Momentshowing

Los Angeles: Video 24/7

Ryanne and I are helping out at Video 24/7, a DIY video summit in LA.
It goes from Feb 8-10. Here's the full schedule.

Ryanne is leading a screening of videos that she put together, and we'll also doing a panel with Kenyatta and Tiffiniy Cheng from Miro. Our goal is to discussion on how video creators could actually record, edit, post, distribute, and archive web videos using open source tools from beginning to end. There are still gaping holes in the current process, but it's all developing.

On sunday Feb 10, we'll be leading a 3-hour videoblogging workshop. They told us 15 people are already signed up. We'll be walking people through our showinabox project using Wordpress....or just see what help people need. If you're in LA, call us (917 371 790) or come by the event.

Changes

I've finally decided to get off of Typepad and move to Wordpress.
I start with typepad in 2004 when I first started videoblogging.
Since there were no free video hosts (youtube wasnt even a dream), Typepad was great because I could upload a video directly to my blog on their servers. Perfect for me. But three years later, I am only frustrated with the lack of customization with Typepad. It's crazy how little Typepad has embraced video.

For the techies, here's a list of reasons and challenges:

• Wordpress allows me to customize my blog much more in look and format
• Wordpress will let me upload everything to my own server
• Archiving all my data is much easier
• Wordpress has a good, strong community that's always improving the platform.

All this is important since I want to keep building my blog during my life.
I need to have control of my own data.

CC Salon: April 17

I'm going to be speaking at the next CC Salon this wednesday night at 7pm In San Francisco. All the info is here.

"CC Salon is a free, casual monthly get-together focused on conversation, presentations, and performances from people or groups who are developing projects that relate to open content and/or software."

Come out and geek out.

NYC Grassroots Media Festival

We'll be in Manhattan from Feb 21-26 to attend the NYC GMC.

Markus, Ryanne, Sandeep and I are running a session called "The Story of Daily Life: Connecting people through video collaboration".

Using inexpensive digital cameras and the power of web distribution, we can now help groups around the world to record, distribute, and archive stories from their daily life. AliveinBaghdad.org, Swajana.com, and Livesinfocus.org are three great examples of video collaboration that could only happen through the internet. In this presentation we will show recent examples of these collaborations, discuss the problems and solutions along the way, and walk you through the specific process of how we used free online tools to make it happen.

I really want to hang out with all the NYC videobloggers...probably all hang out on Friday night.
Call me if you want to connect 917 371 6790.

I'll also be presenting the latest version of SpinXpress at the NY Video 2.0 meet up. We've done some cool stuff that helps groups of videobloggers work together.

Update: the NY Video meet up got pushed back to Wednesday...so we miss that event. See you in NYC though.

Germans get Videoblogging

I don't see a lot of regular Germans posting video about themselves.
Could be that I just don't hang out where the online German spots are.
But a recent Wired article discussed how videoblogging is getting into German politics.

Pretty amazing to me that the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, is doing a weekly videopodcast. 

Update: My friends at Xolo.tv made a video on this event earlier this year.

Reinventing TV

Ryan, Verdi, and I will be on Jonny Goldstein's crazy internet show.
Join us live and let's fuck shit up.

When: Thurs, 7PM Pacific, Nov 9
Where to go to watch: http://reinventingtv.phovi.com/studio-entrance/

Blogcamp in India

Around San Francisco, I've heard little conversations about how India may soon start becoming influencers instead of just being influenced. I have a good friend who actualy moved to India to start his own business. It's beyond outsourcing. He says there's a freshness in India that is pretty amazing.

Here's one piece of evidence of this hypothesis:
Link: BlogCamp.in - Bringing Bloggers Under One Roof
On September 9th and 10th, bloggers will get together in Chennai for all things blogs. Check out their cool video on the front page.

Blogging is more than just a tool for online communication. For bloggers and blog readers, it represents a way of life where open communication, dialogue, feedback and collaboration enrich content, helping us forge professional and personal relationships. From encouraging government transparency, blogging about children, discussions on economics, sharing poetry and literature, ribtickling humour, online activism, movie reviews to Sunday musings, the tool has changed lives for all those who use it and rely on it for opinion, information, entertainment and business.

I love that, "ribtickling humor". We need more of that in the US.
They are also adopting the Barcamp.org style to allow for improvisation based on who shows up. They seem to also be very tuned into videoblogging. Wish I could go. Exciting to see the philosophy of the blogging community spread farther out.

Being Real and how video remembers it

Steven Colbert became famous this week when he gave a speech to the White House Correspondent Association Dinner. With President George Bush just two seats away, Colbert said everything many of us wished someone would say to our ridiculous leader. For 20 minutes, he roasted Bush and many members of the audience. The audience was mainly silent and stunned.

Here is the video:

The interesting thing is the coverage of the event. Most of the press either ignored him...or said he bombed. As it reads on Wikipedia...

According to Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post, a majority of the mainstream media omitted Colbert's performance in their description of the event, choosing to focus upon an earlier bit where Bush was joined on-stage by a Bush impersonator.^[11] The New York Times^[12], Reuters^[13] , and Chicago Tribune^[14] all published articles on the dinner that did not mention Colbert's name, even though Colbert was the featured entertainer for the evening. Media Matters for America compared the blackout to the extensive coverage of Don Imus's controversial roasting of Bill Clinton in 1996^[15]. Froomkin believes that the media went from ignoring the incident to declaring Colbert's performance unfunny in response to allegations of a blackout because they were also targets of Colbert's comedic barbs.^[16] Columbia School of Journalism professor Todd Gitlin remarked on the alleged blackout of Colbert's performance, "It's too hot to handle. [Colbert] was scathing toward Bush and it was absolutely devastating. They [the mainstream media] don't know how to handle such a pointed and aggressive criticism."^[17]

You check out the video.
The jokes are not "laugh out loud"....it was more just the simple truth.
If we didnt have this ability to distribute video online, no one would have seen this rare event.
Steven Colbert knew exactly who he was talking to: us.
Things are changing.

VloggerCon is coming....

In case I haven't mentioned it....Vloggercon is happening on June 10 and 11th in San Francisco.
You should of course come.
All the info here.

Public Access TV dead?

Yes, it looks pretty grim.
Link: Congress Poised to Kill Community TV

Public Access TV is not the favorite channel for Americans.
But in many communities, it is the only TV channel that actually shows people like them talking...and expresses their opinions and ideas. 
As many of you know, I worked at a public access TV in Manhattan until recently.
I brought many of the philosophies I learned at this community TV station to videoblogging.
"Get everyone involved in the conversation".

These community TV stations are funded by local franchise agreements with the Cable Companies who are given a private monopoly to run the cable system in a given city.
All they must do is give back some channel space and a small amount of funding to allow the people to put on their own programming. Its literally pennies compared to their multi-million dollar yearly profits. The Cable and telephone companies now want out of this set-up now that they have secured monopolies across the country.
What could be a bigger hassle than to deal with thousands of local communities across the country who want access to put out their own media?
 
In my mind, this makes Videoblogging even more important.....and each
of our efforts to spread the knowledge of how to get involved.
Strange days.

Gena says:

My concern is now with the potential walling off of the Internet by
the phone companies. Step one - they lock us out of public access.
Step two - the phone companies put the squeeze on Congress & FCC or whoever to charge for faster/heavy bandwidth usage. Segregation for the elite, reduced access (and videoblogging) for the rest of us.

Now this will bite them in the tukas in the long run cuz this is just
going to inspire some latent genius to invent something to bypass
phone company distribution and away we go into the new frontier.