Tech Related

Whilst listening to a conversation between several podcasters in their debriefing they were asking the question of how to involve a different demographic in the process of podcasting. This is an interesting question. As one participant pointed out the demographic seems to be for white males over 30 years of age to create content whilst younger people seem not to be active. If that last statement is true then I am an anomaly to the rule since I have over four years even to reach that age. What is the strength of podcasting and how does it differ from mainstream media?  What is the difference between the mainstream media and podcasting What makes a documentary a documentary rather than a podcast? Are podcasts and amateur pieces of work because the person creating that content has less experience? If so does the habit of podcasting turn them into professionals and do they as a result lose their identity. Is podcasting about content on demand and fed automatically to the player? In that case how long do we wait before the mainstream media do the same thing? It’s an interesting topic and I’d like to see what people have to say about this. I know that some people at the Podcamp complained about people talking about podcasts in podcasts but there are some important questions to be answered. I don’t see myself as a podcaster because I’ve spent so many years in Uni studying this that I believe I deserve another label. I’m a television producer, or at least I aim to be one. There’s something that has really changed from my childhood to now. When I was no more than ten years old I decided that I wanted to do video and that I wanted to edit but I had no access to any hardware that would allow me to do anything. There were two reasons for this. The first of these was cost. At the time two beta sp decks would cost 30,000 CHF a piece. Now for 3200 CHF you get yourself a portable edit suite. Add a small camera and you’re doing ENG. What growing up when I did meant is that I had to content myself with books on the subject. I bought books about editing, about basic camera work, basic betacam work, theory books by Eisenstein and still more books. What this meant is that although I had never been able to edit the material I had shot I had the chance to think about shooting and editing style. It was nothing more than an intellectual pursuit. As a result of the time I spent daydreaming about having the facilities to produce television programs it meant that finally when I had the equipment I was in a much better place than young content producers are today. Most people pick up a camera and film something without thinking of sequences of shots, story telling and more. Instead they do anything and put it together. As a result there are some products that are hard to watch. What about duration. In broadcast when you’re a beginner you’re given one or two minutes for the video you want to create. As you prove your skill at short items you progress to longer, more informational and more interesting pieces. Of course those are documentaries in the Griersonian sense of the word rather than podasts. You see documentaries are the creative treatment of actuality. They are built as a means by which to document what happens in real life rather than something setup. These are actualities, Actualié in french. Find the means by which to make them about current affairs and you have a documentary. Dziga Vertov with “The Man With the Movie Camera” played with this idea. So did Flaherty before him with Nanook of the North. John Pilger, Nick Broomfield and documentaries after them have also experimented with different styles. All of them were broadcast. Now we’ve come to another era in factual production. This is the personal era of video production. If you think of early literacy you may have seen the same fears as there are now. If everyone can writ then what prevents them from writing their own books and no longer buying material by those who do it for a living? Time, for a start. Producing high quality content takes a lot of time and thought. What is the difference between a podcaster making a documentary about the steam railway and Fred Dibnah? Contacts, budget and organisation. Fred Dibnah is in front of the camera telling you so much about what he knows but how much information did the researcher  go through before providing the right amount of information. How long did the script writer take. How many shots in a professional production are handheld and whom do they have access to. Did they spend three days to get the shots they needed. Of course they did. As a documentary maker you’ve got the pitch, the proposal and getting it agreed, the budget and getting that agreed, the shooting schedule and then editing. You also need to understand the demographic you’re providing content for. Podcasters do it as a hobby and they’re surprised when people watch their programs. It fills them with joy and pride. I saw many people and the passion they had for their productions as podcasters. They’re filled with ambition and this is what makes their programs interesting. They give us their point of view and it’s great. I think teamwork may be what’s lacking from podcasting. Lot’s of people want to create content yet when you meet them you see that many of them do so alone. If that is the case then the reason to have Podcamps is to encourage people to create networks and teams. As the teams grow and as a variety of people with specialist knoweldge join together so their product increases in visibility. What makes Leo Laporte such a great podcaster? The people he involves in his work. He recently stated that he has at least two podcasts a day to record and that he gets other people to do various things he needs help with. He’s got one or two guests to speak about law, a few more to speak about Macs and yet more for This Week in Tech. As a result he’s got a “Twit Army” to help with content creation. With more Podcamps and greater participation  there is a greater chance of teams being formed and creating nice networks of podcasters to produce compeling content. Europe as a whole needs to provide much more content so that we get a European take on all these topics. Better still, involve a variety of people. Get women involved. Mention the name Allie (sp?) and see how many of those at Podcamp remember her. Why aren’t more girls involved so that we may remember and interact with a team of them. I’ll see what others have to say about this

Ten years ago if you met someone and they gave you their visit card you’d put it away somewhere and eventually you might have come back to it but the information would need updating. Over the years social networking tools on the web have evolved from simple mail clients to web forums and finally to Myspace and Facebook. With Facebook we find what I think of as an enhanced phonebook. When you meet someone at a party today there’s a good chance that this individual has a facebook presence. As a result when you go home they may add you as a friend and in so doing you are brought into their lives. You can see where they’ve worked, for how long and what they were doing. you can see whom they associate with and how they tend to meet people. Facebook has become  a daily feature of contemporary life. Facebook does not limit your interactions to the people you’ve met during your time at parties, events and more. It also allows you to join groups, some are based on occupation, others on passions and yet some more on soemthing that may be relevant to only ten to twenty people. As these groups multiply so you decide to associate through these people through forums and the likes. For a time I was part of the Lecture napping appreciation society whilst others were part of the “curse of the N18” amongst other groups. Today a friend joined a group which I would never join for the simple and good reason (simple et bonne raison) that reflects the views for which I avoid the place. I’m living between London, a city of up to twelve million (depending on the demographics you chose) and a village of no more than 2000. I love the contrast between the two and as a result feel no need to visit the place that the group boasts about. The point is that as a medium becomes more commonplace and as more people feel comfortable with the technology so their personalities are reflected in a variety of ways which give a great wealth and diversity of character to the medium they are using. It is precisely because of those differences in interests that we gain as a social group. We, the international internet users, have a great wealth of opinions and views available within a few keystrokes and we should constantly aim to promote those interests that most effectively reflect our character, things that friends may take years to notice but that can be made obvious online. Facebook, in my opinion, is a personal, rather than social network where you promote the interaction between friends you’ve had for years and friends you’ve only just met. There are other networks that are great for making new online friends but Facebook should be kept for those people whom you have met face to face.

Back in 2000 I arrived in the South West of England as an 18 year old who was used to watching 24 minute documentaries on a range of subjects and I wanted to do the same thing. For the course I was doing when I was told that I had to do one minute pieces I was dissapointed because I thought I would never get through what I wanted to say in that amount of time. It took a lot of effort and thought during those two years on that course but eventually I understood the importance of briefness. I understood that you can get the same idea in twenty words as you can in 2000. As a result of this when I arrived in London to study for the BA in media and television studies I had the one sentence one point mentality and when i was told to make a ten minute documentary I saw this as more of a challenge than when I was told to make short documentaries. The reason for this, precision. There are a number of bloggers, used to the written word, who are moving over to video to deliver their message and as they do so their inefficiency with getting the point across gets in the way of the quality content they have to offer. On a number of occasions people tend to record ten to twenty minute interviews without cutting anything out. As a result the signal to noise ratio goes down. As a video producer one of your most important tasks is to find the key points that someone makes in their argument and get them across to your viewer within the shortest amount of time possible. If you think that a news item is between one minute 30 to 2 minutes these are the timings you should work for. There is far too much content on the world wide web for me to waste a quarter of an hour listening to someone who cannot be conscice in the way he expresses himself. It’s a shame because what is said may be of interest but I’m not ready to spend 15 minutes on one video clip unless it is a highly and well produced piece of documentary making with a range of interviews and analysis.

As you’re painfully aware by now there are hundreds of social networking websites but none of them have a communal database. If you’re on orkut your data stays there, if you’re on yahoo communities your data is there. All these social networking websites are very similar in what they ask of you but different in how they link you. Loudmouthman got me thinking about how you could use a database like freebase to share this data between networks, sort of like openid but with more data. Freebase is a database for volunteers, similar to a wiki but whereas the wiki is a collection of articles this is a database where you write the front end and implement it according to your needs. If you’re interested in video production and television for example you could take the television section of that database and make it accessible within that site. If you encouraged your users to create their profiles within that communal database then details which are not so critical to your persona (whilst being careful not to make phishing to easy)  could be used so that you input your data only once. By having a communal database the migration from one social networking website to another would be far smoother, more transparent. You’d have the same user profile in a number of places and you would have more freedom to concentrate on what you feel is important. If one website goes down then that is not as critical since your presence is spread in a number of places therefore there is less opportunity to be in trouble should your main social website go down, as was the case with Facebook and Skype within the past few weeks. RSS feeds are already helping to spread your presence across a number of websites and sites like Jaiku and tumblr help aggregate your daily output to a number of locations.  As a result of such practices. In effect you’d have built in redundancy. If one node goes down then five others can be used whilst waiting for your preferred  social network to come back online. In summary since we are members of more than one community there is a demand for a communal database from which the sharing of certain types of data would promote the spread of online presence between more than one community at a time. By facilitating the process of setting up a number of communities there is less opportunity for us to be bogged down in content we are uninterested in. Communities, rather than forums could be far more specific to our needs. I would welcome your views on this topic.

There are a great diversity of websites out there and each one has it’s own strengths. As a result of this it is not unusual for me to visit twenty to thirty websites on a daily basis, from the likes of twitter, my own website, news sites and more. What this means is that I find the tools that are best for what I want to do on a variety of websites. To each website it’s own purpose. That’s why I’m so dissapointed with what facebook has become at the moment. In the good old days of e-mail use you would start with a clean account and every e-mail you received you wanted. As a result you might get one or two e-mails every few days but they were of interest. Over time spammers started sending their junk and this personal space was less personal space. At around the same time friends began sending chainmail, participating on “which character are you most like” and other activities. As a result of this there was a lot of static which meant more time would be wasted processing the influx of information. This problem then came to social networking websites. One of the weaknesses of myspace was that everyone could put megabytes of junk on their pages and the website would slow down and crash certain browsers. In other situations people spam you via the bulletin boards in such way that you start to ignore them. I thought that facebook was different. I used to view facebook as a mature online community that was about people keeping in touch with their friends. The sharing of personal images, personal videos and personal work was great. That is, until the api came along. A I look at the daily requests on facebook I have zombies biting me, I have several application requests that do the same thing for music and more. The “questions for friends” api is one of those useless api that makes you sign into a service you don’t want to use so that you can read the question a friend wants to ask you. The “compare me to my friends” api is another annoying one. Yesterday I noticed that I was more likely than someone else to do something and I signed up for the api, unselecting all the elements that would advertise the api to those in my news feed. I wanted to see whom I had been compared to but found out that I had to answer fifty questions before being able to use the api. At this point I removed the api. The beauty of the World Wide Web is the vast amount of specialised websites and tools that allow for the sharing of a variety of elements. If I want friends to know about my travels then I’ve got World66, website I used before going to Poland. If I want to talk about good food and restaurants then I’ll drop by Trusted Places and read what users have written. If I want to play games online then I’d go to Kraland, nainwak, travian and a number of other websites. I see Facebook as the modern version of the phonebook where I can keep up to date with what friends are doing and where they are geographically. I enjoy the ability to see photographs and videos of what they’re doing but hate being spammed with movie trailers and other junk. I want facebook to be about my network of friends and what they’re doing in the real world. If there is too much extraneous content then I shall be looking for a less populist website. The fact that it’s been banned in certain work environments demonstrates it’s declining value as a social networking website.

For those who are interested in community video French operator Free is providing one of the most interesting services around at the moment. They are offering you a user generated television channel and the technology to broadcast content live from the comfort of you own home. All you need is a subscription to ADSL 2 and the Freebox HD box. The idea behind this service is to bring community video straight to the user. Youtube gives people the chance to upload poorly produced content so that the masses may view them. Current TV provides a website where users submit content and hope that it works it’s way up to being broadcast. Blogtv allows people to chat and is interesting for live events. Operator 11 is currently my little favourite thanks to it’s ability to switch from one webcam to another with participants from around the world. It’s great and offers you the ability to plug in a dv camera but is let down by picture quality. Free are revolutionising the process. They are providing the user with break out boxes that take the video content, either via s-video or another method and encode the content within the box. From this point on there are two options. The first of these is to provide the content live at a lesser quality level or share it differed, in other words once the data has been transferred from one point to another. According to SVM the compressed video is around 1,4 gigabytes for an hour. Normal DV streams would be 12 gigabytes per hour but with the correct encoding they’ve saved on space. If you want to find out more about this service then the SVM article can be found here. It includes a video. The content is only in French though.

After a long but great day of work I came home to do The Twitter Vox show with Loudmouthman and two guests. We were joined by Goldie Katsu and Malburns. We discussed what it’s like to reach 3000 tweets and the conversation moved towards the advantages of using twitter when part of global communities like Second Life. We had some interesting insights and the conversation progressed well. It’s a good show and can be found here.

Recently I have been trying to categorise websites and how they are used into single words. To this end I have recently started to view facebook as a self actualising phonebook. There are a number of factors which help to contribute to this feeling. One of these is the ability for me to add all “real life” friends without adding any “virtual friends” - friends I do not know in person. In so doing it limits the number of people in my contact list to those I have talked to in person at least once, but occasionally spanning two decades or more. What is great about facebook is that those you have not seen in a decade are once more part of your daily life. I look at what people are posting and I know they’re in a number of countries. I can see which are their favourite films, whether they have recently travelled, whether relationships have crashed and burned or more. I can also see what they’re up to. Twice in the last week I have noticed events put on by friends. One event was by friends whom are part of my University of Westminster days whilst others are from when i was a Bournemouth University student (albeit in Weymouh an hour away). When I went to the Westminster event I recognised quite a few faces since they are part of my recent history. It allowed me to meet new people and one comment was interesting. The girl who organised the event commented that most of these people did not know any others. She was the degree of seperation between all of us. As the night progressed so the links would strengthen and people who had been strangers just a few hours before would become familiar once again. The next day saw me going to another facebook event but this time with people I had not seen for half a decade. By taking a look at the newsfeed in facebook I could catch up with these people. I saw that one friend was having their birthday that night and that another friend from the same time period was also going to be there. Looking through the photo stream I could see what the latest adventure had been. If people think that it’s important to mention something then it’s easy for you to notice and aknowledge this once you meet them next time. When  you think of a phonebook you usually associate a limted amount of details like phone number, address, business and address. Facebook gives these details but it also gives us so much more. It’s a great tool for those of us who are mobile and willing to travel. There are three contributing factors which help make facebook popular; the first of these is mobility, the second is international travel and the last is broadband.  The first two factors are related. I am thinking about the distance and time it takes to get from where you live to where the friend lives. If you’re in North London and your friend is in North London then it’s easier to keep in touch via the facebook newsfeed than to commute over an hour to see that individual. At the same time as more of us have international groups of friends so the cost of phone calls and ability to see how friends regularly declines. We need technology that allows us to keep up to date with friends and that’s why we need the enhanced phonebook. Broadband is the enabling technology. There is a lot of information. Imagine taking two hundred pictures of an event where twenty of your friends are. If you have to mail each of these to each friend then this is going to take a lot of time and effort. Facebook allows you to do this without hinking about it, hence keeping friends you may not see frequently current to the life you are currently leading.  In effect the more open your network of friends are the easier it is to remain up to date with current developments.  At this moment in time Facebook is one of the best adapted to these needs

The fake Steve Jobs linked to this video before writing a short commentary. _ “Phone Bill Girl and one of her fellow Ph.D. candidates are discussing the work of Roland Barthes and narrative theory in the context of Derrida and Chomsky, with a deftly handled digression into the recurring sexism of Norman Mailer’s work” _ I have no idea where the inspiration for the video came from but the little remark is amusing. Fake Steve’s comment is about citizen journalism and by referencing Ijustine’s video he brings a satirical look at the question. In effect we hear so much about problems with accuracy and mis-information that this video is a nice break. it’s satirizing the idea of citizen journalism. _“Somewhere in heaven, Marshall McLuhan is weeping. Either that or laughing his ass off.“  _ This comment is particularly relevant to the quote I used two or three days ago. _…makes each of us present and accessible to every other person in the world. To a large degree our co-presence everywhere at once in the electric age is a fact of passive, rather than active, experience. _ Marshall McLuhan wrote that last comment fourty three years ago and today it’s a reality, but not as he envisaged it. The video of Justine having a little fun with a friend is a perfect representation of what the Web has become. Having spent some time researching the Operator 11 movement I have been surprised to find that people are video chatting to each other in a public place. Some of them are without shirts, others have a glass or a bottle next to them and yet more are falling asleep. People are living their lives online. They’re going out to meet friends but they’re also social from the comfort of home. Looking at what several people have done on operatr 11 I found myself thinking that this is beavis and butthead web 2.0.  The reason behind this thought is the nature of the programs. Users like Rubberbangirl start a “show” and users connect to the stream and comment both in video and through the text chat. As they do so we get a sense of community and well being. Anyone anywhere in the world can participate at any time of day and McLuhan’s thoughts are getting more concrete with every day that passes. At this moment in time Justine and other participants of Justin.tv are walking with the cameras life casting their lives. At the same time hundreds of people are sitting behind their computer screens at home watching as a number of lives occur in real life. Within a few months I expect that we’ll see these streams straight to mobile phones so that as one person lives and broadcasts their life so someone else is living their life as they watch another. We’re living in the digital/electric age where everyone can talk to everyone else. Whilst Fake Steve is having fun in his way so we see a little snippet of how Justine has her own fun. Neither of them is write or wrong. They’re reflections of trends that are active. The only difference is that whereas Fake Steve and Justine have a high profile so most users are still relatively anonymous.

“The simultaneity of electric communication, also characteristic of our nervous system, makes each of us present and accessible to every other person in the world. To a large degree, our co-presence everywhere at once in the electric age is a fact of passive, rather than active, experience. Actively we are more likely to have this awareness when reading the newspaper or watching a tv show.”

Marshall McLuhan - 1964

Marshall McLuhan was well known for a period because of the theories he developed but over time he went into disrepute as people lost interest in his ideas. When the Internet and a new form of interaction with it, the World Wide Web came to be so McLuhan’s theories would once again become more relevant, at which point people began reading and studying his works, adapting them to this day and age.  I particularly the quote above. “makes each of us present and accessible to every other person in the world” describes twitter succinctly. When you have some free time later in the day take a look at twittervision and you will have a graphic representation of what McLuhan was talking about.