vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Perambulators

When did prams lose their fourth wheel and feel the need to become All Terrain Vehicles? I can only assume that this happened more or less at the same time that the family car mutated into the suburban wrangling SUV. The tamer we make the world the easier it is to dress for adventure.

Personalize Media

Gary Hayes’ blog, looks good. Will browse manually for a bit then decide if it joins the RSS belching machine.

Video in a Blog

Readers regularly pass through here since I’m supposed to know quite a bit about videoblogging. You probably wouldn’t know it lately, been no video posts and no commentary, theory, or any other words ending in ‘y’ about video blogging. I guess this is partly because I’ve been writing for a few years here, and I figure I’ve said it. But its a blog, its conversational, and like most conversations it isn’t really about what you said two years ago. So, I’ve placed the vogma manifesto back in the side bar (first written in December 2000, some other notes about it here). And I’ll repeat, again. Sticking some video into a web page is video on the web. People been doing it since the mid 90s. Sticking some video into a blog page is a blog with some video. A blog video, or blogged video, if you like. It still is not a video blog.

What’s the difference? I have several answers to that. Today, let’s just look at one. RSS and casting. RSS is impressive. It lets people and machines subscribe to feeds and to then do something with those feeds, whether that be aggregate them to read, manipulate, redistribute, or whatever. The Royal Smooth Serialisation of information as flow. With the addition of enclosures RSS is now a delivery mechanism for sound and video – voilá pod and video casting. This is not blogging. This is not video blogging. It is a distribution mechanism. In the same way that blogging is not just, only (or perhaps really) a way of distributing what I write.

Blogging is about links and connections. It developed as a way to note, annotate, document and describe what you found online, a sort of more sophisticated and shared bookmarking system, combined with diary and process. This picked up a pile of diary like qualities, but each weblog was not an island. Each linked out, and once a critical mass (tipping point, threshold, bifurcation point) was achieved linked into, through and across each other. Through blogrolls, links, trackback, comments. Through checking referrer stats, reading other blogs, finding connections and making these connections literal through our linking. That is blogging. This is as important as what you may or may not blog about. Blogging is network based, it is writing in the network rather than on it (the old model of the homepage).

Video via RSS enclosures. What of the above is retained? I distribute my video. You view it on your iPod. Network? Gone (except as a FedEx like delivery agent). Links? Usually not used or present, and anyway if you go to a iPod then links won’t work anyway. Each podcast is an island, this is the opposite of a blog. It is community TV that is mutating into personal TV that has shifted to the net. Which is great, as long as we recognise that is what it is. Yes, anyone (in the first world with sufficient time and income) can do this, but we’ve always had home movies. So that’s not the difference. However now we can publish and distribute to the world. That is a qualitative quantitative change in distribution. Not in form, not in access, not in media, not in genre. RSS, video in a blog, at the moment is only a delivery mechanism, and I remain frustrated, bemused and surprised at how many people confuse that with a revolution in form, accessibility to media making, media or genre.

Further

To my MySQL troubles. I’ve been able to see that a lot of requests were being made for a blog that was apparently dormant. Bit of examination and it would seem to be trackback spam. So I’ve been able to remove the legacy blog, hopefully that frees up a pile of connections, threads, for mysql requests. The next step is to try to find where the MySQL config file is so I can also increase the number of connections, since that would seem to be the problem I’ve hit.

MySQL Problems

Things have been flicking off and on around here recently.

Its an old installation of mysql which has been regularly dropping its bundle. The server is an old OS X server, which had some weird mysql installation on it. It certainly doesn’t appear to be where it is supposed to be (unless that’s just me, which is entirely possible). So sorry to those who have found an interruption in service. I am, apparently, getting a new server real soon now, so I’ll be able to migrate everything. Failing that I think I will migrate everyone anyway – we have a very well spec’d linux installation going on now in my area so if nothing happens ‘real soon now’ I’ll just migrate everything from here to there. In the meantime I need to find out some MySQL powertips to clean up everything.

Cathy has a blog

Via Mark I have found Cathy Marshall’s blog. Cathy is the hypertext elf. A computer scientist who can write with an élan that is, well, wonderful, and of course makes cool things. I think I’ve only met her twice (at each of the ACM hypertext conferences I’ve been to – no, I also met her at the 1999 ACH conference at Virginia), and her impish intelligence brooks no fools. Uncut diamond, only because to cut the stone is to turn everything that can be into one thing that is. That’s Cathy. (She once sent me an anonymous sports sock with a hypertextual chain letter commanding I forward the sock on – I only knew it was Cathy because of the logo on the letter.)

Experimentalist in Network Literacies

So, I have students doing individual problem based learning inspired research into Roland Barthes and “From Work to Text”. (This is so that they can make interactive media essays about how this essay might help them think about video and pod casting – yes, it is a long bow, but you can hardly encourage or model creative research practices if you invite everyone to colour in by dots.) They are writing what they find to their blogs. I want to collate this into a single location. Del.icio.us lets me tag, but it is only headlines (unless I’ve missed something). Furl lets me add posts to a clip blog and that has RSS. To do this I use my RSS client (NetnewsWire) to get their posts. Handily I can do a search of the posts for a string like “Barthes”. I could then load each individual post in the browser, select some text, and use the ‘furl it’ extension in Firefox to clip it. Then students could subscribe via RSS to my furl clippings feed to find all the material aggregated.

Then I wondered if reblogging wouldn’t be easier. So I’ve installed Reblog. Now, if things were more advanced with the students I could get them to custom tag their content with a category for the project, then I could subscribe to each student blog on the basis of the custom category, and simply aggregate. Alas, with 60 odd undergraduates still struggling to come to terms with RSS, this is not a good model.

A quick play with reblog, ah, I can subscribe to each student blog (again), then skim their posts and simply choose to republish whatever in their feeds I want via reblog. Now I get it. It can pull in all their RSS, I only publish the Barthes related material, and it is done. And of course reblog has its own very nice RSS feed. Now I just have to load in the OPML file from Netnews Wire of all the students, and start clicking.

Trial and error. Iteration. Exploration. Testing and evaluation. Practice.

Applied RSS

For those interested, in our second year media program I have students doing very crude research on a single theme (Barthes’ “From Work to Text”). This research is posted to their blogs. I tag each relevant blog entry in del.icio.us so that there is a single page that collects all of this research. Students can subscribe to this page via RSS which means all of the distributed student research is aggregated for them, to them. Kewl, as they apparently say.

Though having written that I see that del.icio.us only provides title and no content, so I need a social bookmarking system that also sucks in the content for me. Furl will do that, as long as I add clippings…

A Step

In labsome honours (basically the first iteration of a new way of conceiving honours research in a School of Applied Communication) all of the students are using blogs. We are currently using elgg, largely because it is very simple to use, all pretty much all of the features needed, and I don’t have the chance/opportunity to teach for the sorts of literacies required to get something like WordPress happening properly. So, while catching up after Easter I notice that Kath has got a few comments. Not sure how useful they are to her, and I’m impressed that she’s taken to the dialogue with aplomb. What I’m interested to find out next week is her experience of this. She’s a professional journalist, so I’m intrigued to see what, if any, changes she is experiencing between her professional practice and the blog.

docudancing

Found this research documentation blog out of InterMedia, Oslo. A research project that is about choreography, dance, documentary, new media and research. This is one of those applied research projects that wants to reimagine research as a practice, which I have a lot of empathy with. Activities that bring research back into actions as a material practice, out of the flatland of the book which too much of the humanities academy has retreated in to.