I’m an early adopter Skype fan and still didn’t think eBay was wise to pay billions for them. I wasn’t an early adopter for the popular video site YouTube and when I first wrote about them here back in Februrary, I still hadn’t even registered. I have mixed emotions about the site to this day. They are sort of like eating chocolate. You know you probably should stay away, but damn it tastes so good.
With that said, anybody who pays at least $1.5 billion for YouTube in its current copyrape condition is even more unwise than eBay. At least Skype had a revenue model. What does YouTube have? Traffic, yes, lots and lots of traffic.
Now YouTube’s “magic number” stands at more than $1.5 billion, according to a senior industry source. Potential suitors include Viacom, Disney, AOL, eBay, and News Corp., the parent company of The Post.
A YouTube spokesperson said the company is more interested in building “a long-term viable company. And we don’t comment on rumors and speculation.”
I like the company line. I hope that’s the case. It will be interesting to see if there is any substance to that long term.
And ok, the 1.5 billion is just a rumored price, but assuming that’s accurate, that’s too much money for a site that current looks too much like the original Napster. Once YouTube’s cupboards are much closer to being clean and legit and it starts turning a serious profit maybe these billion dollar guestimates can be taken seriously.
My own YouTube / Hmm experiment
Since February I registered for YouTube and even linked up a few videos here and there. I thought it would be interesting to see how many of these videos are still on YouTube and ponder whether or not they were violating a copyright. Disclaimer: I’m not an attorney and have no formal legal training. I’m just a layman with 20+ years of business experience, 12+ owning our own businesses.
I started with a site YouTube search and worked my way through the videos embedded or linked. The dates, post links, my non-lawyer assessment of the copyright and whether the videos are still up follow.
Summarizing the activity I learned that 8 of the 14 appear to be either legal, 3/14 are either clear copyright violations or strongly appear to be a violation (the Bon Jovi cover song video) and the remaining 3/14 are questionable. Even if we give YouTube the benefit of the doubt on those three questionable videos, what about the other 3/14 (21.42%)?
While I’d be among the first to acknowledge it’s very difficult to prevent copyright content being posted, it’s not as difficult to pay people to moderate and remove it once discovered. For YouTube to be worth more money the first thing they need to do is clamp down on the copyrighted content. It seems like their efforts so far have been toward cleaning out the really obvious stuff. That’s easy. They need to dig deeper which takes more manpower or use services like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to sift through and make judgement calls on copyright like I just did. Hold over the questionable stuff for an inhouse legal staff to approve.
Expensive, you say? Not for a company rumored to be worth more than a billion dollars. I’ll be surprised if YouTube in its current condition sells for more than a billion dollars. Not shocked perhaps, but surprised. You?
There is a mini vlogger (video blogger) debate on whether or not one should bother. We all see these video sites popping up everywhere so clearly a lot of people believe video is the next frontier. Is it? Should you create a vlog?
As listeners to our weekly podcast here will note, behind the scenes I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to integrate video into our weekly Hmmcast. So far my biggest enemy remains time and I haven’t figured best how to overcome that yet. While some vloggers might have all the time in their world to throw at creative passions, unfortunately at this stage in my life I don’t. In my childhood years I did and in my yearning years I will, but probably not during my earning years. I’m envious of those who do have the time.
On June 14, 2005 while producing an original pilot vlog called “The Two” I laid out the time requirements for the three different mediums from a creator and publisher perspective:
1-2 hours - vlog (2 minutes, scripted, produced, compressed, edited, published/FTP) 30 minues - podcast (10 minute show, show notes, compressed, edited, published/FTP) 5-10 minutes - average sized blog entry (100-200 words) 1 minute or less - link blog entry 30 seconds - moblog (camera / picture phone send)
I think in retrospect a few of these times were a little on the low side. Not even once have I been able to create a scripted vlog version of the weekly Hmmcast in under two hours from start to finish. The Hmmcast in its current 7-12 minute incarnation, counting the pre-production time, takes from 1-2 hours to complete. Adding lighting, virtual backgrounds, props, video, titling, a script — which is necessary to keep some sort of logic, flow and reduce meandering — makes a total production that exceeds four hours.
I can read material ten times faster than I can listen to it. At least with podcasts you can listen to them while jogging or moving where you can’t do anything else, but video has to be watched. If you’re just going to say your message, you’re putting quite a burden on me to force me to take 10 times as long to consume it — and usually not be able to search it, or quickly move around within it or scan it as I can with text.
So you must overcome that burden. And most videologs don’t.
Well said.
As far as attention span goes, two minutes of video are like reading 20 blog posts or listening to five minutes of audio in the background. I think a lot of material is being pushed into video format that doesn’t belong there. News on video only works if you have strong visuals and audio to compliment the material. And it works even less if you are talking about it on camera with no exterior related footage. Screenshots can work, but they aren’t as good as a live demonstration and many things on the web work better as a screencast than in a video. The two can be combined, but then that requires creating a separate screencast and blending with a video; more editing.
And have you ever messed around adding titling to videos? It can be as involving as creating graphics. Sure, there are templates and tools out there to help save time, but if you want to do something that doesn’t look completely cookie-cutter — just like with making web graphics — you need to put in the time.
Can you create good video content?
I think anybody reading this can create interesting video content, just as I believe anybody can write great text or record a worthwhile podcast. The not so secret ingredient to creating quality? Time. Time spent thinking, planning, producing and publishing. Short circuit the process somewhere and the quality inevitably suffers. Note: consider the editing process as part of the production and publishing.
Therefore the challenge I’ve been facing isn’t whether or not an interesting vlog of Hmmcast can be created. Heck, Aldo Nova laid down an entire album mostly by himself — and it was pretty darn good — but it took him a long time in the production mode. In the albums that followed, Aldo didn’t take as much time and what happened? He was seen as something of a one album wonder. I wonder what he is up to these days? Last time I read anything about him he was hanging with the band Bon Jovi.
Definitely have gained a lot more respect for folks creating daily video blogs with the production quality of Rocketboom over the last couple months. On that note, I see Amanda Congdon might be back vlogging her cross country trip, sponsored by Ford and others. She is one of those rare exception talking heads. With a smile and looks like that, she doesn’t need as much pre and post production — extra visual stimuli — as an aging white guy like me.
Experiment: How long to create and publish a mostly bare bones vlog?
I was curious how long a mostly talking head segment with a minimal amount of pre-production took. For this post I decided to conduct an experiment and compare against my time estimates above. One take, minimal production and a script using a Samsung Digital Cam and Visual Communicator. I started the timer at 11:00am and the result can be viewed at the top of this post.
My video experiment above is an outtake and something I would definitely have shot over. That said it still took a little over an hour to go from conception to shooting to labeling and uploading (motionbox was very slow to upload for some reason). I’ll let you point out the rough spots and mistakes in my experimental video but if I had done more takes the time for a finished video that is less than one minute would have gone over 1.5 hours. After uploading the video I spent more time shooting other videos and working with the editing tools. At some point I looked up and gasped at what time was showing in the systray.
Am I just moving way too slow on this stuff or what? I need some expert vloggers to tell me what I’m doing wrong here or to confirm that yes, indeed, video eats time.
Interactive video
You’ll note above I tried using the new motionbox video service. I like the feature that allows anybody to clip out, tag and link to sections of the video and it’s taking the Google video permalinks a step beyond. The next logical step for this type of feature would be to allow embedding on third party sites only the clipped sections of the video which motionbox doesn’t allow. I’m guessing this is a copyright concern? Maybe if they limited the copyrighted clips to no longer than say a certain percentage of the overall video? I don’t have the solution to prevent DMCA violations here but there has to be some happy middle ground.
This would be the vlog equivalent of blockquoting from another blog post or article. This would also enable creators the ability to upload source video of scenes and outtakes and let other people mix, mash and edit their own video masterpiece. This could also save time in the overall process and provide an viewer interactive element which sounds like a win-win to me. I’m interested in exploring the possibilities here further.
But vlogging is for amateurs like podcasting, right?
There is something to the thinking of screw production values just point, shoot, stop, title and upload. This might work ok in a situation where a vlogger labeled all his/her stuff as source material only and licensed it so that it could be used in other videos. This could be appealing because:
a) it throws the quality argument completley out the window. I’m seeing videos of watching paint dry as source material
b) it allows source content to be shared with little care or concern as to whether it has mass appeal by itself and
c) it is an authentic amateurish effort, no Hollywood crap
d) it could provide linking to the original source creator’s website from the masher (mentions inside video are useless in current search engine algorithms)
Time isn’t on our side
As you can probably surmise by now, I’ve pretty much switched gears with the Hmmcast and no longer am looking at a weekly video version of the entire show. If I can’t create at least a semi-respectable vlog, or something that I think is creative and useful on its own, there seems little point. This doesn’t mean I don’t want to create a video blog, because I very much do but I wonder how many others feel like I do?
How to produce and publish a vlog with the minimal amount of time available to me in any other quality than source material? Maybe I’m being way too quality-consicous or maybe I just don’t have what it takes with video. I’m going to keep working on this behind the scenes, as I don’t give up easily.
The whole process sort of reminds me of writing and producing music. I’ve written and recorded a couple dozen songs mostly when I was in a band in high school and that was a long and arduous process. I enjoyed it — and still do — but I didn’t own two businesses back then and have a family to support and raise.
So instead I’ve turned my interest to the idea of a monthly vlog. In other words, perhaps a most Hmmworthy of the month segment which pulls in the best parts of an entire month’s worth of Hmmcasts (generated from posts and comments here at this blog) and clips out the most Hmmworthy parts. This seems more realistic time-wise and something I could build on a little bit each week. Not sure that this is will actually get done but this seems more realistic than a weekly vlog version of each Hmmcast. Now when or if this site ever makes about ten times the amount of money it’s currently making, then I could easily justify spending 4-6+ hours on a weekly vlog. Otherwise, that time is much better spent programming or writing and sharing text material.
Podcasting on a weekly basis is very possible for a site with limited time and human resources. It might even be possible for a single website owner/creator working part time on the web to do a daily podcast. However, a daily vlog for a single person working part time? I’m sure there will be a few exceptions — there always are — so I won’t say never, but the vast majority of individual vloggers at least will not be able to keep up with this publishing schedule and maintain any sort of production quality and viewer value. And if the production quality slides viewers will eject — quickly. Brad wisely pointed out that video demands too much viewer attention.
I’m most attracted to producing more regular source video material and not worrying so much about production values. Just as I’ve thought about producing audio files that others could incorporate into their online creations.
I spent much time today planning, shooting and editing video and the result is this single blog post and some more raw source video that I might use another day. I also made a title graphic for a video that I will use another day. In that same amount of time I could have written a dozen blog posts and taken a bunch of screenshots for several different blogs plus created logos and graphics for at least one webpage. I feel like I didn’t accomplish very much today. Do some vloggers feel like this?
Yeah, I’m sure the process gets faster, but weeks have gone by and I’ve been trying to speed up the process. It’s not getting much faster. Maybe I need to seek out better tools?
I’m opening up the discussion below for good input and suggestions how one might better be able to do the whole video creation and production process faster? Ideas? Also, feel free to play around with clipping and tagging my experimental video. Flash 9 is required.
Can you feel the earth starting to shake in anticipation of Apple king Steve Jobs to make his appearance on stage to announce one of the worst kept secrets ever? Movies in the iTunes store, we know that’s coming, in fact there are already leaking images on the German version of the Quicktime store.
You can follow the streaming live event here on the official Apple website. I’ll be watching (even was not streamed live) and updating this post as the live action unfolds, so be sure to refresh this post.
Also liveblogging (will add to this list as I find others)
- Hmm reader Gerald at GWh!z
- Engadget is actually at the event but I’m getting 404 on their site at the moment. Might want to try one of the others
- TUAW, also having loading problems
- CNET
Live Blogging Showtime
Appears as is there won’t be a live stream at the location mentioned above. Steve is on the stage per Engadget, but their site keeps crashing.
- games on the iPod including Pac-Man! These games will sell for $4.99 and are available in the iTunes store.
- lowered price on iPod to $249 for 60GB and $349 for 80GB and 75% longer battery life
- aluminum Nano casing to be available ($79, taking orders now for October ship date)
- iTunes has a market share of 88% for legal US downloads! Wow. Take that, all other music stores. iTunes is now officially the fifth largest music reseller in the US behind Walmart (#1), Best Buy, Target and Amazon.
- iTunes 7 will soon be available (keep checking Software Update or iTunes.com) and include: missing album art (freely downloaded), a new cover flow view which Engadget describes as like flipping through your CD rack
- over 45 million TV shows have been downloaded, over 220 TV shows from over 40 networks
- Bringing on the NFL Network: NFL season highlights on iTunes. $1.99 for each game, $24.99 for a season pass. Bummer, no full games?
- Video resolution to increase to 640×480 and iTunes can now play “seamless video” using H.264
- iTunes Movies include Disney studios as expected: Pixar, Touchstone, Miramax and of course Disney. Over 70 films available today including Pirates of the Carribean at a price of $12.99 for new films and $9.99 for older titles. 640×480 and same usage rights at TV shows.
- US only, international availability in 2007.
- new titles will be available the same day as DVD (at $12.99)
- Disney CEO Bob Iger: “We’re confident that movies are going to work as well as TV on iTunes.”
- sneak peek of product available first quarter in 2007: iTV that will wirelessly communicate with the computer to connect to your flat screen TV (HDMI). Will sell for $299 and work with PCs and Mac
Summary
less expensive iPods, more battery life, new Nano options, Disney movies available in US only at 640×480 and same day as DVDs hits stores, iTunes 7 with some new functionality.
Wow, this is an impressive solo acoustic guitar version of Bon Jovi Livin’ on a Prayer by Finnish guitarist Tomi Paldanius. Especially impressive is his use of continuous bass and the pre-chorus drum-like effect by tapping the body of the guitar. Effective.
As Homer Simpson might say, seven thumbs up!
Update 11:14am PST: Some bonus links for iPod users to transfer any YouTube video to your iPod: Windows | Mac [thanks Lifehacker]
Blackout, I really had a blackout! Those are more than lyrics to a Scorpions song from the 80s they are also the message sent to NFL fans who try to access the NFL Game Pass on Yahoo Sports from inside North America.
The pricing even if we could get it is on par with DirecTV Sunday Ticket prices. $24.99/month or $249, but I’d probably throw down for that if only it was available in North America. Hopefully this test works and the NFL considers opening things up next year to North America.
This is one where my friend from Sweden who complains — and rightfully so — about how many different things (contests, promotions, sales, etc) are only for those living in the US and Canada. Here’s one where he can gloat.
Sony buying a P2P video site, how about that? It’s not YouTube or Blip.TV, it’s Grouper for the price of $65 million [Hmm Grouper review].
The acquisition by Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE), the Hollywood movie and television production unit of Japan’s Sony (6758.T: Quote, NEWS, Research), aims to infuse the studios with new ideas and talent for movies, television shows and games, a top executive said.
TechCrunch adds to the story more details on what Sony might be using Grouper for:
Sony says they will use Grouper’s technology to share lower quality Sony videos online, distribute DVD quality video by P2P and allow users to create mashups of select Sony media properties. Grouper says the P2P network took the company two years to build.
I like this move by Sony and not because I think the Grouper technology is worth that much (I don’t). $65 million is not a huge overpayment though and it’s major jack for the Grouper crew who have been working their site/product since 2004. Kudos to them.
Let’s hope Sony has learned their lesson and concealing another rootkit won’t ever be on the Grouper upgrade feature list. That shadow will be hard to escape. Still, I like this move and am encouraged for what it could mean down the road.
The screenshot above shows my Hulk rage video has received over 6,100 views on Grouper. That’s the most views I’ve had of any video I’ve shared to these third party video sites to date. The one I created for the Xbox 360 game Dead Rising on YouTube has a little over 1,100 views and one comment.
You’ve seen those fake rock walls to climb at amusement parks and arcades, right? Ever tried actually scaling the bad boy on the hardest side? During our recent trip to Silverwood I tried that and the video below [1:13] is the result.
Our youngest teen was there filming the event and narrating.
This also gave me a chance to try out the blip.tv video service. After trying out YouTube and Blip.tv my favorite service so far is Google Video because I like their video permalink feature (disclaimer: I own GOOG stock). That remains a must-have feature for vlogs and podcasts.
Does any service provide a permalink-like feature for podcasts? And does Blip.tv not have an easy embed into your blog option like Google Video (as shown above) or YouTube? Make that two must-have features for video sites.
Originally the title of this post was “quick filtering 3,000 posts, 3,000+ to go” but now that I’m on day three it doesn’t qualify as “quick” any more. As I write this, I am working through the last 980 posts. Most remaining are from August 1 or earlier. Strangely I feel a little like I’ve spent the whole week reading RSS.
I’ve been speaking fondly about reBlog since March. It’s a great RSS reader and tool for bloggers. It’s assisted me in pouring through well over 75,000 posts total and 500-1,000+ new posts every day. The screencast below takes through the filtering process of a couple hundred posts.
I only use about 40% of the reblog feature set regularly but I use that 40% every work day. It’s easily the best RSS reading tool I’ve tried, it’s free, and can be installed on your own server (they also have a hosted version, but I’d recommend using the one installed on your own server). You can tweak the code until your heart’s content.
On Tuesday I lamented the fact that as fast as I read and wrote about items in the reader, new items came in. This is a good problem to have, actually. Wednesday, Thursday and today have been slower post days, so I’m making more progress. I thought it might be useful for others to share how I’m filtering through the posts to mark as ‘publish.’ Below I’ve marked some key points in the screencast above so you don’t have to watch the entire 8:47.
Video Keypoints [see: how to create keypoints] [2:39] About 10% of posts are marked ‘publish’ [3:25] Posts with images at/near the top draw more interest [6:25] Search through items already marked ‘archive’, ‘publish’ or all [8:10] Optional keyboard navigation
The numbers since the last time I reviewed reBlog haven’t changed, I’m still marking about 10% of the overall posts as ‘publish.’ Since this screencast ends abruptly, I’ll write about stage 2 of the process below.
Stage 2: reviewing ‘publish’
After I mark everything I’m interested in reading more as ‘publish’ then I visit those posts and pick out what I’m going to write about. I start with writing my raw, initial thoughts sometimes in the format of a Hmm Quickies like this:
- topic 1, link, notes
- topic 2
- topic 3
- etc.
When I want to review the site/service, I’ll grab a screenshot at the same time. Then I can copy/paste the notes from the post window to a brand new post. If a story really grabs me in the middle of Stage 1 filtering, I’ll open up a new post and start writing immediately. This is why Tuesday I actually went backwards reading, I was seeing so much I wanted to write about and needed to get those thoughts down. Yesterday and today, I’m seeing a little less of that happening so I’m able to get through more of the past posts.
It’s important for me to capture thoughts when the iron is hot. Ideas and thoughts can be fleeting and if there is one thing I’ve learned about the writing process it is to quickly get at least the rough idea down. You can come back later and finish the thoughts, expand, add detail and breadth, but it’s important to capture that initial aha! moment or it might be gone tomorrow.
To go along with my stop before you are done writing advice, I’m not saying to avoid recording a brief summary of your thoughts and ideas, I’m saying save writing out those thoughts/ideas in detail, taking the screenshots or finding a picture to go along with them at the end of the day so you have something to start with tomorrow.
I also maintain an ideas/thoughts post in draft mode for ideas and thoughts I’d like to expand on someday.
The importance of pictures and images
If you don’t own your own digital camera and you are a blogger, go buy one now. With the rise in video popularity, you might consider buying a video camera that doubles as a digital camera (it’s better than not having a camera at all). Pictures are an important interest grabbing and text compliment tool, so take pictures liberally of places and things. Be courteous when taking pictures of people as some will not want their pictures published on the web. Public crowd pictures are ok, but be careful about zooming in on specific people without their permission. You can always black out or blur faces.
When talking about websites and software relevant screenshots almost always add to the piece, even if it’s only a thumbnail image. If you are doing reviews and bought something, take a picture with you in it so readers can see you actually bought it. I don’t take my picture with products because I think I’m photogenic, I do it for reinforcement that I went into my own pocket to buy or rent the product. Similarly, I take screenshots and make screencasts to show where I was inside a program for reviews [see Lifehacker: are screenshots from websites legal?]
Readers know that taking pictures and screenshots takes time. Using audio and video where appropriate can add additional interest to a post but with longer videos be sure to highlight keypoints. I like video permalinks which take me directly to key points in video (as shown above) rather than forcing me to watch the whole piece. I appreciate posts that give me this extra assistance. With podcasts, bloggers need a similar bookmark function or at least detailed transcripts, something most podcasts are without.
And when taking pictures don’t be stingy. Storage space is cheap these days. You never know when you’ll write something that fits a picture or vice versa: a picture that spawns a story. Sometimes that picture needs, begs, demands a story be told and this can fuel slow writing days.
One of my newest works-in-progress is a site to help writers stave off writer’s block. I wrote a little about the project genesis last month and when I get caught up and completely back from vacation work will continue. It’s not ready for public consumption yet, not even close, but I’m excited about the framework.
It’s worrisome being stuck with a flashing cursor or blank page. By having an organized RSS reading strategy where you can read through a lot of material, that’s a good first step for keeping those pages full of text. Readers: thank you, and happy writing to fellow writers and dreamers.
A subject I’ve not written about here in great depth are UFOs and aliens. A Hmm search for “ufo” only yields 4 results. A couple months ago on the weekly live radio show I host, I talked a bit about this. It’s a topic where you can’t spend too much time on or people give you a raised eyebrow stare. A low tolerance topic. It’s one where people either believe, disbelive, or begrudgingly disbelieve or believe.
We just returned from the most alien place in the United States: the desert of Nevada where the one and only (?) Extraterrestrial Highway exists. We didn’t actually travel along the highway which runs north of Las Vegas and to the east of the Nevada Test Site [google map location pictured above]. Apparently there is a place where you can stop and eat an alien burger.
Video Keypoints [see: how to create keypoints] [3:20] Dude making copious notes on aliens he thinks might be among a UFO convention. Yes, he is serious. And check out that he changes up his outfit on day 2 to avoid detection [18:47] [8:37] P&T paint a sex toy silver and a woman claims it is alien in nature. [16:11] Woman displays picture of her extraterrestrial husband. Sort of looks like half-man, half-cheetah. Rarrg! [21:05] The Bush family come from reptillian alien bloodlines? A UFO author says yes. Hard to type while laughing.
What I believe and don’t believe when it comes to E.T
When it comes to other intelligent life, I’m a skeptical believer. I think it’s foolish to assume we are the only intelligent life out there and that some other planet somewhere doesn’t have beings with equal or superior intelligence.
I do not believe aliens are coming here and conducting secret human research using strange probes. I’m with Penn & Teller on the content and thrust of their video. Most, if not all of those people are there to exploit and earn money from selling UFO-related books and speaking gigs to vulnerable people. The people caught up in it I feel sorry for too, just listen to Penn’s thoughts at the end of the video. Some people need to believe in something. An alien being interested in them is better than nobody being interested. It’s sad, really, not funny, even though I laughed at the video keypoints above.
I do believe there is evidence in a military stronghold (Area 51 or elsewhere) somewhere that extraterrestrials have visited — and or keep visiting — earth and that the government doesn’t want the American people to know about their findings. Do I think people today would panic knowing E.Ts have visited earth? No. Some people might, but then some people panic at the sight of rain in Seattle or rush hour traffic.
The flipside is projects like SETI haven’t been successful yet and they don’t think they will be until 2020. It would seem with the massive combined computers effort that something, anything would have been found by now and yet there’s been nothing. Is it possible the government has squelched results from the SETI project from being echoed back to the participants? I’m not big on conspiracies, but that sounds unlikely even for a conspiracy theorist.
What I’d like to see is some sort of open source community movement for dealing with what’s already been discovered and is being kept secret. For military defense reasons, I doubt that will happen any time soon, but I wish the government would stop playing the finders keepers song. Have a little faith in people and their ability to reason. Sure, there are crazies out there, people who can’t handle the truth, but I believe strongly in the human condition. That man can find a way to live with the knowledge that a more superior creature exists.
Even if that means we are living among them right now.
Originally the title of this post was “quick filtering 3,000 posts, 3,000+ to go” but now that I’m on day three it doesn’t qualify as “quick” any more. As I write this, I am working through the last 980 posts. Most remaining are from August 1 or earlier. Strangely I feel a little like I’ve spent the whole week reading RSS.
