but in fact, only claiming “concern” and further saying that it would cause “confusion” in the blogosphere, since he already had a 3-year old DVD product employing that name.
How dare he be nice and not threaten a lawsuit in his first email like John Hart did in his. Maybe this is the way the film world works, I’m not sure, but it seems to me like threatening the use of lawyers in your first or second correspondence with someone isn’t a civil way to resolve something. Also, the guy threatened to post Michael Verdi’s personal credit history on the Internet simply for leaving a comment on the guy’s blog about it. Lawsuits and lawyers should be a last resort. If the guy hadn’t been such an asshole he probably would still be making his movie now. The Blogosphere doesn’t take well to threatening tactics, and some of the bloggers he was going to interview, most of whom hadn’t even been contacted by him, pulled out of the movie nearly instantly when they were informed of his scare tactics.
Now, on the other side, if I was his investors, and he was creating controversy, I would have funded the movie anyways. There’s no such thing as bad publicity. Unfortunately, I just don’t see how he would have been able to get a large number of bloggers to be interviewed with his attitude, which is what ultimately, I think, what killed the project. It’s an interesting read, none-the-less. Way to go Chuck!
Apparantly, John Hart, the guy behind a new documentary in the works called 59 bloggers, is threatening Chuck Olsen from Blogumentary. Eric Rice has the full story, but basically it sounds like this guy is being a real shithead. I definitely agree with Eric, lets get ahold of the guys this guy is going to interview and let them know what’s going on.
