I am very impressed with the HP SpeechBot search engine. It searches audio and video content, but get this: it turns audio into text (transcripts based on speech recognition) and searches those transcripts.
“hp has indexed over 10,000 hours of content that you can search.” Shows are updated daily. The design of the result is also quite brilliant:
Here’s a thought I had yesterday on the train. Since video is hard to search (though there are many projects: Webseek at Colombia University, Altavista video search, SingingFish, Virage, Compaq’s Speechbot, …), classification may become more important with video than with the text-web.
Google’s image search (and most video search technologies) search on the text surrounding the video/image.
So here’s another idea: if I can link within a videostream (discussed here earlier), I can then annotate and make that content available to Google. So maybe my classification idea sucks - searchability may come from discussing video, not from classifying video. Discussing is, after all, more natural than classifying.
Just wanted to point out that my GuideToEthnography : Recent Changes has a working RSS feed. Enjoy!
Following up on my Racial and Ethnic classifications as an example of classification challenges, livia has this interesting screenshot.
Moblogs By Textamerica: videoblogs from mobile cameras.
Organic Style Love Your Lawn (via WorldChanging): “The secret to having a great lawn without chemicals is Dutch clover. For the past 50 years, clover has been considered a noxious lawn weed, but before that it was an important component in fine lawns—and for good reason. Clover is drought-tolerant, virtually immune to diseases, and distasteful to common turf insects. And it generates its own food by fixing nitrogen in the soil.
So how did this lawn superstar get such a bad rap? Blame the broadleaf herbicides introduced after World War II. Used to kill weeds such as dandelions and plantains, the chemicals also destroyed the clover that was used in many lawn mixes of the time (leaving ugly bare patches in their wake). Today, virtually all seed companies omit clover from their mixes.”
HubLog: MP3 to M3U or SMIL playlist A bookmarklet that harvests MP3 links on a page.
BlogAudio - Jon Udell: “Jon Udell has been “quoting” audio and video snippets on the web for some time.
It is presently a very difficult process, but Jon’s approach does not need a server to capture any media. He just hyperlinks to a media file and gives it start and end points.” Good overview by Bob Doyle.
CMS Videos: more videos and technical notes from Bob Doyle.
Audio and Video from IA Summit 2004. I met Bob Doyle during the latest IA summit when he was videotaping. Great guy, great work. There are some interesting technical notes at the bottom of the page.
Paolo Valdemarin Weblog: “the idea of doing an interview with iChat and post it to the web is great in its simplicity.” Easy is good. We’re getting to a level where things truly are easy.
WackoWiki: Release 4 (previous was 3.5) is in beta.
I added some new companies to Companies That Do Ethnography. Feel free to add yours if you offer true ethnography services.
urlgreyhot : Video of Lorenzo at the BMA fountain Michael started videoblogging :)
Jim Moore is blogging on the political use of TV, video and the internet.
Jim Moore’s cybernetics, politics, emergence, etc. :: “This afternoon Dave Winer and I were talking and he told me about his coinage of the term “Personal Television Networks”–PTNs.”
Knowspam.net: How knowspam.net works: looks interesting. A lot of people contact me out of the blue though, I wonder how many of them this will scare away?
pOWL - Semantic Web Development Plattform: a PHP and web-based ontology editor.
Video about shipping 100s of computers to ecuador (Real Video). Good video, personal story in interview format. I like it, and I’m figuring out how to link. If you click CTRL-I in Real Player, you get a popup with the URL.
Autometa RPXP: I don’t pretend to entirely understand this, but this might make it possible (right now) to link to a certain point within a video stream.
Alan from demandmedia.net has a SMIL powered videofeed. The good part is: it addresses the scanning problem (video is hard to scan).
It works like a TV channel with a forward button: if you get tired of a particular video, just click the next >| button and you are taken to the next video within seconds. I like how he uses SMIL to add some text above the videos within Realplayer.
It’s kinda like an RSS feed for video, but it’s called a playlist because the words “videofeed” should probably be reserved for RSS with enclosed video (or not?): 
DemandMedia SMIL Playlist
(PS: feel free to copy this button if you like it.)
The third video right now is a short history of the internet. Kinda cool. Jay just told me that every time you click the link you get a random selection, so forget that “third video right now” comment.
My commute goes through some great industrial landscapes around Newark. The shot below is from the train window - 106K. Didn’t take long to optimize or upload - I used my default settings.
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Wired News: South Africa Struggles to Rebuild: “One answer may be that increasingly, people like McCallum are returning to South Africa as opportunities dry up overseas, often starting businesses that harness knowledge and contacts gained abroad. In her case, it only took a year. Working in San Francisco, she says, she grew tired of all the dot-com hype and decided to try to make a difference back home instead.”
I was discussing this with Livia (IA from Brazil) the other day: if all the IA’s come to the US (the opportunities are here), what happens to IA in other countries? Answer: we go back and take what we learnt.
AIFIA launched a new project: the IA Library.
This is me missing my train going home - the start of my commute is a 20 minute walk, pretty nice. For this one I used better optimization settings. It’s 361 K. All the optimizing, renaming and such took way too long though.
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My commute is kinda long. I took 20 little videos today and selected this one. I embedded it with more correct tags this time. It’s Quicktime, 178K. Still trying to figure it all out…
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Is it possible to show a quicktime movie in an editable textarea like htmlArea? When I try, it converts the opening and closing embed tags to 2 closed xhtml tags. Then it says there was an error with the plugin. Any ideas welcome!
QuickTime Active X Plugin: How to embed quicktime movies for maximum compatibility.
Youthink!: “Youthink! invites young people to explore the research, knowledge and experience gathered by World Bank experts on issues like poverty, development, and conflict” First glance looks like a good site.
Dowbrigade News:: “The technology exists now to allow you to get back from the bars at 1 am and then turn on your TiVo to watch 20 minutes of live CNN followed by a 20-minute condensation of the NBC evening news (no commercials) followed by a 20-minute compendium consisting of 5 minutes of Instapundit, 5 minutes of Scripting News, 5 minutes from Adam Curry and 5 minutes from Dowbrigade. Or perhaps more realistically (since 5 minutes of air time is a lot to fill up) 2 minutes each from our top 10 favorite video-blogs.”
Daily Experience: A Video Blog: Harper Goes Crazy on the Couch A good videoblog - my style. The only thing I wonder: if you are creating a short video consisting of 2 scenes, isn’t it better to have 2 separate video entries? Makes it easier to scan if every entry is a simple atomic scene.
Slashdot | Are Video Blogs Ready For Prime Time?:
- “with all the far more provocative reality TV out there, who’s gonna watch Linus recompile his kernel?”
- “it wouldn’t be easily searchable or easy to catalog.” Partly solved by mixing video with text entries.
- “I don’t have to render a video stream. I don’t have to do any editing beyond proofreading, and spellchecking. Upload is near instant. Download is too. And people can read it at their liesure. What advantage does video bring to the table?” Which is, of course, exactly the question.
I am thinking aggregation may be even more important with videoblogs than with text blogs.
- “Lets say that you produce a 10 minute piece a day, and that 500 people tune in each day. Lets say that you put your video in a postage sized window and it comes out to 1MB. Thats half a GB a day.
The current rates for bandwidth at this scale are about $1/GB of transfer. You will be spending about $180 a year for bandwidth for just 500 people.”
To which I respond: 4 US$ a day for 100.000 people is two beers. Change your videoblogging style. And some of the new P2P technologies will help.
ipowerweb has a good bandwidth deal: 40 Gig (and 800MB storage) starting at US$8 a month. That’s 20 cents per Gig.
- “the real problems with video blogging have to do with the nature of video (and not the problem of bandwidth.)
[1] Text is random access which means that as a reader, i can scan through someone’s text blog and read it as fast or as slow as i wish, and instantly skip the parts I don’t want to read. Video is linear which means that in order to consume the ideas presented, you have to scan audio, text, and images in order even if you don’t want to.”
Yes Yes Yes. That’s why I’m trying to figure out the native language of videoblogs.
- “[2] While it will take you ten minutes to produce a compelling text paragraph with links and some light editing before you post, It takes exponentially more time to create the equivalent video “paragraph.”
Good observation again. That’s why I’m figuring out the workflow. That’s why I say “No editing”.
- “Video blogs will never catch on for the same reason people hate voicemail after using email”
Andromeda “is the simple and smart MP3 server for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. It’s great as a personal net-jukebox, as part of a public Web site, or over a private network.” Might be useful. “If you have a basic Web site and are capable of copying MP3s and the Andromeda script (PHP or ASP) into a folder on your server, you can offer streaming or downloadable music on the Internet.” It’s a (free for evalutation, $35) PHP script. It can be configured to work with RealMedia. How about Quicktime? Not sure what the advantage really is though?
- “Video isn’t the best suited medium for blogging for a number of reasons: it’s very hard to skip around in to find what you want, it’s a bandwidth hog compared to text or even audio, many Internet-specific nuances are lost (the lack of links is the most glaring of these, although the fact that nobody can say “^_^” is an upside), and very few of us actually have engaging personae in real life.”
Again - that’s why we need to find that language.
- “It would interesting to see video clips that people had captured from television or movies and analyze (in traditional text), or the clips edit together in illuminating ways (”here’s a montage of shots from all the movies that feature James Cameron’s recurring foot stepping onto ground/crushing object scene”). “
Unrelated News: Video Blog day, take that AudBlog!: My style videoblogging: “I left my apartment this afternoon with my sister’s MiniDV camera in hand and taped whenever I had a thought.
[...]
All in all it was fun to try it out. With the shooting/capture/edits/compression taking just over 15 minutes per clip to get done, it was not bad. If you are just doing one or two it’ll be fine. But it still took too long for it to be a realistic thing to do everyday. Until there’s an easier way to streamline the process I’ll keep this idea as a fun little thing I’ll do every now and then.”
This might help with videoblogging bandwidth concerns. Not P2P, but free caching. FreeCache: “While keeping their big file on their webhost, the RockLobsters change the URL on their webpage to point to: http://freecache.org/http://www.rocklobsters.com/videos/my-new-rock-video.mpg When a user clicks on this, the user downloads the file from a nearby machine on their ISP’s network, and
the user is happy because it was fast.”
Would this work for videobloggers? Other options are BitTorrent (”You can link to the .torrent file using an ordinary hyperlink”) or Overnet (”You can embed links in webpages that will initiate downloads within Overnet.”).
Getting started watching videoblogs (no guarantees about quality): joitv | demandmedia.net | silversow.com | Vidblogs.com | avoidinglife.com | video-link.com
So as I’m watching some of these blogs, a few observations:
- It takes time to watch a video blog (no easy scanning).
- Many post little movies. That’s not what it’s about, at least not for me.
- I like inline movies embedded in text story. Helps with the scanning.
TIME.com: See Me, Blog Me — Apr. 19, 2004: “Garfield belongs to a small but growing legion of video bloggers, or vloggers, who are turning the Web into a medium in which someday anyone could conceivably mount original programming, bypassing the usual broadcast networks and cable outlets.”
Video blogs go mobile in 3G trial: “mobile phone company Orange unveiled plans to offer customers of its soon to be launched 3G service the ability to file the next generation of blogs - video diaries.”
Random thoughts:
What’s the language of videoblogging? Blogging is not journalism - it’s a personal voice. When searching for the language of a new medium, it helps to think about the specific strenghts and weaknesses of the medium.
The first photographers tried to imitate painting. It took decades before the language of photography was born: capture the moment. Frame the world through your viewfinder. These are the unique strenghts of photography. There are many movements within photography, many languages, but there is clearly a basic language that fits the medium best.
So what’s that language for videoblogging.
Let’s look at some of the strenghts of videoblogging:
- It’s personal self-publishing. You can say whatever you want, no approval needed (like in a printed publication).
- It’s quick. Blogging means you can get something online fast.
- It reaches people. Blogging means you can reach small or large numbers of people.
Wait a sec - we’re talking about blogging here. The language of videoblogging will be based in the language of blogging.
What’s specific to videoblogging? It uses video. Let’s see what videoblogging is not:
- It’s not journalism - although it can have elements of journalism.
- It’s not movies. No extensive editing.
- It’s not video art.
That doesn’t really help. I spent an afternoon on Sunday talking to my friend Jay about what videoblogging really is. Here’s my manifesto (for now):
1. No editing. Editing takes too long. Selection is the only editing allowed.
2. Tiny movies are moments. Long movies will kill my bandwidth, so tiny movies are a must.
3. Quantity over quality. It’s blogging after all. Post as you think. Unfinished pieces.
4. Movieblogs are conversations. The strenght of videoblogging is that you create an audience. That’s where using the old fashioned languages of documentary, … falls down. The tools exist, but the distribution doesn’t. No audience. So work that conversation.
Some more ideas from that conversation (which I wish I would have videoblogged):
- Developing the language will be done by insiders of the old languages (TV, movie, …), who can deconstruct these languages, together with the very young who have the creativity to build upon the work of these pioneers. (Agree?)
- Bandwidth preservation is important.
- Optimizing the workflow is important.
- Will the third world videoblog?
- Why have the tools to make movies not being taken advantage of on a greater scale? Most cameras are being used for home movies. We thought it was the lack of distribution - with a home movie, at least you have an audience.
‘
Finally: why haven’t I seen Bush’s latest speech with a commentary track by insightful people as a downloadable file? It’d be more entertaining and interesting than watching the live speech on TV.
The Vogma manifesto:
- a vog respects bandwidth
- a vog is not streaming video (this is not the reinvention of television)
- a vog uses performative video and/or audio
- a vog is personal
- a vog uses available technology
- a vog experiments with writerly video and audio
- a vog lies between writing and the televisual
- a vog explores the proximate distance of words and moving media
ZZ/OSS Installer - SitePoint PHP Blog: an excellent idea: a generic “installer” application for PHP scripts. But: “With the available releases, while playing “I’m a dumb user”, was unable to install the installer.”, and “writing installers for PHP, the installer itself also being PHP, is notoriously difficult.”
I really pray they make this into a useful tool, even for small scripts (not just a developer plaything). Installing even a simple PHP script is still too hard, a few exceptions aside. This beginners tutorial explains things a bit.
