Apperceptions

What's Right & What's Wrong?

Dave Toole of Outhink shot this video during the Darknets Panel at South By SouthWest 2006. Here Kori Bernards of the MPAA explains how they intend to educate people on what's right and what's wrong when it comes to p2p sharing.

Chuck Olsen of Minnesota Stories has also posted some video from this panel.

If you look carefully, you can see Michael Verdi, Steve Garfield, JD Lasica and others from the vlogsphere.

Click the pic to view the vid.

Xpression RemiX

I put together a little remix of videos from Chris Ritke, Michael Verdi, Steve Garfield, Chuck Olsen, Ryanne Hodson and others who participated in or contributed to the XpressionVlog event at the Ex'pression College of Digital Arts on November 18th, 2005. The voiceovers are sampled from Dave Toole's presentation.  Music is from the track named "Clear" found at Regular Cat with Headphones, on the Internet Archive.

Mia Garlick of Creative Commons

Mia Garlick gives a basic explanation of what Creative Commons is all about and how it relates to re-mixing and videoblogging. This is an MP3 recording of a 23 minute presentation that was delivered at the Ex'pression College of Digital Arts during the Outhink sponsored XpressionVlog event on Friday, November 18th, 2005.

Backstage With The Students

Here's a short clip showing the equipment we were using in the video editing booths while the Ex'pression College event was going on.  Here, Fernando, Chris Ritke, Richard Pascual and I try to figure out how to capture from the digital tape into Final Cut Pro.  This was a first time experience for all of us (I had never even held a DV tape before).  Luckily, we had help from Jon Scanlon of Ex'pression.  Thanks Jon! 

Jon got us going, but we ditched FCP and used iMovie instead.  It was easier as none of us knew FCP!

Then we got our next suprise: unsynced audio!

Schlomo's Introduction

Schlomo Rabinowitz was the emcee for our Ex'pression College videoblogging and personal media presentation event. During the intro, he shows Chuck Olsen's classic video from the Fine Line bar. I could not bring myself to stop recording or edit it out and so this is a bit long of a video, but great for re-mixing.

Alex Woodard Performs "Wonderful"

Here is an mp3 of the audio captured from the Ex'pression event, including Schlomo's introduction. This is released under a Creative Commons license of "Atribution-NoCommercial-ShareAlike" so you are free to re-mix!  Tag it with xpressionvlog.

Ex'pression

We're putting on a videoblogging presentation and event at the Ex'pression College of Digital Art on Friday. Here's the first post to the new vlog.

Webzine 2005

I'm off to Webzine in San Francisco to coordinate a workshop on videoblogging.  I'm following the course charted by Michael and Ryanne at Freevlog.org of course.  This will be a quick version of the workshops that we are holding at the Digital Dojo. 

Here's a little video I made from a picture tagged with webzine2005 at Flickr.

Click the pick to view this very short video.

Digital Urban Development: Rooms For Rich Media

Recently, I have been experimenting with new ways to create collaborative "rooms" for use with the Podcast Hotel event in Portland next week.  The general goal is to create ad-hoc web-pages that provide an environment where people can share media captured at the event and make it easily (and instantly) available for anyone to mash-up or re-mix and upload again for others to play with and comment on.  Of course, being a videoblogger, I want these "rooms" to have rich media feeds that I can use in tools like FireAnt.

It is easy to imagine how an enterprise system for this might be designed.  However, part of the challenge was to build on existing tools and infrastructure in order to design and build something that could be used with any kind of web page, particularly blogs like Blogger, WordPress and TypePad.

Another challenge was the the solution could not assume an underlying storage system; blogs like Blogger do not provide storage for media except pictures and those that do (i.e., Typepad) are too limited in bandwidth and storage to support significant uploading and downloading of media files.

I also wanted these collaborative rooms to be simple to add to a web page.  For the moment, this means that it should be no more difficult to use for the author/publisher than inserting a Flickr or Feedburner badge.

I used SpinXpress as the basis of a solution because it is a p2p (person-to-person/peer-to-peer) file sharing tool that allows you to form "groups" (like rooms, or spaces, or networks) where you can store files, bookmarks and comments.  You can also access content in SpinXpress via web services (i.e., HTTP) and, most importantly to a geek like me, you can extend SpinXpress functionality via Java servlets.

So I did that.  I'll leave the technical details to future posts, but basically I created servlets that add XML (XHTML, mRSS, SMIL, XSPF, etc) feeds, forms and handlers that allow one to add a "room" or "group" to a post where people can share files and collaborate.

I will demonstrate this in the very next post.  In the meantime, here is my first SnapZ ProX screencast about SpinXpress.  It just covers the most basic concepts, but should help with the conversation.  Click the pic to view the vid.

Disclaimer: I receive a small sponsorship from Outhink and have equity in the company.

Napkin & Notebook Sketches

More from the Eric Rice Roadshow in San Francisco. 

While Shawn drew vlog architecture drawings for me, Renegade and Alicia drew pictures of the other vloggers.  Here is one Rene drew of Schlomo.  Click the pic for to view full sized.  Below is one of me from Alicia.

Check out more sketches on my Flickr photostream.

Eric Rice Roadshow: San Francisco

Alicia and I caught up with the Eric Rice Roadshow in San Francisco last week.  Just a week after BlogHer, I got to see Eric, Rene, Shawn, Chris and Schlomo again and we got to meet Eric's cohorts Josh and Tony.

The roadshow was great.  Alicia and Rene drew portraits on napkins, while a small band played upstairs in Schlomo's bar.  Photographers and videoheads were running around snapping pics and vids of the band and everything else (Eric has the coolest equipment by far - great video and audio).

I really liked this setting as it was very small and laid back, giving a chance for newbies like Alicia and I to get to hang, learn and play with others who are interested in creating, sharing and collaborating on different forms of new media.

So, what do vloggers and podcasters and creatives do after a roadshow meetup?  Go out for breakfast at 1am of, of course.  We all went over to a great little dinner over on Church Street (near Market, I think).  Then back outside for a smoke break and some parting last words.

Here's a great little moment (well, about two minutes) where Shawn, Rene and Eric are talking about videoblogging workshops, videobloggers with unusal names (Have you ever noticed that both Eric Rice and Zadi Diaz have first and last names that use the same letters?)  Strange.  I never noticed that before.

I love the excitement in Shawn's voice as he talks about teaching videoblogging related workshops.  So many videobloggers love to participate in meetups, workshops and presentations.  It's great.

Click the pic to view the vid.

Webzine 2005

Webzine 2005 is coming up next month in San Francisco!  I've volunteered to participate in the Videoblogging workshop and panel.  This looks like it is going to be fun and off the wall.  Rene and Schlomo are organizing.  There might be a videoblogger meetup in SF that week too.  Today is the deadline for confirming your interest in helping out with any of the interesting workshops, panels and parties for this great event that is being held at the Swedish American Hall on Market Street.