Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

Mica: “there’s a lot to think about!” Watch movie Quicktime, 0.7 min 1.8 MB (Original post, via scratch video)

Forbes.com put Mefeedia in its ‘Best of the Web’: “BEST: Breadth of offerings, including links to other vlog portals. Quick free registration. WORST: Forums are like a ghost town and design is wanting.”

All true :) Their “Obtain the Forbes Best of The Web logo for use on your site” is coorporate bullshit though: you need to fax them for approval to use their logo. You got to be kidding me - what a scam.

The best compliment ever for Mefeedia: “I love what you did to the place. So close to homemade but no lumps“.

Although there are plenty of lumps left :)

Sometimes a picture works better: this is how Mefeedia (the first video aggregator) supports rel=”payment”. If you put a link with rel=”payment” in your blog post, Mefeedia will show a support link in its interface.

When we thought of it, it made sense. Only slowly am I realizing now why it makes sense, and why it might make less sense for text bloggers.

Rich media aggregators (or enclosure aggregators) like FireANT, Mefeedia and iTunes, don’t get their content from the RSS feeds that’s already been syndicated. The media content is linked from the RSS, not embedded, like text content. So you HIT the owner’s bandwidth every time someone watches or downloads a movie or a podcast. It costs them. That’s why it makes more sense to have a payment link for rich media than for text media.

Or it might just be the early morning coffee.

Yesterday, I met with Jay, Josh and Kenyatta. We were talking about standards for videobloggers, and how we can set good standards now, before the likes of Apple, MSN or XXX try to control the space. Jay said: “how can we get people paid with standards?” (Getting some $$ is a big thing for videobloggers, with hosting costs and all.) Josh was explaining an idea with an RSS namespace. I said “rel=donate”. It just made sense. Josh proposed we changed it to rel=”payment”, which made even more sense. Jay posted a video.

I implemented it for Mefeedia this morning - still testing but it works. Post a post with a video and a rel=”payment” link, and it’ll show a nice “Like this video? Support this videoblogger” link.

Why might this work? producing video is (perhaps) more work than text. Videobloggers love to be paid. As for the standard: it’s supersimple. Only the aggregators need to support it, not the creation software. And it degrades perfectly. Share and enjoy :) Standards are about implementation, not definition. We’ll see.

Yesterday, I met with Jay, Josh and Kenyatta. We were talking about standards for videobloggers, and how we can set good standards now, before the likes of Apple, MSN or XXX try to control the space. Jay said: “how can we get people paid with standards?” (Getting some $$ is a big thing for videobloggers, with hosting costs and all.) Josh was explaining an idea with an RSS namespace. I said “rel=donate”. It just made sense. Josh proposed we changed it to rel=”payment”, which made even more sense. Jay posted a video.

I implemented it for Mefeedia this morning - still testing but it works. Post a post with a video and a rel=”payment” link, and it’ll show a nice “Like this video? Support this videoblogger” link.

Why might this work? producing video is (perhaps) more work than text. Videobloggers love to be paid. As for the standard: it’s supersimple. Only the aggregators need to support it, not the creation software. And it degrades perfectly. Share and enjoy :) Standards are about implementation, not definition. We’ll see.

A great new blog about how we are the media. Lots of videoblogging there. Give him some linky love.

Bre is using the Mefeedia quoting tool and made this quote which has been cracking us up all morning: “I think it is important to try to look into the dirty face or reality“.

I released version 3 (still beta) of Mefeedia today. It has lots of cool stuff, but what I’m most proud of is the first version of a video quoting tool. Here’s a screenshot:

Basically, it lets you select a part of a bigger movie, and create a new movie out of that. You can then link to that on your blog. The idea is that in the videoblogging world, people don’t link a lot to each other like text bloggers do. I think it’s because videobloggers can’t easily quote a post and then comment on it and link to it. So I’m trying to change that. Let’s see if it works.

Here’s an example quoted movie, by the way. “Like I’m trying to pull a fast one or something.â€? (Quicktime movie)

I am still experimenting with what works best.

• Include a thumb and a reference to the original blogpost? Just link the quote?
• Add a frame at the end of the movie that gives some metadata?

Right now, the quoting tool is just smil, which, if you’re quoting something at the END of a movie, makes it slow. I’m working on ways to improve that…

Press article mentioning Mefeedia

Yahoo! Groups : videoblogging Messages : Message 14050 of 14077: “If Google were here with me in this room right now I wouldn’t speak to it.”

Netscape co-founder eyes video blogs | CNET News.com: “Video blogging will be interesting, but the tools to make it don’t exist yet,” said David Hornik, a partner at August Capital. “People are spending an amazing amount of time consuming video content on the Internet.”

Another high-profile entry in the market (after the Allaire guy with Brightcove).

YouTube - Your Digital Video Repository: let’s you upload your video’s for “free”. I hate services that tell you they’re free but don’t tell you why, or what the business model is. How can I trust my data to them?

Exactly 1 year ago me and Jay started the videoblogging mailing list. In the past year, it has become an amazing community. 100s of videoblogs have grown up around it. Happy birthday.

Here’s what might happen: Apple, Google, Yahoo et al will start expanding RSS (with namespaces) or creating their own. Their tools will use these namespaces, so developers will start supporting them as well (to get their stuff into iTunes and such). So brace for the RSS wars.

NowPublic.com is a community site to develop citizen news stories.

Today, everyone’s a librarian. A vlog about categories: “We had a huge debate in our family wether we should establish certain categories.”

freevlog.org (all NEW) explains stepby step how to set up a completely free videoblog, including free video hosting. Brilliant. (And using none of those crappy free hosting sites that send you popups and stuff).

Not only the most brilliant review of Backpack so far, but I was watching it through Mefeedia, and if you play the video while reading it, it’s a surreal multimedia experience. Waw.

Digital cameras–stop them before they shoot again | CNET News.com: “When you have hundreds of pictures where you used to have one, people are less likely to ever go back to look at any of them,”

True. But also true: people start using pictures in new ways: remixing, interpreting. The same with video.

A year ago, we were worrying about running out of bandwidth to host the videos we’d create as videobloggers. Today, there are TWO free and relatively reliable solutions for hosting free video: Google Video (Beta) - Video Upload Program and the Internet archive. That’s pretty amazing, and we’re not even talking Bittorrent yet.

videobloggingweek2005 is rocking.

This is a test: reposting a vlog entry.

Brightcove (presentation) looks like ANT (desktop aggregating) + Ourmedia (storage, web service) + Mefeedia (tagging, web service). I’m not sure doing all things at once is going to be the winning approach. At least in our approach, things can be swapped out and compete (there can be more than one of each element). We’ll see.

I helped out a bit with the Ourmedia metadata work, and they were nice enough to label me “metadata nerd” on their project team page. Chech out Ourmedia. It’s a brilliant and worthwhile project.

O’Reilly Network: Hypermedia: Why Now?: “my hunch is that we’ll soon see a tidal wave of creative work.”

MSNBC - Ready for your close-up? Here come the vlogs And yes they mention my baby.

dltq.vlog: 42sec: 42sec: Earn $200 from watching my vlog!

I asked some people at the recent IASummit about folksonomies in the hallways. PeterMe thinks the IAs have a better conversation going on around folksonomies than the techies - I’m not so sure. I’ve been a bit dissapointed with the lack of IA’s speaking up in the blogosphere about this.

The panel at the IA Summit was good though. It lacked insights about integrating folksonomies with other approaches (how exactly, folks?), and there were some misconceptions (synonyms are NOT a problem with folksonomies, they’re a problem with the technology. Google solved search query synonyms pretty well, the folksonomies will do the same.), but overall it was great to hear IA’s speak up. Too bad we don’t do this publicly, enough (and I’m as guilty as the next guy).

Peter Morville’s part of the panel was brilliant. I’d actually never seen him speak - he had me laugh out lout quite a few times. David Weinberger’s favourite metaphor (folksonomies are leaves falling of the trees) was extended in many ways. Peter Morville: “what happens with leaves that are raked together? They rot. And become food. For trees. Which then live long and useful lives.” There was more talk about trees having many shapes, trees blocking out the light for new things to grow, people bumping into trees which can cause pain and so on. Fun.

Anyways,
here’s the movie (Quicktime, 7M)

Tagging is great. Check out the growing sharing of love at Mefeedia.

Sanyo Xacti J4: Digital Photography Review: seems like a pretty good videoblogging camera: gets mp4, you can zoom while filming, ….

Jon Udell talks about screencasts today, and is the screencast pioneer. On Mefeedia (video aggragator), there’s a screencast tag collecting screencasts: http://mefeedia.com/tags/screencast/

� Podcasting: Zero to 3075 in six months (much, much faster ramp up than blogs). Vlogging is taking slower, basically going to about 200 vlogs (rough estimate) in a year. We’re still under the radar of most people. That might be because we don’t have the famous cheerleaders podcasting has, or because there are a few more technical obstacles to overcome for videoblogging, and we’ve yet to hit that tipping point.

Ryanne’s Video Blog: a video entry about the buster controversy: where a bunny is being censored because they mention same sex couples.

Another old movie, this one from early 2004. Jay talking about videoblogging (Quicktime, 38M).

This is an old movie - the first one I ever edited. It’s Jay pre-videoblogging, talking about ways to connect. Jay in 2003. (Quicktime, 7M)

I went to see The Gates in NYC central park. I saw so many people making video with small digital cameras, I wish they were all vloggers. This is my video (Quicktime, 10M):

http://mefeedia.com/tags/gates/: this week Christo’s crazy art project “the gates” is in central park. Videobloggers are filming it (let’s be honest, EVERYONE I saw there was filming it) and movies are gathered in mefeedia around the ‘gates’ tag.

Vloggercon: Tools. (Quicktime) I was in this session. The cool thing with these vlogging tools is that, no matter how hard the big $$ companies try, all the really cool tools are being developed by us kids in the basement.

Vloggercon: Content is king. (Quicktime) “Discussion leaders: Steve Garfield, Mica Scalin, Ryanne Hodson, Chris Weagel, Jay Dedman Creating and posting videos is the key.”