vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

and thanks

To Dan Winckler (a video blogger of some repute). I don’t think something I’ve made has ever been called “fucking cool” before.

syntheses

Courtesy of Collin who had linked in to my earlier entry on using Mau to invent knowledge, I have found Rob Kendall’s “Smoothcircuit“. Only had one play of it, but this is very good work.

And from the same place Collin introduces me to Jeff Rice’s “Theories I believe In” which is a nice adjunct to the network literacy manifesto. Weave the webs. Build. HEY YOU!.

dion’s turning japanese

My friend Dion is teaching English in Japan for the next long while. He’s started a blog and I know Anna will squirm with envy at the dots (though one entry a blog does not make).

3ivx

These settings are courtesy of Sean Gilligan (but this is what he’s really up to) and apply to the 3ivx MPEG4 codec. I played around with this the other day and got it working fine in QuickTime on a machine without the codec installed. Made a movie with it but obviously changed the settings since it then broke without the codec installed. So, these are the settings to use for 2 Pass Encoding:

embedding vog roll 2.0

To embed vogroll 2.0 into your video blog:

Things to watch out for: the above has no line breaks and shouldn’t. So if you copy and paste it via a text processor or similar, and oddness intervenes, just make sure you don’t have stray line breaks appearing. You might not see them, but doesn’t mean they’re not there and certainly the server will send them!

The object classid nonsense is for ActiveX in Internet Explorer, you can leave it all out if you prefer but you can run into problems on PCs.

For an explanation of what this is about, there’s the post I published a little while ago.

vogroll 2.0

Last week I made vogroll version 1.0. A QuickTime based movie that is the video equivalent of a blogroll. This first version consisted only of still images with a simple mouse in event which rolled over the image. Clicking would take you to that individual’s videoblog. Well, it didn’t take long to realise that what I’d done could just as easily be done by a basic image map, so really not a lot had been achieved by doing it QuickTime.

Which leads us to Vogroll 2.0. Why a whole iteration? Because this one is now video. This time mousing in to each person’s image will cause a brief 3 second clip to play. Mousing out restores the image. This works for each person in the vogroll. This makes the vogroll much more, well, voglike.

The video that I’ve used I’ve just lifted from each individual’s videoblog. The one I did I did specifically for this project, so I’m inviting those who want to use it to shoot and make available a three second clip, which is what I’ll include. The total file is currently 260Kb. I reckon I can shave a few Kb off that, but the problem with a vogroll like this is that as more are added to it, the file size rapidly only becomes viable for broadband.

Which brings me to vogroll 3.0, which is my job for next weekend. In this one I’ll experiment with using child movies for each of the tracks. The advantage of this is that the vogroll movie will be a fraction of its current size (it needs to be 260Kb because it currently contains the 3 second samples from each vogger). It also means that the video content that any user wants to display can be as long as they wish. As long as the bit rate is really low, so that it will more or less stream on demand, then if you want a 5 minute intro to who you are on your blog, off you go.

Bit rate rather than total file size is important here because the parent movie (what will actually be the vogroll that you embed in your videoblog) will be, say, 30 or so Kb, but as you mouse into a person’s image it will retrieve whatever it is they want to say or present. This will be video, presumably off their own website (though I can host it here), which will appear within the vogroll movie only when someone mouses into it. So a request is made to receive this video, and it plays within the vogroll movie. So as long as the bit rate is low (and it is fast start) then it will start playing almost immediately (I’d expect within 3 seconds). Off course three seconds is an eternity, but such lag and delay for me is a condition of the network.

Oh, another benefit, by building it like this we should be able to play nearly any video format inside of QuickTime, including avi as long as it is compressed with a QuickTime legible codec.

manifesto for change

I’m currently teaching a subject that goes by the name of Advanced Seminar (these days its a final year communications research project course). In this subject I try to get students to think much more creatively and critically about their own practice. Last week I talked about how their undergraduate careers have taught them to consider the ‘what is’, but the industries they’re going into require them to be able to think of the ‘what ifs’. How they’ve all learnt how to read something and work out, possibly repeat (but of course not literally) what it says. How to do yet another analysis of a film, a book, an image, a sound. That these are foundational skills but they ought to be a foundation to then consider new possibilities and to invent new knowledges. Not add to the existing storehouse.

This week I repeated the same theme, but this time through the simple distinction of having been acculturated to being knowledge consumers, but now they are to become knowledge producers. That being students they’re given things to read, to consume, to interpret and to present in their essays proof that they’ve been able to read and interpret. It is a model of consumption. So what might it be to move to being knowledge producers? Was a difficult though useful discussion.

To model this I handed out Bruce Mau’s “An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth”. Everyone spent a few minutes of class time to read it. There were a few questions which we discussed answers to. I then invited everyone to choose three of the items in the list that they thought were important to themselves and what they wanted to do. “What they wanted to do” was left open, it might refer to their project work this semester, or it could refer to their careers, next year, and so on. They had to write why these three things were important.

We went round the room, everyone nominating their three and why they were important, including myself (process is more important than outcome, begin anywhere, and avoid fields and jump fences). I used my three to contextualise how this course actually runs, and why. Quite a few people had some common points so we discussed these and what they actually might mean, and since some students had made really good points in their discussion I returned to these to tease them out a bit more.

Finally, I asked everyone to do number 28, make new words. They were to look at their three key items and develop a new word that would express this quality. Their final projects should, then, exhibit this quality. I also did this, and I explained my process so that the students had some sort of methodology. I listed a key word from each item, brainstormed from that word, and made a word that was a creative composite from these.

From ‘Cross fences and jump fields’ “jump” was the most significant quality for me, this lead through leap, fall, skip, run, dance. for ‘Process is more important than outcome’ I listed event,river, flow. And for ‘start anywhere’ it was begin, birth, baby, child, star, origin, flow, music. From this I invented

A term that suggests music but also muse, so a particular idea of invention and creativity. The sound of word (hopefully) suggests something about dance or music, it is a word that sings on your tongue, and also expresses the key qualities of flow, rhythm, invention, and creativity.

Everyone announced their words, some combined languages, many were brilliant. The point? Invention, creativity, new knowledge. This word can now work as the exemplar by which they judge what their project is and becomes. It demonstrates what happens (and what it feels like) when you stop repeating knowledge and start anywhere on anything to invent outside of the known. For next week? We’ll see, but first of all everyone was given the job of drawing what their word should look like, to present next week.

embedding QuickTime

Apple maintains an excellent series of pages detailing what the embed tag can do with QuickTime. Did you know you can string together up to 256 different QuickTime movies, getting one to play after the other, just using the embed tag? No, have a read, it’s quite amazing what you can do with it.

blog engine upgrade

Well, this blog will be messy for the next week or so. It’s Friday afternoon and I’ve just upgraded to MT 3.x, so I will not be redesigning for a while. But I do want to upgrade and see what problems it might cause before I move a pile of other blogs on hypertext.rmit to MT 3. So, sorry for any interruption to normal broadcasting….

but wait, there’s more…

From Chris Weagel on August 18 (sorry, no permalinks):

rotfl.