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Monkey Thieves is a documentary about the Gulta Gang, a gang of monkeys in India wreaking havoc. What I love about this documentary is that it’s a great topic in HD. You see all the details. You see the faces, you see how they eat a grape but throw away the skin for example. You see wide shots of the city and you see other animals. It’s all about the visual wealth that documentaries can offer you. It’s just a well shot and humorous look at monkey behaviour. You see smiling faces in the background. The scene is monkeys stealing ice creams and eating them. They hold it with the stick, take little bites and more.

This morning whilst tweeting with Fahran Rehman we decided that we would like to organise a twitter event in London with a difference. Twestival and twinterval are great ideas but we’re thinking of doing something over a period of two days that would be like a podcamp but over two days and we need your ideas to make it worthwhile. Already we have 27 people on facebook interested in the project and another 6 so far on tweetcamp. It would take place in London in the not too distant future normally. The reason for it taking place in London is that there are over 10,000 twitter users theoretically based in London already so we might expect at least two to three hundred to come along to participate. If you’re interested in participating then put your name down and let’s get the project underway and see how much interest we can gather.

Here are some old images of Geneva in Switzerland taken over a century ago. You can see how the land used to look and how it looks now. You can see some of the old streets and the contours. Now it’s a mass of buildings and the relief is hidden. [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Geneva many years ago”][/caption] Then Such a contrast between the two. And the gare de Cornavin And to see how it is now For more images of the set.

Piotr - Dec 2, 2008

Looks like a hardship assignment!

Loic Lemeur giving an interview to a journalist with a nice big seesmic logo behind him.

There’s also the social side. Hermione of Techfluff.tv and Alicia L’americaine . There’s a video I should upload of Hermione dancing with three mariachi but I’ll do that once I get access to more bandwidth.

I saw a tweet saying that Americans now send twice as many text messages as Europeans and this makes me think of just one thing. It’s obsolete. What I mean by that is that now that I have a data plan and skype and gtalk on my phone I refuse to send sms which I have to pay for when everyone I know uses at least one IM client. It’s so much cheaper (free) for me to chat with you on gtalk. There’s also more chance that I’ll get an answer. I really don’t like the idea of sending sms when there is a better contemporary technology out there costing far less money :-) Just to give you an example. I’ve been with friends in Geneva and Lausanne chatting with other people via gtalk from bars, restaurants and the living room couch. I’ve even skype called a friend with the N95 and she’s in the US. All of this is free, inclusive data within my contract. I want you to modernise, let’s use mobile communication in a more creative way than missed phone calls and unanswered SMS.

Tonight I went to the cinema and saw two films at a cinema that has turned half a century old. The most interesting of those event is a 1930s film with a live performance by a jazz band touring switzerland with that film. I also saw an Avant premiere for a film that was quite interesting. It was a different subject matter than other films I’ve seen. I’ll write more and include links to videos once some of the video material I shot is processed.

richard - Nov 2, 2008

Sukhjit: For the past three or four days I have been watching hours of documentaries. They have nothing about celebrity, nothing about real market value. They simple provide information about subjects that interest a certain portion of the population. There’s an interesting series called Evolve and two subjects were “Skin” and the second was “Gugts”. These are topics that may not be interesting because there is a low chance that people would buy them. At the same time it’ like video encyclopedias. Rather than look at this information on a page you actually see it. Much as with David attenborough’s Life on Earth Series from the 70s I really think there’s more to television than mindless entertainment for the masses. I also think that music, games shows and other programs are not the only form of entertainment. In fact that’s why I never watched the five channels available in England. Frieda: There’ a lot that can be done when you’ve got unlimited airtime, as is the case on the web. They might as well take advantage of that and produce some original content.

In an age where mobile video streaming is cheap in comparison to the past it’s a shame that youtube do not showcase this technology and have three hundred people streaming from one city for example. Why is it that they chose to cover live music events instead. Of course music is cheap to cover, excluding rights issues. Get three or four cameras in a room to cover the action on stage, two or three more cameras backstage and you’ve got a program, That’s not all though. It’s something you can rehearse. The singers do their sound checks, the vision mixers and directors know the music, know the cues. Everything can be well orchestrated. The production will be flat and boring. The BBC stopped top of the pops and now you’ve got Youtube doing live music programs. Of course it’s a different program, of course it’s a different technology, but of course it’s just one more step on the trip towards a different age of television. I love new media and new technology but I wish they would do something more creative with their time. Look at Autumn watch for example. Camera crews went to beautiful landscapes to cover the wildlife. They even broadcast whilst scuba diving. They use the website as an addition and they’re doing some outdoor event. That’s what we need more of. In an age where everyone walks around with a video camera, whether flip, mobile phone or other so the broadcaster, especially when it comes to entitities like youtube, should reflect their user’s method of covering the world. They should get out of the studio and get twenty cameras in a city, and cover everything that’s going on in real life, nothing setup. Just capture life as it happens. If that’s too boring then do some research, see of a live event that you could cover, whether it’s a car show where you’ve got lot’s of drifting, a festival where you’ve got hundreds of things happening at once or a ski resort where you’ve got snowboarders, skiers and other activities taking place. You could have cameras at the telesièges, at the teleski, you could have some at the summit and some on the other side of the valley filming as people ski down. You could have dynamic cameras. Just get out of that studio and give us something that’s not an advert for someone’s latest single. That’s just dull.

Today it snowed.