vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Video Blog Theory Email List

The videoblogging list (which has become large, noisy, and regularly stuck in either flame wars or just dealing with newcomers), has spawned a videoblogging theory email list. I’m not sure if it will survive, since there are only 13 members, so it could just splutter out. But it is certainly a change from the videoblogging list where there are something like 100 messages a day of which perhaps 2 I might read. No real charter apart from discussing video blogs theoretically, whatever that might come to mean. But certainly not a place to debate H.264 versus wmv or why my RSS feed isn’t working (and what was RSS again anyway?).

TV Killed Vogging’s Star

This is the last paragraph of the chapter I have contributed to Axel and Jo’s anthology on blogging:

What might it mean for audio and video media to be porous to the network? To allow quotation, interlinking and to develop a media which is as permeable and granular as networked text? These questions cannot be answered until we have tools that enable this to happen as easily as it can be for text. The narratives that could then be sung remain to be discovered. Blogs are the first online popular media to have recognised that relations between parts are an immanent quality to a properly networked practice, and while audio and video remains closed to the network audio and video blogging can be little more than audio and video in a blog, rather than audio and video blogging. Until this event occurs, the moment which in retrospect makes it obvious why audio and video ought to be plastic and permeable, the culture of the media star remains uncontested and central to audio and video blogging which accounts for why much of this content mimetically mirrors the direct address forms popularised by mass popular media. This paucity of invention mistakes style for new paradigms and with the rise of mobile non–networked devices there is every opportunity for TV and radio to kill the yet to be born video blogging star.

Was going to write more, thinking more about the use of direct address in personal video blogs, and then slip into something about the importance of free indirect discourse, but the above is enough for now.

Slowly Emerging

From way too much administrative non sense (I’m now ‘acting’ co-ordinator of the Bachelor of Communication honours program, which I’ve renamed LABsome and seem to be sending silly amounts of time doing very basic administrative activities that really, I’m paid way too much to be spending my time doing). Where was I? Oh yes, so, I’ve been stuck in writing a difficult piece of time online (still mired in that one) and administrivia, so I thought I’d stick my head up long enough to mention the Smarty Blog Awards.

I was one of the ‘experts’ on the judging panel, and the winner has caused some minor controversy (see Charles Wright. In general I’d agree with some of the sentiments. The winning site, as opposed to the blog, is exemplary, but the blog part of the site is, well, not particularly bloggish. But the assessment criteria we were invited to assess by did not really recognise this. It included things like regularlity of posting, use of images, and so forth but nothing that actually required us to think how ‘bloggish’ the blog was. Hence this particular blog, which lacks things like comments, trackback, RSS (which are not just geek fetish) etc and is largely devoid of internal or external links, a blogroll and so on, manages to sneak in. As I said, the site itself is an exemplary work, but I think it is easy to confuse the blog with the site.

There Should be More Vogs About Rain

This is a small piece I made a couple of months ago, just testing out some things in eZedia QTi. What I like about eZedia is that I can drag an image in, and in the eZedia interface just set a mouse off, over, and down value for it using sliders. Seriously fast and easy. On the down side though is any video or audio that you bring into an eZedia project is, by default, a child movie. This means video that you make in here will always break in RSS, because what it actually produces is a container movie (what you see) and within this it plays video or audio. In the case of this piece all of the video is loaded as a child movie, even though this is all the video content of the piece (one piece of video).

In case you’re wondering, the video tiling was done using only QuickTime Player pro. I’ve got an old tutorial explaining how to do this.

The work is just video filmed during a thunderstorm at home. It’s my backyard in Melbourne. The film noise is a real time QuickTime effect which means it is rendered at run time – so if you play it a second time the scratches will appear somewhere else. Mouse into the three bits of text and you can read them, that is all this does. As I said I was just playing with eZedia.

I think vogs should aspire to the condition of water.

This Week

I am on leave. I’m spending the week with my kids, Christmas shopping, wrapping stuff, going camping. I’m old school. Leave is leave, it isn’t a chance to step out of the office and do the work that you wish you could do if you didn’t have to do all that administrative stuff. It is time to let go, switch off, forget it. (If you don’t get time in your job, then either manage time better or rethink your job.) So later this week we’re all off to The Prom, I intend watching children swim and play in the sand while I read a novel or two. Next week I am returning for that insane last week before Christmas. And summer holidays.

Part of A Sketch

The poster movie below (click to load into QuickTime player – it will launch outside of the browser window) is the introductory remarks I made at Learning Technologies 2005. It could have become my presentation in its entirety, but I wanted to show and discuss the interactive QuickTime essay I was/am working on (I expect it to be published next year). It departs from what I was going to talk about, in response to recognising that the educators here need solutions now, not ideas for futures that might not happen.

BTW, it’s 4.3MB

WTF….

What does it mean when your clothes are being designed around your electronics? The Kenpo jacket for iPod.

Call Me Old Fashioned

Well, currently sitting in the food court (when did food in malls become a court for goodness sake) at Tullamarine. Flight to Sydney cancelled as cargo door on plane was damaged when a ladder got blown in the wind (given they fly at the speeds they do, I don’t understand but if it’s broke it’s broke). Got another flight. That has thruster something-or-other problems so have settled for a later flight that, presumably, won’t be stricken. I know we’re assured that this isn’t the case, but you really can’t help wondering that with Qantas outsourcing so much work (cheaper) that this is the result.

WordPress Database Repairs

Here is a tutorial using phpMyAdmin (which manages mysql) showing you how to repair mysql tables for WordPress. Sort of thing that can save your bacon. And from the same site, how to restore your tables…

WordPress addon

Adam, one of the students in Integrated Media this year has whipped up a nifty script that generates a javascript link to show videos in your blog.