Raymond: Two years of videoblogging

Norway's Raymond K. looks back on two years of videoblogging.

Salon and Time's Persons of the Year

Salon Person of the Year: S.R. Sidarth. The Virginia native and son of Indian immigrants changed history with a camcorder and introduced Sen. George Allen -- and the rest of us -- to the real America.

Meantime, Time magazine names its Person of the Year: You! Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.

We're ready to balance our diet of predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing. You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos—those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms—than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.

And we didn't just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software. ...

Why Scoble shoots in HD

Why is Robert Scoble shooting in high definition at PodTech? He just posted this explanation to the Yahoo! videoblogging list:

I'm only using HD camcorders. Why?

For one, the image I get is much higher quality overall. My $4,000 Sony can shoot in low light, has better image stableization than the $700 Panasonic cameras I used at Microsoft, and I like the widescreen format better. The images are also better sharpness before compression and I find they compress better too.

But, that's not really the reason I'm using them. I expect that sometime in the next 18 months that old-school TV distribution networks are gonna need HD content and need it bad. I'll have it.

Also, look at new school distribution networks that are popping up like Tivo, Xbox, Playstation. All are looking for HD content.

Plus, if you ever want to show your videos off in HD, say, in a conference setting, or at a future Vloggies, or something like that, having HD originals will make you shine in those places and if you are shooting some video for home use, some for videoblogging, and some for friends and/or company, you'll want HD, especially if you have an HD screen.

My video on my Sony 60-inch is stunning. Makes me look like the Discovery Channel.

Robert's using foresight here. Still, there are few of us who can afford $4,000 video cameras. Let's hope they drop rapidly in price during 2007.

Video competition winner snags $100,000

From the Current TV blog:

Last night in Los Angeles, Lucas Krost was awarded top honors in the Seeds of Tolerance competition for his film "One Nation Under Guard," which highlights the racial injustice of the US prison system and the intolerance shown to ex-prisoners once they have served their time. Lucas took home $100K (plus another $15K for charity), a Sony HD Handycam, and a snazzy trophy.

That's some serious dough. Check out the winning entry here (in Flash).

Lonelygirl tops AP's top 10 YouTube videos of 2006

Associated Press: Lonelygirl tops AP's top 10 YouTube videos of 2006

The mystery of YouTube's home page picks

Mark Glaser's latest in-depth piece just went up at PBS MediaShift looking at the mystery behind how YouTube chooses the videos that are highlighted on its home page. YouTube explains that the Featured Videos are not paid slots, though media partners do get their videos rotated into the Director Video slots on the home page. Still, some YouTube users are upset with the success CBS has had with its videos on the site, and question the way media partners work with the video-sharing site.

"We've noticed a rash of videos and commentary claiming that 'the only featured videos we're seeing [on the YouTube home page] are paid advertising videos.' This is totally untrue -- anything you see in the box marked 'Featured Videos' has been selected by a team of editors who are constantly thinking about what might appeal to you, the users, and trying to balance the types of videos and subject matter seen here. We don't always nail it, but the intentions are never commercially oriented, we can promise you that." -- Mia, YouTube editor

Amanda's ABC videoblog

Amanda's new ABC News videoblog went live today and it'll appear every Wednesday. "As I was driving to work today, I thought about just how much javascript sucks."

And Amanda says, "I am candidly chronically my experiences working with big media here."

The New York Times has a writeup: An Online Newscaster’s Appealing Bafflement. Excerpt:

Now in the warm embrace of the mainstream media, this onetime indie figure is making online video segments on eclectic subjects. And ABC is meanwhile promising its groovy young girlfriend that she won’t have change a bit, even for corporate events: no first-lady suits, no hot-roller hair, no mannequin makeup. Ever. On her first minishow, which became available yesterday on ABC’s Web site, Ms. Congdon shows up in a taut Steely Dan T-shirt and opens with her trademark girly casualness: “O.K., this is weird.”

NBC Teams with One True Media

I'd missed this the other day, from the Red Herring:  NBC Teams with One True Media.

One True Media said Monday that NBC Universal will use the company’s online simple video-editing technology to power viewer video creation and submission for the new interactive daytime TV talk show iVillage Live.

The Redwood City, California-based online video company competes in the market of video mash-ups like Eyespot and Yahoo-acquired Jumpcut. But it differentiates itself from competitors by selling users their final product in DVD form.

Many members of the site are moms. They also happen to be the target demographic for NBC’s iVillage Live talk show.

NBC expressed interest in One True Media when it found a lot of the site’s users were posting video content on iVillage. 

Media titans plan site to rival YouTube

Wall Street Journal: Four major media companies -- News Corp.'s Fox, Viacom Inc., CBS Corp. and NBC Universal  -- are reportedly in talks to create a video site to compete with YouTube. The companies, owners of most of the major TV networks, envision a jointly owned site that would be the primary Web source for video content from the networks, allowing them to cash in on fast-growing Web video advertising.

Good luck with that one! More from ITWire and TechCrunch: The Video Startup That May Never Launch.

Today's top 20 viral videos

You can see the day's top 20 viral videos at Viral Video Chart.

Revver 1.1 is live

Revver, one of the few sites on the Web that is in the media producer's corner, went to version 1.1 yesterday, including a redesigned home page and a slick new Advanced Widget Builder. It looks pretty hot. Says the Revverites: "The main goals of this release are to make it easier for you to find great videos on Revver and to give you more tools to share them. ... Revver is the first online video sharing network to put artists first and to share revenue 50/50 with video-makers. And we are the only network to share revenue with video-sharers as well."

Adds Revver's in-house video superstar, Micki Krimmel:

We had one of our favorite creators make a few promo videos for us. They're hilarious. So we're asking our users to upload those videos to YouTube and other video-sharing sites to help spread the word about Revver. ... Here's the blog post  outlining that campaign. The idea is that we're the good guys and we shouldn't be afraid to poach people from those other less creator-friendly sites.

Well put. Hope they get some viral mileage out of this.

EngageMedia for grassroots video in Australia and environs

EngageMedia, a website for video about social justice and environmental issues in Australia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific, recently launched its beta site and got some funding for software development. Cool -- they're doing great stuff.

Azureus' HD videos trump YouTube

Wired News: Azureus' HD Vids Trump YouTube.

Amateurs, big media and online video

Journalist Scott Kirsner in the San Jose Mercury News: As online viewing booms, the amateurs give way to big media.

At the recent Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco, Mary Meeker, an Internet analyst at the investment bank Morgan Stanley, defined three different categories of video content on the Internet: amateur, semi-professional and professional. She said she would expect that viewers might divide their attention equally between those three categories. An example of semi-professional content might be a series of yoga videos made by a local studio, or a low-budget feature film that is well-made, but was never shown in theaters. ...

I think Scott sometimes sells the amateurs short. Meeker's right, there will be a strong mix of amateur, semi-professional and professional video material in the coming years.

Jon Healey of the LA Times in the San Jose Merc: MySpace, YouTube hope to escape the fate of Napster.

'The Future of Web Video'

From Scott Kirsner:

After a year of work, and more than 100 interviews, I've just published a book called The Future of Web Video: New Opportunities for Producers, Entrepreneurs, Media Companies and Advertisers. It's available in eBook/PDF form (which you can download immediately), or as a paperback, which requires a few days for shipping.

Google/YouTube: Don't sue us

BusinessWeek Online: The Google/YouTube Come-On. Google and YouTube are dangling nine-figure sums in front of major programming and network players. Google calls these monies licensing fees, but some executives characterize the subtext like this: Don't sue us over copyrights. Take this (substantial) payment, and trust us to figure out how we'll all make serious money once we get advertising and revenue sharing worked out.

YouTube's purged videos migrating elsewhere

Forbes.com: YouTube now performs frequent purges of television shows and other proprietary content uploaded by users. Those forbidden files are largely migrating to DailyMotion.com, another video-uploading site. The Paris-based DailyMotion appears to do little if any regulation of copyrighted material. Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.  

BitTorrent's video deals with the studios

San Jose Mercury News: BitTorrent cuts online video deals

YouTube coming to cellphones

Well, this is interesting. Wonder how they plan to compensate the video creators? Or rather, if they plan to.

NY Times:  YouTube Coming Soon to Cellphones

Lonelygirl and YouTube

Wired magazine: The Secret World of Lonelygirl. How a 19-year-old actress and a few struggling Web filmmakers took on TV.

Plus, Bob Garfield's witty piece, YouTube vs. Boob Tube. TV advertising is broken, putting $67 billion up for grabs. Which explains why google spent a billion and change on an online video startup.

YouTube vs. Google Video vs. Revver

 

From my friend Chris Pirillo of Gnomedex fame. Pretty funny. Click on videos one, two and three in quick succession. (Click the small play button for YouTube, not the big centered button, for some reason, or it'll launch a new page.)

New version of Democracy Player

I had planned on blogging this tonight, after receiving an email from Nick Reville, but Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing saved me the trouble:

There's a new, faster, more efficient version of Democracy Player out today. Democracy is the free and open Internet video player that can subscribe to easily-published video feeds. It automatically fetches new videos using BitTorrent (so the video-maker's server is never overwhelmed by sudden popularity) and it plays it no matter what video format it's in.

Version 0.92, released today, fixes a ton of performance issues, mostly in the Windows version (Democracy is available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux). If you've tried Democracy before and had problems with it, this is the version to get. Link

Study: iPod video yet to play big

Hollywood Reporter:  Less than 1% of all content accessed by users of Apple's iTunes and iPod devices is video, a number that climbs to just 2.2% for video iPod owners, according to report from Nielsen Media Research. The October survey of 400 iPod owners ... calls into the question the popularity of TV and movies on Apple's products.

A visit to the Reichstag

From IndyMedia contributor Brian Thomas, a video essay about the Reichstag and about a people's confronting their past. I don't agree with all the political views expressed here, but it's well done. YouTube | hi-quality QuickTime 7

Tim Street on French Maid TV

Ever since Vloggercon, I've been meaning to catch up with Tim Street. So at Podcamp West yesterday, I interviewed him about his wildly viral videoblog, French Maid TV. Ooo la la! (Ourmedia page | watch video)

Cross-posted to Real People Network.

VlogEurope starts tomorrow

The VlogEurope conference starts tomorrow in Milan, Italy. (Wiki is here.)  Wish I could be there to join Deirdre and friends.

Can Daily Motion challenge YouTube?

BusinessWeek.com: Can Daily Motion Challenge YouTube? The French video-sharing site already has 16 million page-views a day. Can it resist its giant U.S. rival by going international?

Watch iPod videos on United soon

Red Herring: Apple Computer is entering deals with six airlines to integrate its iPod devices into in-flight entertainment systems. Video content from iPods will be able to be played on seat-back monitors on planes operated by Air France, Continental, Delta, Emirates, KLM, and United.

Cool, but where will they get their videos from? Not Apple.

YouTube vs. TechCrunch

TechCrunch says it has received a cease and desist letter from an attorney representing YouTube, for posting data on how to download the site's videos to a hard drive. Blogger Michael Arrington writes: "The irony of YouTube accusing others of copyright infringement is delicious."

Meantime, from the Financial Times: Google, in closing the deal to buy YouTube, says it has set aside some $204 million to address possible copyright lawsuits over the next 12 months arising from the acquisition. CEO Eric Schmidt earlier denied reports that Google had put aside $500 million for possible lawsuits.

Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointers.

Online video auteurs

From the Sunday New York Times Magazine: The Online Auteurs. Excerpt:

For Kent Nichols [a friend whom I spoke with at the Vloggies the other night] and Douglas Sarine, the question was, What can you do in a squalid West Hollywood apartment with one camera, two guys and a ninja? Nichols, who is 30, and Sarine, who is 33, met six years ago while taking improv-comedy classes at the Second City Training Center in Los Angeles. They began collaborating on short films soon after, and in 2003 won a national make-a-movie-quick contest called the 48-Hour Film Project. But they never even considered making a serious film.

“Going the Sundance Festival route is insane,” Nichols told me recently. “There are thousands of submissions, and maybe 5 or 10 get distribution deals who aren’t already established filmmakers. Even the ones that do well at the festival don’t necessarily get a deal unless  Naomi Watts is in it, pushing herself in a new direction.”

While they were taking classes at Second City, Nichols had a day job in an improvisational children’s theater group and Sarine made a living as a paralegal and dog walker. Still, every weekend, they and a dozen of their classmates were out shooting their own films, with Nichols directing, holding the camera, editing, checking the sound. Their experiments were under five minutes long, and they made about 40 of them. Nichols sent the best one to a film festival for high school and college students. He wondered what to do with the other 39, and he thought it might involve the Internet.

Then, last year, YouTube came along. ...

Actually, no. Nichols and AskaNinja got their start on Ourmedia, not on YouTube.

There's more than one grassroots media site, despite what Big Media is telling you.

Related: AskaNinja DVD release party in Los Angeles on Dec. 5.

Online video will go pro

San Jose Mercury News: Online video could look more like TV programming, with venture, ad dollars paving the way of new media.

YouTube and the 'right-brain Renaissance'

Terry Heaton on the Right-brain Renaissance: His latest  essay examines a "right brain renaissance" in our culture -- a shift away from counting numbers and making rules to creative thinking and creative expression. Writes Terry:

When people speak of culture wars, this conflict is very much at the center. This is an important understanding as we move into the Media 2.0 space, for much of what "works" here doesn't make a lot of sense. Or perhaps it's better to say that it makes sense only after it has been up and running for awhile, when we can see what it's all about. But by then, it's often too late for us. Google is the classic example. Their purchase of YouTube doesn't compute with those who think in a purely left brain fashion, but to those who see beyond the numbers, it's a perfect marriage. 

Google's data or yours?

From Dan Gillmor at the Center for Citizen Media:

A Couple of Post-Election Thoughts. Excerpt:

The collaborative nature of the online medium got a workout in several journalistic ways. Perhaps the most notable was Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall’s brilliant gathering of string on what turned out to be a last-second bit of trickery — not the only thing of its kind by the two parties, but one of the most notable — the now-notorious Republican “robo-calling” stunt where automatic phone dialers inundated voters with repeated calls that appeared, at first glance, to come from Democrats — a tactic quite plainly designed to annoy voters, not educate them.

Marshall, more than any other journalist, blew the whistle on this stunt — and, moreover, he led the charge to persuade the traditional media to wake up and cover what plainly was a big story. I strongly doubt that this story would have been in the major newspapers and on TV had Marshall not done this work.

Agreed.

Your Data or Google’s? Some Small Progress. Excerpt:

When you upload your videos to places like Google, YouTube (now part of Google) and other sites; when a blog-hosting company keeps your blog for you; when you entrust what you’ve created to others — it’s vital to ensure that your data is yours. Your ISP doesn’t own it. You do.

Google takes the position that while it’s your data, Google has the right to hang onto it essentially forever, and then to mine the data and use it to create better advertising. I find that more than a little creepy, and I think you should, too.

I'm not sure what Dan's getting at here. You upload your video, Google's servers store them for free for as long as you keep it there, and it earns revenues around it through ads, which you know about in the first place. I'd like to see a revenue split with the video creator, but there's nothing creepy about this.

Did YouTube swing the election to the Dems?

The Boston Herald has a column that raises the same question I've been wondering: Did YouTube swing the Senate majority to the Dems?

YouTube didn’t even exist in the last election - and it may help decide the Senate.

Consider: U.S. Sen. George Allen’s race in Virginia hinged on a few thousand votes.
How many people downloaded his infamous “Macaca” gaffe - where he tossed the apparent racial slur at an opposition volunteer - from the video Web site? Nearly 400,000.
And the scene of his campaign heavies manhandling a liberal blogger: 180,000. ...

How many people downloaded video clips of Rush Limbaugh’s bizarre attack on Michael J. Fox for his role in that race, or the actor’s dignified response? More than 1.1 million. Limbaugh’s comments can only have helped his opponents. He may have been “rallying his base,” but he was also offending independents.

When it comes to politics, the Internet is finally coming out of the rec room and into the mainstream. ...

The future of online video

Nicholas Reville of Participatory Culture at GetDemocracy: Openness Matters. RSS Can Help.

The Vloggies in hyperspeed

The Vloggies in hyperspeed: "If you weren’t able to make it to the Vloggies this past weekend in San Francisco, then you can experience the magic in this super condensed version of the awards festivities."

YouTube is Time's invention of the year

NY Daily News: YouTube Is Time's 'Invention of the Year'

Time magazine is naming YouTube as Invention of the Year. "The rules are different now," the magazine says, "and one Web site changed them."

Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

Dina Kaplan on Blip.tv's Vloggie wins

Dina Kaplan, COO and co-founder of Blip.tv, talks about Blip's two wins at the Vloggie awards Saturday night in this camera phone interview I conducted at the event. (Ourmedia page | watch video)

YouTube's impact on the election

NY Times:  Online Player in the Game of Politics. A citizen captures a Republican House candidate telling a church congregation via Webcast that God had called her to run for Congress -- and puts the video online, of course. 

Photos of the Vloggies

Here are some photos of last night's Vloggies, the first videoblogging awards to honor the top vlogs.

Among those I hobnobbed with during the night: Chuck Olsen, Jonny Goldstein, Lori Erickson, Robert Scoble, Dave Toole, Morty Wiggins, Mary Hodder, Steven Starr, Colette Vogele, Steve Garfield,  Scott Beale, Thomas Hawk, Irina Slutsky, Bill Streeter, Enric Teller, Kent Nichols, Josh Leo, Richard Show, Ted Tagami, Chris Ritke, Micki Krimmel, Dina Kaplan, Valerie Cunningham, Kevin Rose, Andrew Michael Baron, Sean Gilligan, Bre Pettis, Jory des Jardins, Stowe Boyd, Jodi Williams,  triple-winner Rox of Beach Walks with Rox, and many others. 

Two categories that should have been included but weren't: Favorite Mash-up, and Favorite Citizen Journalist. And Steve Garfield didn't get the recognition that he deserves.

Robert Scoble has the rundown on all the winners and more. Plus, photos from Scott Beale and Thomas Hawk. And more coverage from PodTech, Renee Blodgett, and others.

Heading to the Vloggies

I'm heading to the Vloggie awards in a little while -- the first videoblogging awards competition organized by PodTech. (I was one of the judges.) The show will take place at 6 tonight at the Swedish American Music Hall in San Francisco. Should be fun!

Stephen Colbert: Don't love and leave YouTube

From Mark Glaser at PBS's MediaShift:

Your Guide to Wikis 

Open Letter: Stephen Colbert: Don't Love and Leave YouTube 

Don't I know you from the Net?

BusinessWeek Online: Don't I Know You from the Internet? Some performers are parlaying online celebrity into deals with big media. Soon they may be able to just stick to the Web.

YouTube will purge copyrighted clips

NY Times: YouTube Is Purging Copyrighted Clips

Users take part in Election '06 via video

Sunday NY Times: Scary, Like Funny Scary.

It’s not that campaign ads are so nasty. They are always nasty, brutish and 30 seconds long. If anything, the scare tactics that loomed so large in the 2002 election in the wake of 9/11 now seem passé. This time around, many of the most powerful political ads are funny — 2006 marks the Comedy Centralization of politics.

Some are playful, others are mean-spirited, snarky and downright scurrilous. But the new breed of humorous ads don’t just mock the opponent, many of them wink at the absurdity of the entire campaign process.

It’s not so surprising. In a culture where growing numbers of viewers say they get their news from “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report,” and at a time when anything shocking or amusing on television can be downloaded and e-mailed instantly, candidates are co-opting the YouTube revolution.

Please. This is not the YouTube revolution. Call it the personal media revolution, or the participatory media revolution, or the citizen media revolution. Just don't name it for a for-profit company built on piracy.

Up for a Vloggie award

My videoblog, Real People Network, has been nominated for a Best Interviews award in the first Vloggie awards. I'm also a judge, so I won't be voting for my site, but you're certainly free to do so, at this address.

Video blog toolmakers to explode

Bambi Francisco at AlwaysOn: Video blog toolmakers to explode. (That's a good thing.)

What comes after YouTube?

Business Week Online: What Comes After YouTube? Meet the startups making deals with Big Media for online video's next step.

Video, social networks to surge in 2007

Bambi Francisco at AlwaysOn: Video, social networks to surge in '07.

Talent agency aims to find Web video stars

NY Times: Talent Agency Is Aiming to Find Web Video Stars

One of Hollywood’s top five talent agencies has created an online unit devoted to scouting out up-and-coming creators of Internet content — particularly video — and finding work for them in Web-based advertising and entertainment, as well as in the older media.      

The move by the United Talent Agency — best known as the home of comedians like Vince Vaughn and Jack Black, filmmakers like M. Night Shyamalan and television producers like Dick Wolf and David Chase — amounts to a bet, albeit a modest one, that Web video is on a growth curve similar to that of cable television a generation ago. ...

Soap star to co-host Vloggies

The Bold and the Beautiful soap star Daniel McVicar will serve as co-host of the first Vloggies.

HaveMoneyWillVlog funds another project

The Colombia Migration Project -- another praiseworthy grassroots video project fully funded (to the tune of $2,100) by contributors to HaveMoneyWillVlog.

Legal p2p downloads coming?

Ars technica: Legal p2p video downloads coming soon?

Did Google's purchase of YouTube change the online world? More specifically, do the deals signed with content providers on the morning of the buyout indicate that the industry is now open to new ways of licensing content?

Michael Geist, an influential professor of Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, thinks that it does.

Using the new online video editing sites

I spent a couple of hours today experimenting with the new breed of online video editing websites. I figured this would be a good way for me to post the video clips I've been taking with my Nokia N-90 smart phone.

Alas, the experience wasn't what I had hoped for. (Disclaimer: I know — and like — the people who run all three of these sites.)

My first stop was at VideoEgg. Their partnership with TypePad — the home of all three of my blogs — makes them a perfect candidate. Unfortunately, my video interview clocked in at 6 minutes 30 seconds, and VideoEgg still imposes a 5-minute maximum for all videos. I would have been happy to cut it down to 5 minutes, but couldn't upload the video in the first place to do so.

Next, I returned to a site I like a lot: Eyespot. This week they released version 2.2 of the online software, with great options such as stats, comments, tags, ratings, embedded codes, hi-res downloads, contextual browsing and the like.

I uploaded my video successfully. I wanted to trim a few seconds just from the beginning and the end, but didn't at first glance see the option for trimming a clip. (It's there, but I missed it.) Instead, I opted for beginning and ending transitions and hit mix. The average time for others today was 23 seconds. Mine was a longer video, but after 15 minutes, I just gave up.

On to Jumpcut. Yahoo! bought them a few months ago, and I could see why. Nice, simple interface (as with the other two), and commands (like Slice and Delete) that were plain and simple. I successfully trimmed the video, but couldn't figure out how to add a title to the beginning of the clip (my original attempt overlaid the title over the entire clip, blackening it out).

I published the final work, and a few seconds later, voila! There's my interview with Jonna Anderson. (See above.) I intensely dislike the fact that the site gives the media creator no option to let users download the video instead of just stream it. It's the YouTube phenomenon.

I'll probably return and use all three sites at various times. But not for my everyday videoblogging. I'll continue to use Ourmedia to host my videos.

A major update to Democracy Player

Participatoryculture.org today released a major update to its Democracy Player, a great application that lets you subscribe to, capture and watch Internet video. You can download it here.

This version (0.9.1) has lots of new features.  The three biggest, says Nicholas Reville:

1. The interface is faster and more responsive.

2. You can create 'Search Channels' that automatically search a channel (rss feed) or a website like YouTube or Ourmedia and download videos that match the search.

3. The Mac and Windows versions can now both search, save and play Flash video.

You can see the full list of enhancements here.

Music companies now own part of YouTube

Thursday's NY Times:

Three of the four major music companies  —  Vivendi’s Universal Music Group,  Sony and Bertelsmann’s jointly owned Sony BMG Music Entertainment, and the Warner Music Group — each quietly negotiated to take small stakes in YouTube as part of video- and music-licensing deals they struck shortly before the sale, people involved in the talks said yesterday.

Garfield videoblogs Massachusetts' next governor

Blogger and citizen reporter Steve Garfield has a series of videos he captured of Deval Patrick, the Democratic candidate who's ahead in the race to become the next governor of Massachusetts. Check out Patrick's Just Words speech, for example. Nice work, Steve!

We're heading to an Internet video world

David Carr in today's NY Times: Idiosyncratic and Personal, PC Edges TV. Excerpt:

Jennifer Feikin, the director of Google Video and the only panelist not invested in the old model, did her level best to let sleeping dogs lie, calling online video “definitely not a substitute in any way” for television. She has some facts on her side: according to Nielsen Media Research, last year, the average household watched television 8 hours and 14 minutes a day, a 3-minute increase from the 2004-5 season and a record high.

But Howard Shimmel, a senior vice president at Nielsen, said research had shown something else: “Internet homes, including broadband and dial-up, watch 9 percent less television over all than the general population. The impact by network differs, with some experiencing 25 percent lower ratings and others substantially unaffected.” ...

The threat isn’t new media displacing old media as much as personalization. Media has become something people make, forward, link and program.

Or, as I like to say in my presentations, old media is something done to you. New media is media that you use -- produce, create, design, discuss or interact with in some fashion.

Newspapers felt the pain of technological disruption first, when people had dial-up modems capable of transmitting modest, largely text-based data. As fatter pipes developed, music performed a jailbreak, leaving behind a maimed industry. And now, with the number of ever-faster connections spreading and the advent of the Flash player, television seems positioned as roadkill, with great big movie files soon to fall after that.

The question remaining is how these industries will choose to react. Television, it seems, may have learned some of the hard lessons endured by the music industry and taken an attitude of cautious engagement with downloaders rather than randomly slapping them with lawsuits.

Indeed. It will be fascinating to watch how this plays out over the next five years.

Google, YouTube and you

In the Sunday NY Times:

A Loopy Deal That Actually Makes Sense

Planet Google Wants You

Sealing the Deal, From the Handshake to the Tee-Hee

We are a camera

Google tries to reassure media companies

Google boss Eric Schmidt is barnstorming New York to assure Time Warner, Viacom, CBS and other traditional media companies that the search giant's acquisition of YouTube will not turn it into a content competitor. "We are not in the content business," he insists.

Oh, yes you are.

Meantime, Time Warner chief Dick Parsons says his company will pursue copyright complaints against video-sharing site YouTube. Says Parsons: "If you let one thing ignore your rights as an owner it makes it much more difficult to defend those rights when the next guy comes along."

Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointers.

More deal details from YouTube founders

The YouTube lads, aka the Kings of Grassroots Video, have a Q&A in the San Jose Merc.

Google: A media 'monster'?

Vincent Maher in E-Media Tidbits today:

We're Facing a Monster: Will Someone Please Step Up and Say It?

Chickenshop via Google Images Is Google a monster?

In the midst of the dot-com-bubble-style euphoria triggered by Google buying YouTube (a $1.65 billion stock transaction), I see very little criticism leveled at Google over this deal. But not everyone is happy. According to WSJ.com (subscribers only), NewsCorp is threatening to ban YouTube videos from MySpace as a result of this deal.

As Google continues to grow, it has shown some stripes that clash with its "don't be evil" mantra. The idea that Google will leave YouTube intact is possibly wishful thinking on the part of loyal users.

This is especially likely if you look at what Google did to Writely (its Web-based word processor) today -- they combined it with a Web-based spreadsheet application and relaunched it as Google Docs. This comes after buying Writely in March. Since then, Google has changed Writely's interface, made a GMail account mandatory, redirected the old site, and deleted the cached version of the site.

It's no wonder that Google -- the poster-child for the "post-dot-com-bubble" bubble -- is on NewsCorp's hitlist. I think Google should be on every media company's hitlist.

As a veritable superpower in information gathering and publishing, we should remember that Google has used its power to censor the Internet in China, and to help itself win court cases through exclusive access to its GMail spam filter data. And in Belguim, Google scoffed at legitimate copyright claims.

The cultural impact of such power is to stifle competition and innovation -- the very things Google says it stands for.

Can someone please step up and say we're facing a monster?

The Vloggies are coming

I've agreed to be a judge at the Vloggies, the first annual videoblogging awards, and I've got some good company.

Google buys YouTube for $1.6 billion

Wow. Google agrees to buy YouTube for $1.65 billion.

I'm speechless ... but others aren't.

Mark Cuban at BlogMaverick: I still think Google is crazy :)

ZDNet: YouTube may add to Google's copyright worries.

Silicon.com UK: YouTube 'a good fit for Google'

Financial Times: How to get seriously rich in two easy moves

New York Times: A Slippery Slope of Censorship at YouTube

Here's the chatter in the blogosophere. More than 230 postings on Slashdot.

What do YouTube's users think of Google's purchase? Hard to say, since there isn't any way for them to express their views collectively on the YouTube site.

Will Google buy YouTube for $1.6 billion?

The Wall Street Journal Online reported on Friday that search giant Google is in discussions to acquire the popular video-sharing site YouTube for nearly $1.6 billion. Citing a "person familiar with the matter," the paper said that talks are still in the "sensitive" stages and could break off. Both companies declined to comment.

Video ads 'annoying' to viewers

AlwaysOn: Video ads 'annoying' to viewers.

Forrester Senior Analyst Brian Haven speaks with Beet.TV from his Cambridge, Massachusetts office. His take on the nascent online video advertising space is both optimistic and harsh. He writes that video ads seen on clips as "pre-roll" don't yet resonate with consumers: they don't notice the ads, don't interact with them and are fairly negative about ads that interfere with their viewing enjoyment. He says that 82 percent of consumers say that ads within a video clip are "annoying."

The battle over YouTube

Newsweek: The Battle Over YouTube. The video-sharing site is the hottest start-up since Google. Is it worth a billion dollars, or is it just another company in need of a business model?

The coming dramatic decline of YouTube?

Mark Cuban had this the other day: The Coming Dramatic Decline of Youtube.

What is it about youtube.com that has made it so successful so quickly ? Is it the amazing quality of user generated content ? Is it a broadband fueled obsession with watching short videos ?

No & No.

Youtube's rapid ascension to the top of the traffic ranks can be attributed to two and only two reasons:

1. Free Hosting from any 3rd Party site
Hey, why pay for bandwidth for a video if you dont have to ? A blog, a myspace page, an email, any website. Just throw in some html in Youtube.com foots the bill for bandwidth. Sure you are limited by size of file, but so what. Just chop it up into parts 1 through N. Its fast, easy and free.

Come to our website and use our video hosting services, we can party like its 1999 all over again !

2. Copyrighted music and video. ...

This so reminds me of the early days of Napster. They were the first to tell you it wasnt illegal. They didnt host anything but an index to link to all the illegal downloaders. Youtube doesnt upload anything illegal and will take down whatever you ask them to. Sounds legit right ? ...

And the New York Times follows up Saturday with this: YouTube’s Video Poker.

YouTube has also become a vast repository of video taken without permission from television shows and movies, not to mention home movies constructed — with nary a cent paid in royalties — from commercial music and imagery.

Mr. Hurley was surrounded by curious media executives at Allen & Company’s annual Sun Valley mogulfest in July. They wondered: friend or foe? Is he earnestly working to make YouTube and its exuberant users conform to the existing standards of copyright law and contractual obligations? Or is he cynically flouting the law to enable YouTube to grow rapidly, calculating that he will be able to cut a more advantageous deal later, or perhaps sell the company to someone else who will be able to sort through the mess of liabilities?

Netscape adds video capabilities

Reblogged from Jonny Goldstein's new Reinventing Television blog

Jason Calacanis announced new video upload and playback on the Netscape social-news portal that AOL owns. It transcodes video to Flash, and it also lets you link to the original format, and it transcodes your video to an iPod-ready video format. It’s still in alpha, but it’s an exciting development.

Letting anyone create an online video-sharing community

San Jose Mercury News:

A Manhattan-based software company thinks it has an idea for stealing market share from YouTube. They distribute free software that lets anyone -- even a bumbling, bloated Hollywood studio -- create an online video-sharing community.

To see the KickApps concept in action, check out National Lampoon's Knucklehead video. Users can submit videos in three categories: ``x sports,'' ``drinkie party vids'' and ``show us your butt.''

The Vloggies are coming

Here's how you can submit a nomination to the Vloggies (videoblogging awards), to be handed out Nov. 4 in San Francisco.

Yahoo teams with Current TV

San Jose Mercury News: Yahoo teams with Current TV on a new section of the Yahoo! Video site featuring user-generated content.

Amanda across America

At Amanda UnBoomed, Amanda Congdon (former host of "Rocketboom") tells about her AmandaAcrossAmerica tour, which begins Tuesday.

YouTube, Warner Music strike deal

YouTube, the video-sharing site, said on Monday that it has signed a major new deal with Warner Music Group. Under the agreement, YouTube will distribute music videos from Warner's roster of artists, as well as behind-the-scenes footage, artist interviews, original programming and other special content. YouTube users also will be able to incorporate music from Warner's catalog into the videos they create and upload onto the site. The two companies will share advertising revenue from both the music videos and user-uploaded content incorporating Warner's audio.

Four vlogs enter Technorati Top 100

Four videoblogs — ZeFrank, Rocketboom, Hot Air and AskaNinja — have entered the Technorati 100 in the past two months. Technorati ranks the blogs with the most inbound links — or the most "authority," as they say.

Video mania is in full swing

Sunday NY Times: A Video Business Model Ready to Move Beyond Beta.

Video mania is in full swing. Amazon is finally doing movie downloads. Apple is touting a new wireless gizmo to beam movies from laptops to TV screens. NBC is introducing a video syndication service that might pit it against Google and Yahoo, and it’s joining the other big networks in putting its shows online for free with advertising. MTV is working with Google to populate its video content all over the Web. ...

TiVo last week brought to market its Series 3 digital recording box, which appears to have the ability to do everything from record in high-definition to take video files through a broadband Internet connection either directly or wirelessly. At $799, however, it’s the most expensive TiVo toy yet.

Motionbox adds 'deep tagging' for videos

Motionbox, the personal video sharing service, today added Deep Tagging, giving users the ability to tag selected portions inside of a video, jump to the best parts, and instantly share them with others.

Motionbox’s Deep Tagging feature lets you intuitively mark specific moments inside a video and add descriptive keywords that apply just to those selected portions, which are then searchable throughout Motionbox’s video network.

“Everyone knows the experience of trying to watch a video and having to slog through a bunch of stuff you really aren’t interested in, in order to get to the highlights — whether it’s your vacation videos, a ballgame or a speech — now you can point people directly to the best parts of the video, as easily as sending them an email,” said Chris O’Brien, Motionbox’s CEO & co-founder.

Sounds amazing. I'll be talking with their CEO about this tomorrow.

AP, MSNBC video to support Macs, Firefox

Mark Glaser at PBS MediaShift: Associated Press, MSNBC Video to Support Macs, Firefox. Mark writes about the brouhaha around the AP Online Video Network, which required Windows machines and Internet Explorer to watch videos. Now, AP and Microsoft are in beta testing for a cross-platform Flash video player that is due in October. Plus, MSNBC will be implementing the same cross-platform player as well in the near
future. Good news to Firefox and Mac users everywhere, sez Mark.

Revver launches

Revver 1.0 launched today. Hope it takes off in a big way, so that video artists will be able to make some money by attaching ads to their videos.

Lonelygirl15 video diaries were a hoax

MSNBC.com: Creators of Lonelygirl15 blogs go public. Friends told adventures of 16-year-old girl as an experiment in storytelling.

Plus, Mark Glaser is on the case.

The Egokast: Video on your belt buckle

NY Times: If You Buckle Up, They Will Watch.

Though a keen aficionado of electronic gadgets, Shaw Kaake sympathizes with the technophobes in one respect: he thinks that people entranced by hand-held screens tend to ignore the world around them, to the detriment of civil society. Mr. Kaake’s response to this trend is the Egokast, a palm-sized video player that doubles as a belt buckle.

“This is the first media device that you don’t watch, but everybody else does,” said Mr. Kaake, an American industrial designer who has lived in Shanghai for seven years. “Instead of staring into your BlackBerry or your P.S.P., you’re looking at the reactions of people to the content.”

New 'JerryTime' episode

It's JerryTime, episode 9: The Big Time. Check it out.

How to be a Net video hit

Ellen Lee in the San Francisco Chronicle: How to be a Net video hit, with a nice 6-step how-to illustration by John Mavroudis.

Polishing that home video

CNET News.com talks about polishing that home video.

Consumer electronics and visual-effects creators are getting the message: The YouTube generation is clamoring for tools that can help polish and add a touch of Hollywood to their homemade videos. They're demanding ease of use, low prices and visual effects that wow audiences.

Most of the material found at Revver, Metacafe and YouTube typically doesn't include much in the way of production values. It's usually just some guy with a camera recording his dog, baby or girlfriend. But the numbers of people trying to infuse their work with a unique look and craftsmanship are growing ...

New at the Learning Center

New at Ourmedia's Personal Media Learning Center:

Introduction to digital storytelling

Seven blogging tools reviewed

Blog search: Keeping track of conversations in the blogosphere

Building an audience for your blog or podcast

How can I capture great travel photos?

A guide to making and distributing digital movies

How to record Internet radio

How can I discover new music by bands I might like?

How to capture a screenshot of a video

Podcasting music: what it will cost you to stay on the safe side of the law

RSS tutorial

Color light on the cheap

Build your own lightbox

Fabrik: A YouTube for adults

Today's San Jose Mercury News: Fabrik: A YouTube for adults. San Mateo, Calif., start-up lets customers store data and share within limited group.

Warfare's new theater: Graphic online video

Newark Star-Ledger: Warfare's new theater: Graphic online video. Propagandists and media scramble to make use of perception-changing images. Excerpt:

J.D. Lasica sees it differently. He is co-founder of Ourmedia.org, a video site that allows posting of gruesome war footage. He thinks teenagers should take a look.

"I wonder if the Vietnam War would have gone 12 years if the Internet had been around," Lasica said. "It would have been a much more realistic view of what the battlefield feels like."

YouTube: a billion-dollar steal?

CNET News.com: YouTube could be a steal at $1 billion.

Slashdot weighs in here.

Video everywhere

Britain's PC Advisor: Video everywhere. How to find films and clips on the web and watch them on your PC, TV or mobile device.

Sony to buy Grouper

San Jose Mercury News: Sony Pictures is expected to announce today that it has acquired Sausalito Internet video-sharing company Grouper for $65 million. Teaming up with Sony further highlights the role amateur videos -- and the companies that host them -- are having in changing the Hollywood landscape.

YouTube introduces video advertising

San Jose Mercury News: YouTube's new ad model.

The YouTube election

Sunday New York Times: The YouTube Election.

August, usually the sleepiest month in politics, has suddenly become raucous, thanks in part to YouTube, the vast videosharing Web site.

Last week, Senator George Allen, the Virginia Republican, was caught on tape at a campaign event twice calling a college student of Indian descent a “macaca,” an obscure racial slur.

The student, working for the opposing campaign, taped the comments, and the video quickly appeared on YouTube, where it rocketed to the top of the site’s most-viewed list. It then bounced from the Web to the front page of The Washington Post to cable and network television news shows. Despite two public apologies by Senator Allen, and his aides’ quick explanations for how the strange word tumbled out, political analysts rushed to downgrade Mr. Allen’s stock as a leading contender for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. ...

YouTube may be changing the political process in more profound ways, for good and perhaps not for the better, according to strategists in both parties. If campaigns resemble reality television, where any moment of a candidate’s life can be captured on film and posted on the Web, will the last shreds of authenticity be stripped from our public officials? Will candidates be pushed further into a scripted bubble? In short, will YouTube democratize politics, or destroy it? ...

Some political analysts say that YouTube could force candidates to stop being so artificial, since they know their true personalities will come out anyway. ...

But others see a future where politicians are more vapid and risk averse than ever. Matthew Dowd, a longtime strategist for President Bush who is now a partner in a social networking Internet venture, Hot Soup, looks at the YouTube-ization of politics, and sees the death of spontaneity. ...

The explosion of instant video may also put pressure on the news media. In the old days, the Allen video would not have been available for all to see. “Imagine this happened 10 years ago,” Mr. Wolfson said. “We had video and trackers then. But you had to get it to a TV station or newspaper. You had to persuade them to run a story on it. This allows you to avoid the middleman.”

What the article doesn't say, of course, is that there are hundreds of video hosting sites online, not just YouTube.

Off the grid

The geeks -- including Ryanne and Robert Scoble -- unplug in Montana. Wish I could have joined them in Big Sky country.

'View from the Basement'

Susan Kirkpatrick just posted a wonderful collaborative video, featuring footage from more than 35 videobloggers who submitted clips for the final music video. Awesome.

Most popular grassroots videos

If you're into this sort of thing, Internet TV Charts lists the 10 most popular videos currently on Google Video, YouTube, Digg and VideoSift.

Dvorak on YouTube

John Dvorak at MarketWatch on the YouTube video sharing phenomenon: Missing the point about YouTube. Commentary: Pent up demand and ease of use add up to explosive growth.

By merely combining a pent-up demand with ease-of-use you get the YouTube phenomenon. It's brain dead simple, but I'm telling you that is all there is to it.

'We Are Not Alone'

video mashup: ben nisetar
home: they-live.com
spoken word: david icke
music: martin noakes

We Are Not Alone, a new photo/video mashup (in Flash) by Benn Nisetar, using onetruemedia’s online montage tool. Terrific!

Al Gore spoof on YouTube not so amateurish

ABC News: Al Gore YouTube Spoof Not So Amateurish. Republican PR firm said to be behind 'Inconvenient Truth' spoof.

A tiny little movie making fun of Al Gore, supposedly made by an amateur filmmaker, recently appeared on the popular Web site YouTube.com.

At first blush, the spoof seemed like a scrappy little homemade film poking fun at Gore and his anti-global warming crusade.

In the movie, Gore is seen boring an army of penguins with his lecture and blaming global warming for everything, including Lindsay Lohan's thinness.

But when the Wall Street Journal tried to find the guy who posted the film "Al Gore's Penguin Army" — listed on YouTube as a 29-year-old — they found the movie didn't come from an amateur working out of his basement.

The film actually came from a slick Republican public relations firm called DCI, which just happens to have oil giant Exxon as a client. ...

Google, Viacom test video ads

NY Times: Google Joins Viacom in Web Test of Video Ads. Fascinating look at new business models emerging for video on the Web.

Google has struck a deal to allow Web site owners to put video clips from Viacom, including “SpongeBob SquarePants” and MTV’s “Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County,” on their pages. The clips will be accompanied by advertising, with Viacom, Google and the site owners dividing the ad revenue. ...

An executive involved in the deal said Viacom would receive more than two-thirds of the revenue. ...

By contrast, most of the other companies that are trying to build video advertising networks — including AOL, Brightcove and Revver — are proposing to pay about half of the revenue to the content creator. (Revver, the smallest of them, has agreed to give as much as 70 percent of the revenue to big media companies, said its chief executive, Steven Starr.) ...

Google will not say what portion of the advertising revenue from the program will be paid to the sites that host the videos. Mr. Schmidt says this is the same policy the company has with its text advertising network. “We don’t give people percentages,” he said. “Just all of a sudden the money shows up, and it’s a lot.”

Brightcove and Revver, which focus on selling advertising on online video, are more explicit; they offer sites that carry the video 20 percent of the revenue. AOL, which has not introduced its similar program, also expects to pay sites about 20 percent.

In return for a share of the ad revenue, and a legal source of video, Web site owners will have to accept limitations under the new program. Viacom will have to approve each site that uses its content, and it wants only sites with at least 100,000 viewers a month. Initial sites include Hiphopgame.com, purevolume.com and Lyrics.com, all of which focus on music and videos.

Also, Viacom is making only three program options available for the sites: short excerpts from SpongeBob, a series of clips from its MTV drama “Laguna Beach” and clips related to the MTV Video Music Awards, which will be held on Aug. 31. The site owner will be able to insert a version of the Google video player that will display these clips. But actual programming played will change from day to day, to encourage repeat viewing. As a result, Web site owners cannot link to a specific clip — say, a certain episode of SpongeBob — and write comments about it, as many do with clips on YouTube.

Certainly, that last part of this deal is ludicrous. The Web isn't TV, folks. But the big boys will eventually figure that out, and video will continue its inevitable conquest of the Web.

Israel's Metacafe moving to Bay Area

John Boudreau in the San Jose Mercury News: Israeli video Web site moving to bay.

Dabble launches

Mary Hodder's company, Dabble.com, launched Monday. It's a way to search, collect and organize your favorite Web videos. Check it out.

AlwaysOn conference: YouTube and clip culture

It's the first full day of the AlwaysOn Innovation Summit at Stanford University. There are lots of bloggers posting good coverage of the proceedings.

There's a live Webcast and chat of the event today and tomorrow.

I arrived in time for the panel, "How Far Will Consumer-Generated Media Go?" with moderator Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal; David Goldberg, Head of Yahoo! Music; Michael Robertson, CEO, MP3Tunes; Chad Hurley, CEO, YouTube; and Michael Arrieta, Senior VP, Sony Pictures.

Hurley clearly has the star power so far at the event - he was mobbed by TV reporters after the session. I asked him from the floor whether there was room for the other 240 video hosting sites out there like Ourmedia, Revver and Blip.tv, and whether they might serve different needs than YouTube does. YouTube was getting all the media attention and sucking all the oxygen out of the room, but other sites might serve targeted constituencies better, I suggested. He said yes, that YouTube wasn't trying to dominate the marketplace and that other sites can certainly serve the needs and interests of other people participating in the personal media revolution.

Michael Robertson chimed in, suggesting that all the other 239 sites will be "history" soon because of the first mover effect. That's absurd, of course, since many video bloggers and professionals are flocking to sites other than YouTube. There's room for a handful of successful video publishing sites, and I think it goes well beyond niches.

Snippets from today:

Marten Mickos, CEO, MySQL: “Code can never deteriorate when you open it, it can only get better.”

From his talks in front of crowds, SalesForce CEO Marc Benioff discovered, “Less than 10 percent of the general public knows what a mashup is.” (Here's an incomplete definition at Wikipedia.)

When I was at Oracle, said Benioff, “There was no trust page. There was an FU page.”

More Benioff: "Mashups are the future. That's the most exciting thing I've seen." (He's discussing the tech industry's version of mashups, not the better-known music mashups.)

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