Momentshowing

How to search for Creative Commons media

Lately I've been running up against the issue of finding good Creative Commons licensed media to use in my own projects: music, photos, video. While the concept of CC media is great, the practice is still evolving. Creative Commons is simply a license you can out on your own published work that makes clear how other people can use it without asking your permission. This is the way we build a reasonable sharing culture. Mike and Jon are the heroes over at CC.

We just launched a new search tool at SpinXpress that lets us search for CC-licensed media to use in our own work. Check it out.

So let's say you want to find some video of a nuclear explosion that you can cut up to use in your video. You want the choice of using it commercially. Just choose the fields...and you get back permalinks and descriptions of each piece of available media. You can also see Previews right in the page.

You can even get a specific URL to a search for sharing. Here's an example. I know Rudy and Casey have been using it to find CC-licensed photos in Flickr to use in their work.

Music is still a challenge to find by keywords, but it's a challenge we got to take on if we want to get off the "illegal use of copyright" train.

The Music Dilemma

After posting my video today for Videoblogging Week 2007, commenters pointed out that I used a commercial song that I had no rights to use. Most people would be like 'who cares?'..but in this case, it's important. We just had a big event this past Saturday where Jon and Colette spoke about Creative Commons. If we videobloggers want respect from commercial companies (ie dont steal our stuff!)...we must respect existing copyright law. This means don't use commercial music without permission.

You can see Colette's great email below. She lays out the law.
I just wanted to use a song I liked. No big surprise it was commercial since it's the music that's all around us. But if we are to build a new way to make media online, we got to pioneer these new independent artists that are offering Creative Commons music. Maybe eventually commercial artists will see that it's okay to allow their musci to be used for personal creations.

So time to get off the commercial media nipple once and for all.
I should have known better. Ryanne has been making her own music with Soundtrack Pro for a year now.
I'm going to reedit the video with a CC-licensed song. Jon suggested FreeMusic. I could even use this page at SpinXpress that I've helped develop. If you have a suggestion...leave a comment.

MyHeavy is a Splog

Someone's going to get a bunch of justifiably angry emails from the Videoblogging Group tonight.
Imagine if a website launched...and they simply reposted blog posts from Boing Boing, Scobleizer, Engadget, etc. These kind of sites are called "splogs". Any funded site knows this is a no no.

But new video hosting companies are still all learning that you can't build a site by stealing other people's video either...which is exactly what MyHeavy.com has done.

• They seem to be pulling videos from different feeds like Blip and Google.
• They repost them to their site with a preroll video ad...and an image ad all around the video.
• They put a MyHeavy watermark on the video.
• They resize the video from the original intended size.
• They have no linkback to the original blog or blog post.

See how my video plays in their page.

So here they have grabbed my video of Ryanne and I buying our engagement ring.
Now I got ads all over it. Great. This personal moment from my life has now become my worst nightmare (see video) thanks to MyHeavy....without my permission.

We've seen this kind of behavior before from a video hosting site: Veoh about 8 months ago.
The group at WeAreTheMedia did a great blog post detailing that situation:

A visitor comes to Veoh, finds a video blog, and falls under the mistaken impression that the creator of the blog originally uploaded the video to Veoh. Clearly, Veoh must be a good service if it’s getting content that’s this good. Veoh profits monetarily from increased visibility caused by an unnatural wealth of content.

Sites like Blip.tv and others should be even more angry since our videos are being taken from these RSS feeds. Blip.tv spends time and energy building up good relationships with creators so people feel comfortable using them as their hosting site. Then a new company like MyHeavy comes along and grabs all this content without any effort.

MyHeavy just got funded for 12.5 million dollars from Polaris Venture Partners and Jacobson Investments.  They probably felt like needed to make a big splash and start showing they have a whole lot of content RIGHT NOW. Why spend time earning people's trust....just grab it. Who cares? We'll see how they react tomorrow when they read the irate emails from videobloggers whose content they grabbed. Veoh ended up apologizing and immediately removing all the videos they scraped.

WeAreTheMedia has a good list of best practices for video hosting companies.

• Always keep video files in their original format to preserve the creator’s intended viewer experience. Only transcode or “down-res” a video file with the creator’s permission.
• Always link the “collection” of content (generally a videoblog) back to its creator. If a video comes from Josh Leo’s blog there should be a prominent link to Josh Leo’s blog on every page including content from or mentioning the collection.
• Always serve aggregated video files from their original hosts so that the original hosting service can track statistics and serve ads if the user chooses to do so.
• Always link from the video playback page to the page the video was originally published on. This is often called the “permalink”. So If Josh originally posted his video to http://joshleo.com/my-video/ the video view page in the aggregator must link to that URL with an indication that the video itself and more information about the video can be found there.

Building bridges and their difficulties

Ryanne just posted this video showing one of the workshops we taught in India.
We took a train all the way to New Dehli and ended up crowding into a local professor's apartment to teach a group of Nagas how to videoblog. Nagaland is a part of little-publicized East India, an offshoot piece of land that most people don't realize is part of India. Inhabitants look more Asian than Indian...and the Nagaland government has unsuccessfully tried to become independent from India for years. Who knew all this? The Indian media certainly doesn't discuss it much. The US media wouldn't touch this stuff.

So the woman who asked us to come teach a videoblogging workshop is a Naga Advocate...and saw the importance of getting them to start documenting themselves online through video.

We spent a whole day with about 10 young men and women who were extremely sharp.
They had no problem following the Freevlog tutorial...and had good skills editing for the first time in iMovie.
But 2 months later...their videoblogs are almost untouched.

So what's the problem?
It's such a great idea to get people from around the world to tell their own stories.
But there's a lot more at work behind this ideal.
Let me give you my take on it.

First, the Naga kids are smart and talented. So thats not the problem.
But I dont think they really understood why videoblogging was so important to the adults.
Why should they spend time to make and post video for middle-aged white people in North America?
Until they are making it for themselves and their friends...this will always be a boundary.

Second, the Naga kids had access to computer and cameras.
Internet cafes were everywhere...they all checked their email regularly...and were members of the social network Orkut (which is hugely popular with Brazilians and Indians). They did have access to video cameras as well.
But since none of them really owned their own equipment...videoblogging becomes a real chore.
Think about it....when you have a camera and computer of your own...you can work on projects.
If you're just borrowing a camera and paying hourly to get online, how do you edit and post video?

So a couple things need to happen before we really start seeing video out of developing countries.

• People got to have computers and internet in their homes.
• People got to have their own cameras. (even a $100 camera could be a month's salary or more)
• And social networks like Orkut need to incorporate video into their sites like Youtube. Instead of direct conversations between Naga kids of a US audience, I think we're more likely to watch conversations among themselves first...then we'll get to know each other.
• If someone could make even $10 dollars a month from their videoblog, they'd have much more incentive in a place where you can live off a couple dollars a day.

To give you a different example...we did also hook up with a group of Indian guys who are now videoblogging. Swajana.com
Why does this project work?

• The guys are paid a salary to make it.
• They have their own cameras, computer, and internet access.
• We have been helping them over the past 2 months. Building the blog, walking them through compression, storytelling, moral support, etc. We are essentially making work for each other.
• They are video geeks like us.

So here are some notes and experiences on building bridges.
I would love to see examples if you know of any.
I'd also love to be proven wrong in any of this thinking?

When you lie to yourself and other people

Here's a news blurb that being passed around the various web video communities:

YouTube sees user rebellion
SAN FRANCISCO (Business 2.0 Magazine) - Hypergrowth comes with hyper-growing pains -- just ask YouTube. The online video-sharing site is facing a rebellion among the formerly faithful. Yesterday, blogger and longtime YouTuber Miel Vanopstal lost his cool in a post titled "Screw YouTube." Vanopstal complains that YouTube's recent upgrades have made the site significantly slower, and that new efforts to enforce copyright and delete otherwise questionable material strike him as arbitrary. He is particularly galled that a single alert notice from a "puritanically minded" fellow user can result in a video being deleted. "I've had it with these random rejections," he writes.

Vanopstal is hardly alone. A bitter Nathan Weinberg at InsideGoogle says that he was kicked off YouTube two months ago. Weinberg chronicles his dissatisfaction with the free (and reportedly money-losing) service, ultimately deciding that he has only one thing left to do: "Ruin YouTube" by systematically reporting all of the site's traffic-generating but copyright-violating videos. Microsoft'sResearch) Don Dodge, who formerly worked at Napster (Research), adds a been there, done that postto the fray, noting sagely: "User-generated content is very difficult to manage and control."
(Article by Owen Thomas, Business 2.0 Magazine online editor and Oliver Ryan, Fortune reporter)

It's not surprising to see YouTube in this difficult position. This new web service made it incredibly easy to post video on the web in easy-to-watch Flash format. YouTube became extremely successful, jumping to "one of the most popular web sites" in less than six months, using the tagline "Broadcast Yourself".

But many people havn't been broadcasting themselves. YouTube has quietly encouraged its users to upload obviously popular copyrighted material. TV shows, music videos, viral videos. This is what people are watching in droves, while costing YouTube $1,000,000 a month in bandwdith charges. Behind the scenes, there's talk of how content companies are threatening to sue YouTube for hosting all this infringing material. Now that they are a well-funded company, they need to play ball with the powers that be. The copyright infringement must now come down.

But what will users think? As the article points out, users are pissed since YouTube is changing the rules. It's obvious that they used people to create buzz and get funding...and now want to keep their users while getting cozy with the big media companies.

When you lie to people, it's going to bite you back. You cannot publicly say you are for the people's content...then brag about your enormous downloads that are driven by copyright infringement.
If you really want to build a video service that encourages regular people to publish their own video...then you must truly stand behind this ideal. You must support video that isn't "popular". You must help teach people how to tell stories and make their videos better. You must create a space where people feel safe to express themselves and talk to each other.

Eric Rice said yesterday that the more a company brags about "user generated content"...the less the company probably cares about its "users".

There is TV-on-the-internet(IPTV), and then there is the video people make for their own reasons. If you want to make easy big bucks, make deals with Disney or the porn industry to distribute their content.

But "user generated content" is an unknown wilderness. Most people are not going to make the viral video of the monkey-washing-the-cat...or the-kid lip-syncing-to-a-funny-song. Who knows what people will be making? Humans have never had the ability to produce and distribute video globally. If you really want to build a service around the video that people make, you must fall in love with the girl talking about her feelings in her bedroom, and the family moments only important to that family, and the weird bits of art that people make. This love cannot be lip service. Your words cannot be marketing. You must have an honesty that lasts through time.

No one will remember YouTube in 10 years. The barrier to entry to video hosting is simply a big server. There are already 160 other video hosting sites and counting.  Its the people who make video that matter. Be comfortable growing a slow, sustainable community where people will share their video throughout their lifetime. Think years. This is how you build relationships. Money and everything else you think you want will come.

RSS Hijacking

Interesting blog post on RSS Hijacking.
Shit, what will they think of next.

Cool Clubs Suck

Josh Leo out of Michigan started videoblogging about a month ago.
He found the Videoblogging group, followed the instructions, made a videoblog, and started posting.
But he seemed to feel that he missed the boat.

In January of 2004, Steve Garfield was the guy who made the battle cry.
Somtehig must of been in the air because a group of us started actively videoblogging since that summer...a time when no one was regularly posting video. It was a technically possible but overlooked part of blogging.
We grew to know each other well...eventhough we live around the world...because the richness of video has brought us close....and we chose to get personal and honest.
Since the ridiculously underplanned and highly successful Vloggercon in late January of 2005, Videoblogging has grown by leaps and bounds.
But because Josh felt an A-list was forming, he decided to make this video.

haha I love this.
What a classic video.
The last thing I want to hear is that Videoblogging is a cool club that excludes outsiders.
Videoblogging is simply a method of easily posting and distributing video to the web.
Communities will form...but I think we're in a very open, naive period.
Like the summer of '67.
Things will change and we'll all laugh at this time.

I guess "videoblogging" is still so new that it seems like a cool club.
It's like when "skateboarding" started....it was only the freaks.
My dream is that one day there are so many people adding videos to their blogs that the Videoblogging Group is forgotten.
Posting video to the web will be as normal as sending email.
And we'll all know so much more about each other and the world around us, but who started it all won't matter.
Who started email?
Who cares.

So Josh, the newest person is the most important.
Each of us has the responsibility to teach someone else.
You arent new anymore so you better be welcoming those new comers so they dont feel left out.
Keep helping us crush the cool clubs.

I have seen it...and I am now officially old

Today was a rough one in the videoblogging group.
We talked about how to make money videoblogging.
Yikes.
It's like our Abortion issue.

Yes, videoblogging can be anything.
It's just a video attached to a blog.
So there you go. We can end the conversation there.

But here you still are....
The Brand of videoblogging that I encourage is a Conversation.
You show me something in your world...in your head...and Ill do the same.
We do it through video.
No geographical or cultural barriers come between us.
This is the first time we've been able to do this.

Now if you want to regularly post video that 10,000,000 people will see each day...slap some ads on it...and get paid...great.
Theye'll be a handful of these.
Like "Must-See TV" videoblogs.
The barriers will be raised...we all just watch...like we watch TV now.

The Brand of videoblogging I encourage is made for an audience of 10.
I make my videos for basically 10 people...anyone can watch...but those ten people are the ones I care about.
And now imagine 10,000 videobloggers...each with an audience of 10.
Now this is a real ecology.
It's a thick jungle of our lives and fantasies and ideas IN VIDEO online.
Anyone new is welcome to jump in and respond with their video.
The most amazing videoblog lifeforms will emerge and die away and emerge again.

And yes, videoblogging costs some money....not much.
A computer. a camera. and an internet connection.
(Bandwidth, I believe, is a temporary problem once we figure out Bit Torrent or rely on the Archive.)
But it's like talking on the phone...I pay to talk to you with nothing in between us.
I dont expect to get paid to talk on the phone.
The Conversation...this is the Brand of videoblogging that I encourage and am interested in.

For instance, here is that latest video by Dylan Verdi...who's cool father, Michael, has been walking her through instant fame.
(i just saw her on ABC World News Tonight because of this video.)

Dylan shows off the new record player that she got for Christmas.
She explains how to use it like it's an antique.
She then plays her parent's old records...the Smiths...Sex Pistols...haha I watched her entry and suddenly realized that at 31...haha...i am from another era where the Smiths are like "classic rock".

But look at what she does...she talks into the camera...she shares these moments...she is herself.
Not everyone can pull this off so entertainingly, but it's a simple style.
this is my Brand of Videoblogging.
And hopefully her friends will make videoblogs and they will talk to each other...
You see how this works?
It has nothing to do with what exists now.
There's this a new language fo video forming that doesnt have much to do with business models.

Talking to the camera is the easiest thing.
This is the minimum.
But you can also, record an event.
Interview someone.
Give a tour of your neighborhood.
Edit an incredibly detailed story.
Make a flash animation.
In my Brand of Videoblogging...I learn about you.

There are other ways to do this.
Go ahead by all means.

I'm Banned in China

So Im trying to cross boundaries here guys.
Im having a conversation with this guy in China who has recently joined the videoblogging group.....

I say:

how can I convince you to have a videoblog?
i would love to see parts of China through your eyes.

He responds:

Warm-hearted videoblogging evangelist...
I had checked me-tv.com out, and also signed my own account up there days ago.
Seems momentshowing.net has been censored by the Great Firewall, at
least I can't get access to it now, and I've been used to it...
And, which may disappointing you, I really don't have a webcam,
though it's very cheap now, haha.
Many of my friends are dating girls online with webcams.
I'm not interested, so it was useless to me.
However, I'm thinking of buying one now,heh.

hahaha
It makes me laugh that there is this country that thinks my videoblog is a threat of some kind.
Weird.
But what this also shows me is that we are really becoming citizens of the Internet.
My Chinese friend (will remain unnamed) identifies himself as:

I'm a geek in China :)
I reached this group through some hyperlinks,
and subscribed to see what's happening and what'll happen to videoblogging!
I'm very interested in videoblogging, as well as podcasting, but as a
college student, issues such as hosting, equipment and bandwidth are all problems to me.
Anyway, I'm watching, and I'll make my own videoblog as soon as it becomes possible :)

See, I probably have more in common with this geek in China than with my next door neighbor.
Geographic location doesnt mean as much these days.
It's our state of minds and personalities.
But yet, we all got to subscribe to our respective physical locations...except when we roam around in here.

In the end, I sent him this link.
"How to Videoblog for Free".
We are going to get him to videoblog.
Anyone want to donate a webcam for a fellow netizen?

And if you want me to see if your videoblog is banned by a government-controlled nation...send me the link and I'll have our friend check.
It's cool to be banned.

The Story of Bandwidth II

Peter made a comment to my last post about 200 people watching my video in one day:
"Shit 200 people. Imagine if you get 2,000. Or if you get Slashdotted and you get 200,000."

Now here's a funny Tyepad log.

Big up for Typepad for letting us videobloggers play.

Nick Nasser mentioned BlogTorrent as a way to solve the bandwidth problem.
Im in...someone just needs to spearhead the process.
How does it work inot the ceation/posting process of videoblogging?

Plus, I love watching a video IMMEDIATELY..and not have to wait for it to download.
Bit torrent seems better for large videos.....
I think web hosting companies just got to open up their pipes and give us more bandwidth.
Times are changing.