EricRice.com :: Let me break it down for you. Podshow = Old Media.: “So, yeah, let me be clear:
- Podshow is not a business I trust.
- I am concerned for friends and other very talented folks who are part of the organization. “
Upcoming videoblogging books:
Video Blogging by Jay Dedman, Joshua Kinsburg and Joshua Paul $24.99
0-470-03788-1 Publication date July 2006 [I don't understand, was
the book cancelled and then re-instated?]
Secrets of Video Blogging Diana Weynand, Ryanne Hodson, Michael Verdi,
Shirley Craig $24.99 ISBN 0-321-42917-6 Publication date April 2006
Hands-on Guide to Video Blogging and Podcasting Damien Stolarz and
Lionel Felix $34.95 ISBN 0-240-80831-2
Videoblogging for Dummies by S.C. Bryant $24.99 ISBN 0-471-97177-4
Publication date June of 2006.
loadedpun is quickly becoming THE place to follow what’s going on in online video land.
The Mefeedia core team (Devlon, Michael, me) uses a mailing list, mostly to discuss strategy and stuff. We tried using the 37sigs chatroom app but the email just seems to work better.. the problem with the chatroom is that you have to open it, it’s kinda hard to follow. Gmail works better.
Anyways, since we fixed the speed of Mefeedia, we’re all happy and fuzzy again. The new homepage really helps too.
Yesterday I added a list of *new* feeds to the homepage, so that when someone adds their feed, anyone see that’s on their homepage and can easily subscribe to it. It really fits in nicely with te philosophy of sending Mefeedia love not just to popular feed (it’s not about popularity!) but to newbies. Newbies need subscribers a lot more than popular feeds, so that’s who we want to highlight.
Anyways.
I always felt Dave Winer was onto something when he was talking about the “River of news” that an RSS reader should be. You gotta give it to the man.
Last Monday, we did an emergency launch to fix some bad SQL that was taking the server down, and as a sideeffect we launched a new homepage for Mefeedia if you are logged in. I call it the river of vlog.
The page is quite simple, it lists new videos that have been aggregated into your queue, including the description of the original blogpost. There wasn’t a page like that on Mefeedia yet.
And strangely, suddenly, I am addicted to Mefeedia.
This river of vlog homepage has become useful. Useful is a powerful word. Addictive might be a better one. I check it many times a day, on the lookout for new videos. It is surprisingly simple yet really really powerful.
I always had a dream: the day I would visit Mefeedia as often as I visit Bloglines, I would know I succeeded. After 2 years of working on it, that day still hadn’t happened. But now, I think we’re there. The difference one page can make! I can spend years doing informationarchitecturitis, but without this 1 page, the site never hit that tipping point of usefulness.
Here’s a screenshot:
Today in Tech (The Show On 10).
A Microsoft corporate site with no M$ branding, using Quicktime by default for video. Can it be true? Yes it can.
Flickr: nathanialfreitas’ photos tagged with openvisiontv: some nice screenshots of the new i/on videowatchingpodcatching tool.
Apple - QuickTime - Download - Standalone QuickTime Player Apple try to make you download iTunes with Quicktime - this is the place to go if you want to download ONLY the QT player.
del.icio.us/url/94ddbb945ebaac34095a802d002dd1ab: bookmarks at delicious of the Mefeedia videoblog directory, which has the amount of videoblogs in its title, hence it’s a strange view of the growth of videoblogging. Yey.
Revlogging is blogging about other videobloggers.
I’ve always felt that videobloggers don’t link enough to each other’s blogs and videos. It’s normal: with text blogs, you have a bookmarklet that makes it 1-step to quote someone and post your thoughts to your blog. For videoblogs, we don’t have a mechanism like that.
My first attempt to make revlogging easier was the QuoteThis tool in Mefeedia. It would let you create a SMIL movie that contains a quote of another movie, and post that to your blog by copying and pasting the HTML to your blog. I still think it’s a good idea, but the tool had 2 problems: the SMIL movies would often play very slowly (a limit of the technology), and there was no 1-click sending to your blog.
So my second attempt at encouraging revlogging is the new BlogThis tool in Mefeedia. This time it posts directly to your blog, and you can even drag and drop thumbnails of the video in your post (it’s a wysiwyg editor). I think this time it works. It becomes very easy to browse through Mefeedia, and the nice thing about Mefeedia is that it has pretty much complete archives of all videobloggers, and pretty good tags. You can BlogThis from anywhere on Mefeedia. The experience is a memory trip: your browse through tags and feeds you know, re-dsicover old videos, and blog them to your site, like I’ve been doing on this site for the past days. The whole thing just works.
The BlogThis still needs improvements, but the basic experience I think is solid. Browse around. Blog movies you find. What revlogging does is creating a web of links between videoblogs and videos, making videoblogs much easier to discover. Videoblogging needs revlogs.
And what i don’t like ;) As you know, the Mefeedia directory is a side project, so there is always more to do.. But there are a few things I really like:
1) Browsing feeds is really nice now. You can go to http://mefeedia.com/feeds/44/ and just click “next feed”, “next feed” and so on, and get a really nice feel of the videoblogs out there. Next thing to do: add “related feeds”. I’m still figuring out an algorythm for that. Or go to http://mefeedia.com/feeds/reviewed/ to see the recently reviewed feeds.
2) You can add descriptions to a tag now, like a wiki. Try it. Example: http://mefeedia.com/tags/vloggercon/ I really like adding descriptions to tags, then clicking a related tag and describing that.
3) Tagging an entire feed. You can now go to a feeds details page (try your own feed) and just tag all the videos in the feed, right there on that same page. That rocks.
4) BlogThis! Revlogging! I love revlogging videos, and you can do it from any page, from a tag page, from a feed detail page, or from the watch page. I like that I can drag and drop images into my post and revlog straight to my blog.
There’s a lot I don’t like about the new Mefeedia too, of course :) That’s for another post. What do you like?
Mefeedia subscriber stats are nowreported in Feedburner. It’s all about making this ecology work.
Feedburner is a great service, a lot of videobloggers and podcasters use them to manage their RSS feeds. We’ve added subscriber reporting to Mefeedia so now you can see how many subscribers you have in Mefeedia in your Feedburner stats. The Feedburner people (Jessie) were great, they really helped us out setting this up.
Odeo is a great service, and they’re improving all the time, but they have a dirty little secret.
They have not solved the findability problem of podcasts. Not even close.
It is very hard to find podcasts you like on Odeo. Peter Merholz noticed this, Donna noticed it too. Information architects!
Findability for audio and video is a HUGE issue. I’d say it’s the number one problem waiting to be solved. It’s just too damn hard to find good videoblogs and podcasts.
Even in Mefeedia, videoblogs are still too hard to find. The problem with video is that it is a black hole for attention. You can’t do much else while watching video (although I’ve found you can actually take your attention away from the screen easily now and then and just listen).
It is very hard to decide whether a video is worth watching, worth spending all that attention on. On Mefeedia, I invest a lot in creating thumbnails, which serve the purpose of making the watch decision easier, of making videos more scannable.
And there are many other tricks coming up in the upcoming release this week. One of them is a BlogThis feature. You can blog a video from within Mefeedia, you can include thumbnails in your post (drag and drop!), it prefills the type (Quicktime), size and length of the movie and links to the original blog and such. The purpose of this is to encourage revlogging.
Revlogging is vlogging (videoblogging) about videos of other videobloggers. Videobloggers don’t link enough to each other, and this is one tool that I hope will increase how much videobloggers talk about each other on their own blogs. All to increase findability - links from blogs to other videoblogs are one of the biggest findability tools out there.
So there you go: findability is the biggest problem for videoblogging right now. Who’da thunk it? A year ago, I thought bandwidth, hosting or creation tools would be our challenges. But now that the amount of videoblogs is exploding, and for the foreseeable future, it’s findability. Which gives me a nice chunky challenge for next year with Mefeedia.
I started talking about videoblogging with Jay in the spring of 2004. We were really excited: regular people could soon start their own television channels! We would have another way of connecting.
The most amazing thing is that this has actually happened, in only a year.
We started a mailing list together, in that spring of 2004, the videoblogging group, which has grown into one of the most active and supportive communities I know. Videobloggers organize conferences, barbeques, you name it. In 2005, we organized 2 conferences, vloggercon and vlogeurope. Podcasters take note. Videobloggers started node101, a nonprof dedicated to teaching videoblogging, and roadnode101, a roadtrip promoting videoblogging.
The amount of teaching that is going on is amazing for such a small community. We’re much, much smaller than the podcasting community, but also much nicer, somehow. The community seems much less commercial. Of course, there is a lot of money in this space, but that’s not what it’s about, and that’s not what most people seem to focus on.
Anyway, the title of this post is building Mefeedia.
I started hacking Mefeedia together as a video aggregator in December 2004, it took me a weekend to put it together. Ruby on Rails? Nope, PHP. I’ll write more tomorrow, got some bugs to squash right now. The main thing I’d like to talk about is how the values you hold influence the features you decide to implement, and the whole design of the site. I was quite surprised by that. More tomorrow. No time. Bugs to squash. We’re coming out with a new version of Mefeedia this week. Hot stuff.
Blogging4Business » Vlogging the revolution: “The number of vloggers (there are over 2,100 feeds on Mefeedia, a tally that seems to creep skyward hourly) out there is getting interesting enough to draw attention from fickle channel surfers. “
So the podcasting guys are, clearly, being kids. Fighting over the history of
podcasting. Jees. I documented a lot of stuff on the videoblogging
wiki during 2004, which was the crucial year during which videoblogging started.
Here’s a copy, in case that resource goes down. For the future. As a disclaimer:
this report probably misses a few important events, there might be a mistake or
two in there as well.
CelluloMichael Verdi, Ryanne and others started videoblogging about a year ago, and the looking-back type videos are starting to come out.
Videoblogging has really been an amazing adventure so far. Here’s to another year of this. Let’s hope thousands, if not millions of people discover this as a hobby, as a way to connect, as a new art form. (Not as a business model, that’s not what we’re talking about here.) The videoblogging community has a real voice, and real values, and I hope those don’t get dilluted too much in the coming year. I’ve always felt podcasters are more commercial. Maybe it’s because they have Adam Curry and we have Jay Dedman. Leaders really set the values for a movement. Maybe it’s because of that name - podcsting - that implies a particular, commercial player, who seems to have co-opted the movement. (Lightnet might provide some hope there.) Who knows.
In any case, here’s to another year of videoblogging. May we not sell out, may we believe in the power of individual voices speaking truth and connecting. May we shave a few minutes of the average 4 hours the American watches television every day.
Russell Beattie Notebook » PSP Update 2.6: Podcasting (RSS) and WMA Music Support!: Sony does the logical thing: they build in a podcatching client into the PSP. No synching via the computer needed, the audio files go straight to your PSP.
Of course they manage to fuck it up: the audio (no video??) streams, so you have to be connected to a wireless network for streaming.
This won’t take off. It’s almost there, so close, but misses a crucial part of podcasting: the caching locally and then listening whenever you want.
Sony will conclude people don’t want podcasts on their PSP, and the opportunity will be lost. So close. I hope they’ll improve it to the point of usefulness though. Even if it means I have to buy a memory stick. Sell cheap memory sticks, add video, and you have a killer app for the PSP.
Too bad they make their money on games, not hardware. Coz if they made money selling PSP’s, they would do everything to make it a more useful platform and fix these problems.
Rodrigo A. Sepúlveda Schulz: The stuff I like about video publishing online. Rodrigo is slowly lifting the vail on his upcoming video publishing service.
PodGuide.tv: Mefeedia video podcast directory: “If, as I have, you’ve been discovering the wild and sometimes bizarre world of podcasts with your newly-acquired iPod, you may want to visit Mefeedia, a directory that lists thousands of video podcasts. It’s the place I go to find some of the channels I feature here on the site. The depth of the directory is astounding.“
Streamingmedia.com: Streaming Media West 2005 Wrap-Up, Part 2: “Podcasting is growing, but video blogging is growing faster.”
Of course it is growing faster - it’s younger :)
Netcraft: Podcasts Help Drive Demand for High-Volume Hosting: “As podcasts and video blogs consume disk space and bandwidth, will these large media files reside with major web hosting providers, niche startups spawned by the Blogosphere, or perhaps Yahoo or Google?”
Hosting videoblogs is a large-scale game, which is why I think it will soon (within a year) be the exclusive game of the big boys. Not to say startups like Blip.tv aren’t doing an amazingly excellent job - they are. But they’ll need serious cash to scale this up, whereas the big guys already are strong in that area. What startups do well is innovation, and where’s the innovation in free hosting? That seems to be an inherent problem with many of the video “free-hosting” startups.
Just to say I’m glad I’m working on a directory for videoblogs. Not only is it easier to scale, and easier to compete with Google/Yahoo/MSN. But it’s also, in my view, a more valuable project. Directories, especially for video, are super important, because search will not be able to play the dominant role for video taht it plays for the text web. Video search just isn’t enough, because video itself demands much more supporting metadata before you decide to give it your attention (you can’t scan it quickly and skip it). Video search is an unsolved problem, and will stay that way for a while, not because we can’t search video, but because the requirement for you to decide wether you want to watch or skip this video is much higher than just a list of search result.
In other words, video directories/sites that help you find the good stuff will have at least 5 or 10 happy years ahead of them (until video search becomes good enough). And the reason that doing an independent directory is important is that the big media companies (who have deep pockets to promote their stuff) are jumping on internet television.
If we create a world in which the internet video most people watch is that coming from big media, we’ve missed an opportunity. If we create a world in which the long tail of video can find itself, we’ve won.
That’s the challenge, and that’s why I hope that in a year, there will be dozens of videoblog directories, hundreds of community video sites, thousands of revlog blogs, filtering out that long tail, making it easy for you to find video you are interested in, not video that commercial interests think you should watch. That’s the vision.
If Google can do it, so can I.
Try on jeans and get free iTunes songs!
Watch movie 3.4 min 11.9 MB
(Original post, via Keepin’ It Reg!)
TipMonkies » Blog Archive » Find free video podcasts with Mefeedia: “Mefeedia is an awesome service I heard about on Rocketboom which is very similar to RSS aggregators like Bloglines and Rojo but targetting the emerging market of video podcasts (or videocasts, or vlogs, or whatever you want to call them). In this way, it is similar to my favorite podcatcher/podcast directory, Odeo. Unlike other videocast aggregators, there is no need to download videos as they are streamed right from the browser. I currently subscribe to about 10 different video podcasts so I have a few gigs worth of video just from that, so it’s nice to finally just be able to stream content. The interface could use a little work as it’s not as clean and intuitive as Odeo but there is lots of great content, and you can tag videos, send them to friends, and do a few other cool things.”
ABC News: PODCASTING. A really nice evolution of the orange XML icon for podcast feeds on (of all places) ABC’s site.
I heard them mention their videoblogs on the news today, couldn’t find them though.
The marathon came by today by our house in 129th St.. The NY marathon rocks. And Harlem rocks harder.
Watch the Quicktime movie (Quicktime movie, kinda large)
ben barren - rss’ing down under: WM Talent Agents, Viral Video + RSS.
Goddamn “viral” video. A lot of the new video sites’ business plans revolve around putting ads around “viral” videos. Is that the best we can do?
It’s this idea that the only valuable video coming from the “masses” is the “viral” video, that the best we’re gonna see is the funny fat kid dancing, that really pisses me off.
What excites *me*, is that we can take back a medium from BigCo television. That real people can make interesting video. Fascinating stuff. Not just funny home movies. That anyone with a laptop, a camera and an internet connection can have a voice through this medium. I’m focusing Mefeedia.com 100% on *those* videos. I don’t give a shit about the funny viral video of the day.
So I guess what annoys me today is the limited vision of these free-hosting-viral-video-ad-income companies that are popping up all over the place. In 18 months, most of them will be gone, thank god.
I think we need businesses to build this ecology of a million channels. But not with those business plans. That’s just not going anywhere.
the weblog of Lucas Gonze: “I am surprised to find that there isn’t much community will to work with Apple to fix the one-click spec, but there isn’t, and given that it doesn’t make sense for me to pursue it on my own. On top of that, it turns out that others’ attempts to get Apple to clean up their RSS have made much difference.
My guess is that the addition of podcasting to iTunes knocked the wind out of the first generation of podcasting software developers. They’re working like mad to carve out a niche, and feel like this is a minor issue at best.”
Lucas is a pioneer. He’s right, I think most developers feel they have better things to do than to get Apple to clean up their act. Me included.
We’re wrong though.
Apple is contaminating the ecology of RSS with its implementation, and that spells bad news for everyone.
They’re like a 1,000,000 pound oil tanker, leaking oil all the way, drifting slowly into the beautiful natural coral reef that is RSS.
Fixing 1-click subscriptions (not just Apple’s, but everyone’s) should be a priority of everyone in this space, but I personally can’t be bothered to fight this fight. Fighting for standards is tiring. Been there done that.
It worries me that Lucas can’t be bothered either though. He’s a crusader. He fights the good fight. When he gives up, it’s like the Greenpeace guys saying: “You know what, whatever. I got better things to do.”
Freevlog tutorial: how to put an Instant Visual Video Archive on your Blogger Blog. Ryanne from Freevlog made a tutorial movie - it’s fantastic. A good example of good video tutorials.
“1. When Google first unveiled video.google.com, you had to use their patched version of VLC to play videos there, and if you used Google’s patched version of VLC, it would only play items hosted on http://video.google.com. (They have since changed over to a Flash player using FLV, which is not like this).
2. If you want to watch news video on MSNBC.com, you have to be using Internet Explorer or you will get an error message saying that IE is required. It’s not good enough to have Windows Media Player as either a standalone or plugin, and it’s not good enough to use an alternate media player like VLC which is capable of rendering Windows Media. It’s possible that there are technical issues associated with this (probably the site relies on features specific to IE) but not that these technical issues were insurmountable.
3. If you want to browse the iTunes music store over the web, you have to be using iTunes as your web browser. With Internet Explorer or any other browser aside from iTunes, you get an error message saying that you must use iTunes.
What these have in common is that the server and client are tightly coupled, so that the same entity must own both.
So here’s a potential litmus test: what makes media open is whether any potential pair of clients and servers can work together to fetch it and render it.”
the weblog of Lucas Gonze: “Dear Apple developers working on the podcasting portions of iTunes, …”.
The Apple 1-click subscription technology is broken. What’s worse, after Lucas told me I should remove the content-type application/rss+xml from my pcast files in Mefeedia, so I did but it breaks iTunes compatibility. So iTunes is totally messed up here. Let’s hope they fix this soon and we can leave this behind us.
braintag: MySpace vs. My Space: “Jay raised a fantastic question Saturday that I haven’t been able to get out of my head since:
Do the benefits of MySpace outweigh the benefits of My Space?
Rendered unclever: Which is better? To publish and participate in a closed social networking environment or to publish a blog/videoblog/podcast on your own server with your own blog installation?”
An insightful post, check it out.
Now that Typepad has integrated videoblogging, I wanted to share some tips for new videobloggers. Some of the stuff that we’ve learnt over the past year or so doing this.
1. You have something to say. Try the videobloggingweek (where you post 1 video every day for a week) for yourself and at first, you’ll feel like “what can I have possibly to say”. Then you realize everything is interesting. Every day, there are at least 5 videobloggable moments.
2. It’s about connecting people and speaking truth. Vlog what you really believe. It’s a great exercise in not becoming the fake person, the corporate drone you always feared of becoming. I think people become that way because they just lack the practice of saying what they really think.
3. Small digital fotocameras (the Canon elph for example) work fine. It’s not about the gloss.
4. As you become better, you can do most editing while filming. As you film, your edit-eye knows what to film and how it will be used.
5. Make sure to always put your url at the end of a video. You don’t know where it might end up, at least like this people will be able to find your blog.
Go to Mefeedia.com to find about a 1000 videobloggers. And add your feed if you’re videoblogging too.
Finally, if you’re really into this stuff, join the videoblogging mailing list, the best place to learn more.
Enjoy!
VCLP0112.MOV (video/quicktime Object) Somehow, having a fight during a presentation seems more entertaining than not having one. (Not that I had it planned that way.)
How to make money with digital lifestyle aggregators - Part I :: AO: “So personalization and customization find their destiny intermixed with Integration and Aggregation. The only way to produce compelling enough experiences is by integrating a wide range of built-in constructs, combining that with agregated web servcies and content and topping it all off with unprecedented levels of control and customization. In one product or service.”
Marc Canter is so full of bullshit. Or, he just writes really badly. “Compelling experiences”? Spending too much time with the suits Marc? And get a spell checker.
And then: “branded memes and viral uptake”. No, not just bad writing, he’s lost. Bye Marc. See you later.
Yeah, I’m in that mood again.
What’s the difference between the video ipod and the PSP, related to videoblogging? What I’m interested in is this: how does this help spread the voices of millions of people through video, taking back a medium (video) that has been owned by Big Media for pretty much ever.
The basic difference seems to be that Apple opens up their platform, while Sony closes it. It is almost impossible to get your video on a Sony. It is trivially easy to get it on your video ipod. Just install iTunes and it’s there.
Sony makes its money of the sales of games (a bigger industry than movies, remember?) and movies. Although I don’t know how many people actually buy movies for PSP’s, here in NYC in Harlem PSP’s are everywhere, but people rip DVDs using a bunch of softwares. Supposedly Sony looses $$ on the sales of the PSP, which makes sense, because it is superpowerful: amazing games, wireless internet, and all that for the same price of the ipod? They have to loose money on that.
Meanwhile Apple makes money off the hardware. The music sales don’t make a lot of money, and I don’t expect the video sales to do this either. It’s all about selling ipods. Which are (really) technically fairly simplistic devices. There are a lot of better portable video players out there already, but Apple wins by providing the complete package: device, UI and content via iTunes. Easy.
So for people with a real voice, videomakers, vloggers and bloggers, the ipod will be their biggest audience for a while. The PSP has a much better screen, and is technically much better suited to playing video, but the platform is so closed that you basically need to make a deal with Sony to get your video on there in an easy way.
iTunes 6 seems pretty vlogger friendly: I already had a bunch of subscriptions to videobloggers in iTunes 5. iTunes 6 adds a new section “videos”, and it imports all the videos from video podcasts. They even have their own category, next to “Movies”, “Music videos” and “TV shows”. That’s great news.
Here’s a screenshot of iTunes’ video section, showing video podcasts that I already had in my iTunes imported:
(promo) Again, if you want to find some good video podcasts or videoblogs as we call them to fill up your iTunes, check out Mefeedia.com, the best place to find indie videos.