vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Me.Feedia.Net

Me-TV.com has become mefeedia, a seriously kewl name. It aggregates RSS from videoblogs, and is the brainchild of Peter Van Dijck. Seriously smart.

It lets anyone add feeds, it seems to automatically create an appropriate feed with enclosures if your feed is plain vanilla, and it also has a javascript that produces a vlogroll to insert into your own blog. By semester two when my students are going to be neck deep in this stuff, I’ve no idea what we’ll actually be doing it is developing so quickly.

ANT 2

ANT development continues apace with another release today. Not sure when various features have been added but now ANT:

• has a link button that loads the url that any individual video feed is derived from (so the blog entry that the video resides on/in
• allows feeds to be added via the interface (not just the menu)
• allows you to refresh via the interface (not just the menu)
• has a play, previous and next icon in the interface
• allows stopping of a download (command .)
• has a playlist button so the playlist draw toggles
• you can toggle the Feeds drawer from the menu
• allows the toolbar to be customised
• has an applescript that adds podcasts to itunes
• in preferences you can auto check feeds at a nominated time
• set a maximum size for how much video you’re going to store
• allows the user to control where videos are placed

Unfortunately this could well define what a videoblog becomes. It is unfortunate since most will just view the feeds, a de facto TV, and not read the text entries nor the blog qua blog which ought to include dates, comments, text, and all the other material texture that makes a blog a blog and not just some video.

Lax

No, not LA international airport (where the big jet engines roar), but as in slack. I haven’t made any video for a while, so today I just found old footage on the tiBook that I hadn’t done anything with and spent 30 minutes making a small piece. Semester starts in a fortnight, I have a lot of new curriculum to develop, another 60 or so blogs to get set up, a wiki to install, things to write and read. Oh, and reviewing abstracts for blogtalk, and trying to start to write some documentation about videoblogging for the new ‘how to’ site that Jay is getting us all involved in.

The new vog, “In the Driver’s Seat”, was shot on my now broken Canon ixus still camera. It is from January 2004 when a small picnic in the Botanic Gardens celebrated Anna’s return from Europe and Jasper’s fifth birthday. It was glorious weather and the kids played a long, complicated game in some trees involving passwords, buttons, climbing and obscure imaginary machinery.

The work is scripted very simply. One sprite was loaded up with the still images, and on the [mouse enter] event the image index for the current sprite was moved by 1, with a maximum of 11 with a wraparound so that once it got to 11 it wraps back to 1. The vog.rmit badge is just a png that I added in a sprite. On this sprite on the [mouse click] event I added a simple goto that loads a url in a new browser window. This links to this entry, but I’m beginning to think that when I split the video and this blog all those years ago it might now make more sense to just fuse the two together again. Anyway, the link to this entry from the badge in the movie is there because now that we’re using things like ANT to aggregate video with RSS your video gets viewed in very odd contextless ways, so this embeds a link in the video back to the blog.

The intent of the interaction is very simple. A simple series of statements that relate to what is being shown, they only appear if and when the user mouses into the movie, and they loop. The video continues playing underneath – it could be paused, but why should a work stop just because a user wants to explore? If it does stop, then exploration is not exploration is it? The risk of missing something, of the not seen (the link not visited) is fundamental to the experience of your actions as having consequence. Clicking and having the universe of the work pause for you is not a consequence, unless you enjoy learning how to salivate when a bell sounds.

Learning Spaces

Geoffrey Rockwell has a nice collection of photos and observations about space, learning, and light. My own area might be moving to a renovated building in the next 18 months or so, and Jeremy and I have thought a lot about similar things.

We have proposed that a series of various size rooms, largely glass walled, be distributed throughout the 5 or 6 floors of the new building. These rooms would be research rooms. They can be booked for varying duration (depending on the research activities being undertaken, and the size of the research team), and will be properly resourced. They are flexibile spaces in that they are multiple.

Why glass? Security, those inside can’t get up to wrong things, and also can feel safe since others can also make sure that wrong things aren’t happening to those in the room. Transparency: so people can see research being done, and ask questions. Space: to give the experience of research as an activity that happens within the space of the institution and not as something that happens ‘over there’ or ‘in there’ – ie literally behind closed doors. Access, everyone should be able to see what is being done.

Why scattered throughout the building? Having several means the space is not precious, nor the preserve of an owner. It also makes literal the idea that research is a collaborative, distributed activity. It also means that you serendipitously discover these things as you move through the building. It encourages collaboration.

Of course, it is precisely the sort of thing that will disappear from any budget at the first sign of cost over runs. (We can but try.)

Garage Cinema Research

This is a project I saw a few years ago (unless it is different project with the same name? nah) which is out of the Uni of California at Berkeley. From their blurb:

They are doing a lot of research around metadata, capture and editing. A place to get in touch with, and to watch.

Blogs and Genre

On the videoblogging list there’s been some light discussion about genre. I suspect it is pretty much time to recognise that blogs are not a genre. They might have been, briefly, but not any more. They’re a medium (that’s medium as in singular of media). A blog is like ‘CD’, ‘book’, or ‘painting’.

So in CD’s we have genres, the really big ones would be things like pop, jazz, rock, classical. But of course each of these can be subdivided into 100s of smaller generic categories. With books we would include fiction, non fiction, romance, sci-fi, fantasy, western, mystery, and so on. With the same ability to further discriminate. We can do the same with painting. In each case we can also identify style, so that in painting a genre might be still life, but it could be fauvist, cubist, late renaissance northern, and so on.

So it is now with blogs. There are multiple genres, each with variable styles. Blogs are now in fact a medium. The first specific medium to have emerged from the World Wide Web http protocol.