vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Anna, at the Trocadero

Anna, at the Trocadero. I’ve just installed Fraser Speirs’ iPhoto plugin for flickr, and this is the first photo I’ve posted. It was January 2004, cold cloudy and shrouded. Still worked wonders of folly.

Freshwave TV

FreshWave.TV is a new videoblog site run by Shai Coggins and Bern Relos here in good ole Oz. It bills itself as “a web tv show (aka ‘video blog’)” which just goes to show how quickly a term gets appropriated, diluted, and commodified. Rose Selavy.

Embed Code Generator

Michael Sullivan over at http://vloggersblog.com/embedmedia/ has a very simple code generator that covers things like QuickTime, Flash, Real, and Windows Media. From the QuickTime point of view this is useful, but for an evangelist like me contributes to the general misunderstandings about QuickTime simply because there are something like 50 attributes to the QuickTime embed tag, and this uses 6 of them. Admittedly some of the attributes are technical, deprecated, or largely conditional on other rules, but even simple things like href ought to be understood better so that poster movies can be easily produced. For those interested, pageot is a freeware tool that provides simple access to all of the embed tag features, and is cross platform.

WordPress and Teaching

Have been several developments in Media’s use of blogs here at RMIT. First of all, as we introduced last year, every student from first year has a blog. It is theirs throughout their undergraduate career, and we’re looking into providing them as an alumni service.

Last year we used MovableType, but we hadn’t resolved individual installations so tended to rely on a single installation hosting multiple blogs. This year we’ve migrated to WordPress.

First of all the local IT staff have developed a fantastic system. Send them a list of user names and they run a script. Student visits an admin page, agrees to terms and conditions, visits their blog address, and WP is ready to be initialised. Some of the wp files are locked (we don’t want them accidentally removing key files) while permissions on other files are all apporpriate so that the blog owner can modify templates, and so on. This means that it takes only a couple of minutes to install 60 blogs. Trés kewl.

This is a big step up in terms of the support we’ve been able to receive, and it has been refreshing to find staff who can build systems like this to make everybody’s job easier, better documented, and to have transparent responsibilities. One of the dilemmas posed by innovation can be adhoc disorder (in other words it is very very nice to have someone who can clean up after me and keep it working!).

New Days

Well, the move was successful, as much as moving ever is. It is now a cardboard brown universe mixed with packing tape, newspaper, and not knowing where everyday things are. The new house is enormous, further out from the city (so far out that when I first moved to Melbourne I would have thought calling this ‘inner’ was just wannabe presumption, but now it is ‘inner east’ or ‘inner north’ apparently), big back yard, plenty of room and it feels like a home. The rent will be a struggle, but I think it will be worth it.

Unfortunately the otherside of this is that for the last two days I’ve become a train commuter. Where we now live it isn’t close to any tram routes, so it is trains. Crowded. Forgotten that they get cancelled, peak hour always overcrowded, and on some days closer to people than you wish. I’m buying a bike. I’ll join the great cycle commute along the Yarra bike path.

I wonder what the cycling equivalent of road rage is? Bike bitching? Bike bastardry, or perhaps cycling carnage? Bring it on

What The??

Ok, I don’t know what to make of this, use of tagging. It is emergent, engaged, sort of reactionary (I mean it is about making money but also uses a very simple social indicator of possibility). It is the use of tags as a tactic becoming a strategy (in de Certeau’s sense), and of course temporary – if it works companies will just invite employees to park elsewhere.

Which I think is the coolest bit, since then it really is an ecology isn’t it? Communicative feedback loops, without a meaningful feedback loop it is all hot air.

Moving

Today I am moving house. It has been a very (very) stressful week. This weekend, I will be floating on a sea of cardboard. Shelves to stock, cupboards to fill, furniture to finesse. It is a much bigger house. A home. We can’t afford the rent, of course, but it will be worth it.

P2P camera exchange

The videoblogging community is trying to get its act together and is inviting people with old/redundant cameras to donate them. The idea is to then distribute these to people who would like to videoblog but can’t afford the hardware.

I’m going to be scrooge on this one, just so that I can be proved wrong.

1. If you can’t afford a camera can you afford tape?
2. If you don’t need tape (maybe its a digital still camera) do you have a computer to post to your blog from?
3. if you don’t need a computer because you’ll use the public library will they let you plug in external camera stuff, without first wanting to vet content (what if you filmed, oh my god, something bad, like chewy in your hair?)
4. If you can’t afford a camera, a computer, but can post video from your library, do you have the literacies to manage this?

That last one’s a bit barbed. I think it is a great idea, I can imagine a lot of schools where free old cameras might make a lot of sense. But there’s the hidden downside in all this, the sort of downside that bedevils many many well intentioned aid projects. They ain’t cheap (they’ll need a recharger, you will ship the recharger too won’t you?). The batteries die with age, so is it affordable to replace them? The necessary cables and leads need to be available. And a minimum amount of information or technological literacy is presumed here. Which is fine in itself, but needs to be acknowledged. Getting video into a blog is nontrivial. Working out how to the use the bloody camera is nontrivial. Videoblogging, at the moment, is for the infotech literate. The infotech literate can also be poor. But they’re an educated poor. Imagine a school gets six cameras. All different, all requiring different maintenance, and so on. (And to make it worse, imagine you want to get them all talking to pcs!)

(I’m reminded of Bill Gate’s experience of some years ago. His fund donated a pile of old computers to a small community in Africa. He goes and visits. They proudly show him their ‘new’ old pc. He realises that a) simply getting electricity for the machine is an enormous problem, and expensive, and b) if someting minor goes wrong, it is a door stop (no tech support, no spare parts, lots of dust). He realises perhaps his money could do better things and that spreading pcs around to the disadvantaged might not actually do much for allievating disadvantage. Likewise this example. It confuses altruism with seeding a movement. If the aim is to get videoblogging to a critical mass then give the cameras not to people who are disadvantaged, but those with advantage and the literacies to do things with them. If the aim is disadvantage, lets sell our second hand gear on ebay and make a donation.)

Cocoalicious

Got this today from David Wolf (in a supervision meeting, he hasn’t blogged it). Cocoalicious is an Open Source OS X client for del.icio.us. I’m going to install it into the labs. This is one of those tools that, after students have set up del.icio.us accounts and start to get their heads around this stuff, makes life easier. Though in my experience they need to do the hard yards first, using the web client and working out what it’s about. Then the desktop client not only makes sense (“why would I do this again?”) but it also is understood as a contribution to something.

Pinging Videoblogging.info

If you want or need to auto ping http://www.videoblogging.info/ then ping

http://www.videoblogging.info/videos/send-tb.php.

What is pinging? Well you should know that if you hang around blogs. When you post an entry your blog CMS automatically pings various sites. A ping is your blog communicating its changed state to other servers. The changed state is, pretty much, that you’ve updated a contribution. It might ping other blogs that your individual entry discusses, or it could be pinging a site who’s one function is to record updates. (So, for example, that others know your blog has been recently updated.)

So videoblogging.info is a site that is all about videoblogging. As it reads your syndicated video feed your blog can also ping it and so from videoblogging.info knows that your blog has been updated. In this case those that subscribe to your videoblog via videblogging.info can then see that your site has been updated. And so forth.

In other words pings are a form of link, a communicative act that bind blogs into complex emergent networks (or ecologies).