I wonder if Eric Rice is paying Chris Pirillo for this, but either way it’s fucking hysterical and a great advertisement for Audioblog. When you’ve got a funny idea, call up the fucking number and blog it. Awesome!
Update: I’m a dumbass and didn’t include a link to the post.
Wired News has it’s first in-depth article, part of a three part series, up on its main page. I’m quoted. Katie, the author, really did an excellent job of fitting in as much as she could in the space she had. Other than neglecting some things, she seemed to get the feel of the article spot on. Something’s always left out, but it’s really nice when facts in the article are pretty much right. You never know until you see the article, but Wired got it right. Way to go Katie!
Wired News has linked to me in a feature of vlogs they like. Awesome! Another write-up should be following tomorrow, hopefully with some good quotes I managed to pull out today during a phone interview with a Wired reporter. Nice to see such good coverage coming from mainstream press.
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.
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.
The Gillmor Gang with Steve Gillmor, Jon Udell, Dana Gardner, Mike Vizard, and Doc Searls is back on the air. This is good news, as I like these guys. This week, the special guest was Adam Curry, podcaster extraordinairre. Overall, it was a very pleasant show, but I do have a few beefs with the group’s glossing over the potential of video and videoblogging.
What they had to say wasn’t harsh, but Steve Garfield and Robert Scoble both agreed with me that they were (in Robert’s words) poopooing on video. It amazes me, no more than a year after podcasting hits it big, how Adam and the rest of the gang can completely dismiss a medium that is showing so much potential. I sat there listening to the entire podcast wishing it was in video so I could associate who was talking with the proper face, because I’m still not familiar with their voices. If you wanted a podcast, you could extract the audio and take it with you on your iPod and leave the video for people like me who listened to it in front of their computers.
I’m obviously biased here. If you’re here, you probably know that I’m an avid videoblogger. I think, as far as micro-media is concerned, videoblogging has far more potential to help people around the world really communicate than blogging or podcasting. It’s one thing to write about poverty, it’s another to tell me about poverty, but the difference between those two and showing me poverty, or war, or just life on the other side of the world is so vast to hardly make the first two worth mentioning.
Video has its issues right now, but mainly it has to do with getting the tools that are already in existance in people’s hands. Video is not hard to make anymore. I showed my wife how to make her own video with a $350 DV camcorder and iMovie on the Mac in nearly no time. Windows Movie Maker is equally as easy. Creating compelling video is no longer a technical challenge. Hosting video content is free, thanks to the work of the people at Ourmedia and The Internet Archive as well as Michael and Ryanne’s excellent work on Freevlog. The issues remaining to be solved are how to get that video to a place where people are comfortable watching it. We can already automatically sync video to your PSP (through FireANT for the PC) and we can already deliver video content to your television through services like Akimbo (my review coming this week and Steve Garfield has a video up watching videos on Akimbo now). The addition of more platforms for watching video is coming, and it’ll only make more accessible if watching it on your PC, your television through Akimbo or your PSP isn’t good enough now.
I think the content is already here, and better stuff is coming every day. I think podcasting is great for it’s niche, commuters and knowledge workers. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a big niche, but I think video offers the opportunity to really appeal to the masses. We’ll be able to use the work podcasting has done with RSS for easy distribution and create video content for every interest, just like podcasting has done, that people can and will want to watch from the comfort of their sofa. There will be videoblogs with 10 viewers and videoblogs with 100,000 viewers. The only limit to the quality of content we can create is time and money, and I think with the potential of the medium those problems will be easily solved. Video is so compelling, I absolutely see a near future where people who can create compelling content will have no problems using the Internet as their one and only distribution mechanism. Rocketboom may be the first to get there, and kudos to Andrew and Amanda if they do, but there will be many more to follow.
Videoblogging I think will also revolutionize the format of of how people watch video. Podcasting mirrors radio’s format almost exactly, with longer-format shows (in my experience, most seem to be 15 minutes to an hour). However, videoblogs have traditionally been shorter, from 2 to 5 minutes (most fall under 3 minutes), giving people a chance to keep up with a large group of publishers in a minimal amount of time. Adam Curry mentioned in his last podcast that podcasts will have to start getting shorter because of limits on people’s time, but we’ve realized that from the beginning. I always say, everyone’s life is interesting in 2-minute installments, and I think the short-form entertainment we’re pioneering will bleed into the mainstream, because it’s incredibly compelling.
The boat’s still in port on videoblogging, it’s a great time to hop on before we set sail. Steve, Doc, Jon, Mike, Dana, Adam, if you want to hop on, you’re more than welcome, but if you decide to let us leave without you, I think in a year you’ll have wished you were on board now.
Alright, so I coughed up the money. Personal money. I need an employer that’ll pay for this shit. Anyone hiring? 
Can’t wait to see Eric Rice, Steve Garfield, and Sean Gilligan there, among others. It should be a blast. I’m also fortunate enough to not need to travel. If anyone needs transportation while you’re here, let me know.
If you’re not reading Rick Segal’s Post Money Value, you should be. Every time I click on his feed I read something incredibly insightful. Today, he was writing about his friend Matt’s experience with Independence Air. He talks about empowering employees to be innovative and make deals. I only wish an airline would do this. They’d win my business for life.
I found out about this site from Steve Garfield’s post on Off On A Tangent. These guys are really trying to be hip and cool, but honestly it’s pretty retarded. I’m not on their list (wouldn’t expect to be), but just because you create a list doesn’t mean anyone will care. I’ll go on record as saying they’ll be largely ignored, but of course, I could be wrong.
In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve changed a few things around here. For one, I’m no longer Typhoon.org, I’m ClintSharp.com! I spent a long time thinking about things over the last week, after David at Mediatuner brought it up to me, that I really should be branding my online presence under my name, instead of Typhoon.org which means nothing. I considered it, forgot about it, considered again for about an hour, decided he was right, and here we are at ClintSharp.com. All the links to typhoon.org will still work, both the sites are the same. I spent far more time redoing the theme for the site. It’s a modified Kubrick (default Wordpress) theme. I already got one email saying they liked it and wanted to know where they could get it. I guess I should publish it somewhere.
I hope you enjoy it here. Vlog entry containing my deliberation process will probably be up tonight.
Secondly, I’m going to start posting entries to the blog for my readers that aren’t into video in the Watch This category, pointing them to interesting Vlogs I watch. I figure these people should probably be getting some link love from me, and I’m on a quest to encourage videobloggers to not forget about old-fashioned text blogging.
Thirdly, I know the site is gawd-awefully fucking slow right now. Sorry. I’m working with my provider, Redwood Virtual to make it suck less. I’m sure they’ll come back and just tell me I’m swapping again, because they give me no credit for administering UNIX boxes for the last 10 years. They assume, like all tech support people, that I’m a fucking moron and pass me off with nary a bit of help. I’m going to try upgrading to the next highest class of VM before I go looking for someone else. I may move the site over to DreamHost or something else and leave the email and stuff here. I sent them an email two hours ago and still haven’t seen a response though, so things aren’t looking too good for them. Something tells me they don’t get Web 2.0 and immediate customer feedback. Of course, I did go with the cheapest hosting provider available…
So, I use Bloglines to do all my text-based feed reading (for video, I use FireANT). However, I’ve tried left and right to find my feed in their directory, and I’ve been unsuccessful. Can anyone else find me? I’ve tried searching for “Clint Sharp”, clint sharp (no quotes), Typhoon.org, etc. Typhoon.org I’ve decommissioned just recently, so it should still be there. I don’t know, I’ve never been able to find anything in their search. So far, it’s returned nothing relevant. For relevance, I go to PubSub and Technorati, how about you?
I just read Rick Segal’s post The Anatomy of Noise (link originally both from Scoble’s blog and Winer’s blog). This whole thread starts with Amit Malhotra quoting Steve Ballmer as saying RSS isn’t the end all and be all (it’s actually not). It escalates with Dave Winer saying:
Ballmer, Ballmer, Ballmer, just when I was beginning to think that Microsoft possibly saw the benefit in working with the rest of the world, he sprays a thick coat of FUD on RSS.
Too simple? Feh.
Scoble responds in his normal jovial way. At this point, I figured things were pretty much over. It wasn’t that interesting to begin with. It only really got interesting with Rick Segal’s post. I first want to point out a fallacy with Rick’s logic. Rick says:
1. Somebody writes something they heard from CEO. Not verified yet.
2. Still unverified, employee comments and cranks it up a notch. That’s strictly my opinion of Scoble’s comments regarding what Ballmer knew, who he talked, and the witty ‘come on channel 9′ invite. You have to read it and be your own judge of his style.
This is missing an important key step. Dave Winer, who’s well read, pointed everyone to Amit’s post (I believe he got it via Steve Rubel, who’s also well read, to give credit where credit’s due). At this point, there’s no controlling the conversation. People like me, who aren’t incredibly well read (I’m much more watched than read), could link to this and add the same commentary as Dave Winer and not receive close to the same reaction. At this point, Scoble has to respond, or everyone’s going to be having a conversation about Microsoft without anyone from Microsoft being involved at all. In the zero day PR world of the blogosphere, if you’re not out there responding, you’re much more likely to take a huge hit than if you can help be part of the conversation, especially if you’ve got someone like Robert Scoble out there writing for you.
And finally, I’d like to point out that this conversation, which I had been following, was largely uninteresting up until this point. The only reason it even reached the point where Robert Scoble was interested was because of Dave Winer’s personal attachment to anyone’s comments where someone might insinuate that RSS isn’t the greatest thing since sliced bread. In my opinion, Ballmer misses the simplicity point of RSS, but I think he responds the same way any CEO should, with moderation. Rick could have chosen a dozen other interesting conversations from Robert in the last month alone to choose, but I think he chose this one because of his obvious attachment to Dave Winer. His analysis throughout the entire article is tempered by obvious admiration for Dave, and I think attempting to pass off defending your friend as an objective analysis of the dangers of “Corporate Blogging” and transparency is shameful. I’m obviously defending Robert here, but I’m at least being honest about my intentions.
Also, in my defense, if you made it this far, I just read all of Scoble’s post (I originally clicked on the link to Rick’s post and started my response) and I see he said a lot of what I’ve said here. It’s 4 AM, my points are valid, and I don’t feel like rewriting. Sorry if it seems as if I’m just toeing the Scoble line, but I actually did write this stuff without reading his first.
In my consistent effort to continue upping people’s PageRank, I’m here to talk about MediaTuner. What an awesome product that’s been lurking out there in development. Unfortunately they’ve having some issues with both Safari and Firefox on the Mac, so it won’t work for me full time until then, but I’m very impressed. I’ve sent them some other feedback that I’m waiting for a response on, but I’ll be doing an update in a couple of days once I’ve had a chance to put it through it’s paces, give them some feedback, and see what they have to say in response. So far David Cronshaw over there has been nothing but kind, funny, and responsive to my feedback. I love working with companies who appreciate their users.
This is a test to see if Videoblogging.info checks for videos in my post. If they do, then this won’t show up and I’ll be able to automatically ping them on every post.
Andy Baio of has written an interesting piece, detailing how Wordpress.org is using their high Google PageRank to profit from hidden links using AdSense. I’m not an SEO expert, but I figure if you can glean additional revenue from your site’s popularity to attempt to offset the costs that it would take to get that kind of PageRank, more power to you. It’s Google’s responsibility to fix their search engine, although I do admit what they’ve done is a bit shady. I certainly sympathize with their plight, and I hope this doesn’t taint the image of the software too much, because I love what they’ve done. Unfortunately, I don’t see anyone else stepping up to the plate to pay them for their software, so they’re sort of in a position where they need to get revenue in any way possible. Thus is the plight of open source. It’s hard to give away your work and make a successful business at the same time.
My heart goes out to Wil Wheaton today, who just put his beloved cat Felix down. As my wife so eloquently put, if you have animals, they are members of your family. While it may seem silly, losing an animal is like losing a beloved friend. All our animals are unique and have their own personalities, and no animal is a substitute for them. Wil, I wish the best to you and your family, and I hope the memories of Felix bring smiles to your face for years to come. I know my departed animals still do.
I suppose as I read more and more blogs (and especially more and more of the popular blogs), it seems that bloggers are mainly interested in blogging. OK, that’s probably a disservice, and I suppose it’s the pot calling the kettle black since I’m blogging about blogging. I guess most blog about their own subjects. It’s just that when you read enough blogs you hear a shitload about blogging. Deborah Branscum has written a somewhat insightful post as to how blogging is like High School titled “High School and the Blogosphere: A Consideration”.
I’d like to add some comments to her thoughts:
1. In high school, girls rule, boys drool. In the blogosphere, boys rule, girls drool.
Perhaps that’s because we can’t see your breasts? Seriously, women’s power in high school is the same afterwards. I don’t think you could possibly be implying that girls in high school were revered for their intellect. If you’re not telling us you’re a woman on your blog, how are we supposed to know? Blog as a man. See if that makes a difference.
2. In high school, it’s jocks vs. nerds. In the blogosphere, it’s wonks vs. nerds.
I’m not sure there was ever a contest like this in high school. Did the dorks, geeks or nerds ever win out over the jocks? I think the only person having this kind of conflict were the nerds, the geeks and the dorks. I think the jocks were just largely oblivious.
3. In high school, there are the popular kids, then everybody else–and it really, really matters. In the blogosphere, there are the popular kids and then everybody else. And so what? We’re adults now and this is blogging, not serious business. (Um, except when it’s serious business.)
I don’t know if this is written from someone who’s not really moved around in business circles or not (EDITED: She’s written for NewsWeek, Fortune and the New York Times, to her credit). This description of the way the high school and the blogosphere works I think could be generalized fairly effectively to the entire world. I only see the blogosphere (I really hate that word, I should come up with something better even if only I use the word) as a microcosm of the real world.
4. In high school, there’s plenty of foul language. In the blogosphere, there’s plenty of foul language.
What the fuck? Why the fuck is this a goddamned issue?
5. In high school, teens can’t wait to enter the real world as independent adults and escape their adolescent misery. In the blogosphere, adults can’t wait to start blogging to escape the real world and its misery.
The grass is always greener. People consistently change careers to find a better one and people switch jobs to find a better job and people switch spouses to find a better one.
Maybe Deborah’s point would have been more insightful but less catchy if she was comparing High School and the blogosphere to the real world. As much as I hated High School, and believe me my life is much improved since then, the real world works much like it. Some people are popular and some aren’t. Luckily, in the real world, as in the blogosphere, it’s often times deserving. Thankfully, unlike High School, It just so happens that I have the upper hand in the real world over the jocks. I feel very sorry for the jocks, as I’d hate to live the rest of my life realizing the best had already passed me by.
