Vlognik

Oprah vs. Your Mom: Revolution Within the Opracracy

2006-09-26T00:09:00.000-04:00

Does your mom have her own TV show?

If the answer is no, I want to know why not.

I've seen this other lady who has a TV show. Her name is Oprah.

The companion Web site to this Oprah-person's TV show makes a startling claim: "Oprah.com is your leading source for information about love, life, self, relationships, food, home, spirit and health."

Good lord, that can't be right. I know who's my leading source for these things. It's not Oprah.com, it's my mom. And for you, I think there's a good chance it's your mom. I think this because I've met a whole bunch of people, and sometimes they tell me their leading source for these things. Typically, it's their mom.

So what's wrong with your mom? Is she stupid? Doesn't she have anything to say about love, life, and self? Is she a moron when it comes to relationships? Is her food poisonous? Doesn't she let you come home? Isn't she spiritual? Does she make people sick?

No? Then why in the name of Alexander Graham Internets doesn't she have her own TV show?

I'm not saying your mom should make the definitive show about love-life-self-etc. watched by everyone in the world. This is a new world, and not every media property needs to be a blockbuster. Indeed they probably shouldn't bust blocks -- moms do best one-on-one after all. But why on earth have you let Oprah claim the "leading source" territory that should be held by your mom?

Look, I'm sure this Oprah person is perfectly nice. But she's an utter stranger to me. How a stranger, backed by a massive international media conglomerate, sending messages I didn't ask for that aren't based on anything in my personal experience, can make the outlandish claim of being the leading source on 8 of the 9 most important aspects of my life (pizza has been oddly excluded from Oprah's list) is symptomatic of the condition that citizen created media exists to correct.

Creative efforts within the New Media Landscape (TM) are an attempt to bring a wider set of voices to the conversation about love, life, self, relationships, food, home, spirit and health. And also politics, art, entertainment, philosophy, knitting, frogs... and you.

This is about opening up the media discussion to other voices I believe have something more to say. Why should the answers to some of life's most important questions be provided by the same elite group of Oprahs? Did I vote for the representatives of this Opracracy? Do they represent my neighborhood's interests? Do they share my community's values?

There's a reason most people don't trust traditional media messengers.

We already trust our moms.

I think it's time to bring mom's voice to the media banquet.

WINDMILL CHASERSAn Interview With jadelr and Cristina Cordova

2005-11-17T21:36:00.000-05:00

As the videoblogging movement grows and more voices arrive around the micromedia table, the creative field diversifies. What may once have been primarily a small group of people working out the technical jiggery-pokery of video compression and RSS subscription is now a rapidly growing population of service providers, content creators, and producers. Recent reporting at We Are The Media quote's vlogger Michael Verdi's description of the Yahoo Videoblogging Discussion Group as a rapidly growing online measurement of participants from an initial dozen to over 1600 this week.

The discussions of this large group, and the work created by them, follows the needs and interests of the communiy as it grows, a process that is organic and sporadic and can be hard to predict. A topic arising with more frequency in recent months is shorthanded with the word "Content." At times the debate is a combination of the philosophical and the political, around the question of what personally-created media can or should be about. I've written about this here before.

Some producers feel it's time to organize content into structured and themed approaches. Language used at times reflects the language of television ("shows"), which can make some of the more anti-establishment vloggers (like me) a little nervous. In a recent interview, Andrew Baron from Rocketboom made a case for this approach:

"The blogs I read have very intense, high-level information from experts that parallels the best in field, and it's this very important, very precisely thought out threads of information that I appreciate in weblogs and find reliable and trustworth enough to rely on .... unlike the random diaries that are just fine, I would like to see more people who are interested in a particular field use the medium to show off that expertise."

But the history of videoblogging (can you call something that spans less than 2 years a "history?") is deeply personal and unpredictable, and this early style of vlogging, uniquely suited to the medium, continues to influence how newcomers create their content. The Echo Chamber Project's Kent Bye offers an elegant and persuasive defense of this so-called "personal" vlogging:

"The relative value between the inward-focused versus outward-focused videos is dependent upon who is watching -- and what they are looking for from the experience of watching digitally-delivered videos. Diary-based vlogs happen to be a really great mechanism for building a community beyond your geography. "

This discussion is more nuanced than a simplistic either/or polarity. Chris Weagel has pointed out here that just because a vlog is about personal subject matter doesn't mean it has no theme or focus ("The lab's theme is MY personal investigations and thoughts"). Meanwhile more and more creators join the party with content that is diversifying and expanding, content that resists simplistic characterization and pigeonholing.

An example of a newer vlog (first posts last September) is the work showing up almost daily at Chasing Windmills. This is a "themed show" of sorts, but not one that resembles much of what I've ever seen on TV.

It is a fictional story that follows a regular pair of central characters in episodic form. Yet the episodes are short (2 or 3 minutes) and don't necessarily need to be watched in a linear order for broader themes and developments to emerge. It's a performance of fiction, but acted out by the writers themselves, drawing heavily from their own experiences and observations and hence very personal. Some episodes are conceptual and non-literal, like "First Date," while others deliver plot, such as in "Crossword."

In this interview with the Minneapolis-based creators of Chasing Windmills, I ask Cristina Cordova and Juan Antonio del Rosario (who goes by the handle jadelr) to talk about their vision of vlogging and how what they do fits within a new movement of creators pushing against definitions and boundaries in a way that combines old and new forms of storytelling.

Vlognik: I have recently discovered your vlog. I like what you are doing with your serial.

jadelr: It really is a learning workshop for us.

Cordova: jadelr has been wanting to do something like this for quite some time. He finally convinced me once I had time to really discover what it is all about.

Vlognik: How much time?

Cordova: About a year ago, I think.

jadelr: I actually started talking about a short format serial on the web before I knew that the whole vlogging thing was coming together. I guess my instincts were in the right place, even though my brain still hadn't caught up with what was going on.

Cordova: We toyed with different themes, then resorted to a simple format and theme that we could accomplish on our own, in order to get more familiar and comfortable with the medium before moving on.

Vlognik: Well, how come you aren't randomly videotaping yourself chewing potato chips and walking the dog like real video blogs are supposed to be about?

jadelr: We don't have a dog.

Cordova: Let's see... because we would be excrutiatingly bored by it and could only expect our viewers (if we even had any) to be just as bored -- or more.

jadelr: I don't think I am interested in posting my private life. I want to live my life, not vlog it.

Cordova: And because we are all about STORIES, no matter what we do. I figure you should have something to say before you set out to say it.

jadelr: I do see value in the personal vlogs, I find some of them compelling to watch. Recently I saw one from India documenting the monsoons on a neighborhood street. I think the kid was going to school. I like the idea of the accessibility of these images, of being able to see life on the other side of the globe.

Cordova: Everyone's life, no matter how interesting, needs editing. Video has to be more condensed than real life. Things have to move quickly, or I lose interest.

Vlognik: So these characters are not you then? This is not autobiography?

Cordova: Nope.

jadelr: No.

Cordova: It draws from real situations, as does most fiction, but NO thank god they are not us, we're not that interesting or amusing really... or disturbing.

As for our characters: Normal people censor thoughts, act in a more socially acceptable manner. Our characters act out the random thoughts many of us have, but know not to act upon (most of the time). That's what makes it amusing (we hope) and something to which we can all relate (we hope)... at least that's the idea.

Vlognik: It sounds like you have thought a lot about these characters and what makes them tick. You know, kind of like, whaddyacallem-- filmmakers. Is that what you are? Filmmakers who can't get a script sold?

[laughter]

Cordova: Good call. Not quite, but close. Storytellers maybe -- in any medium -- right now we like film. Actually, we haven't tried to sell a script.

Vlognik: How did this collaboration start? What was the genesis of your working relationship?

Cordova: GREAT question. We have been working together for about 5 years. We had an alternative newsweekly in Puerto Rico. We continue to explore new mediums, but we are interested in doing things "our way," which makes it very difficult to "sell" an idea or script, because we want to control the final product.

jadelr: Enter VLOGGING.

Cordova: Exactly. it's a step in a direction that we want to travel, without any necessary hand-holding.

jadelr: The great thing about the medium is that it really finishes the transformation of film from an industrial medium to a personal one.

Cordova: YES! And a good way to gauge whether anyone out there is actually interested in what we are doing -- whether we should continue this path at all.

jadelr: Film is now like painting, and now burgeoning filmmakers, or audiovisual storytellers, or vloggers...whatever you want to call them because in a sense they are all the same thing. They can now find their own voice in the medium the same way painters started to do once photography took care of recording history.

Cordova: The vlog we are producing really tries to take advantage of this intimacy of the medium, by bringing the camera into a more personal situation. We also have to consider where and how the viewer is viewing. This has a large impact on the experience. We are no longer in a movie theater, alongside many other people. However, we don't always have the lights out. But our hands move and we interact with the medium, in a way.

jadelr: I think we are going to see a real revolution about how we tell stories through images and sound and how we perceive them. If you think about it, it really isn't all that different from what has been happening in the other arts. The idea of hip hop using a sample to rap over is the first case of what eventually would become "cut and paste" music. Blogs now mix images and audio and video and text. We absorb tidbits of information, like media collages. It's a whole new language.

Cordova: Exactly; but one that incorporates bits and pieces of all the languages we've already heard (that sounds grossly postmodern).

Vlognik: You have mentioned the audience several times. The audience needs to be considered, the audience will let you know if you should keep telling your stories.

Cordova: Absolutely... I think. I guess you can tell them just for yourself. But...

Vlognik: I take it you don't subscribe to the philosophy that says something like, "I do this for me, nobody else, I would do it alone in a dark room with no one watching, I don't care if anyone ever watches."

jadelr: Then do it in a dark room. If you're out of the room it is because you want to communicate. That does not mean that you compromise your style or your standards. It means that you stop bullshitting yourself and take a hard look at your work and try to make it say what you want it to say effectively.

Cordova: I guess the important thing is not to get too caught up in the idea that your audience needs to be a particular SIZE.

Vlognik: Awareness of an audience is about communication, but just doing it for yourself is about expression. Do you think this is right?

jadelr: Yes.

Cordova: Yes, I do. I think they are both essential. I think the idea is to express and want to communicate it. We are all in a constant state of expression. It's all about finding a way of communicating that fact... or the details.

Vlognik: In order to communicate, there needs to be someone to communicate with. So who is your intended audience? Who do you imagine is out there watching your stories?

Cordova: NUUs

jadelr: New Urban Universals

Cordova: Universalists

jadelr: There you go. We are so perverse we speak in marketing lingo.

Cordova: Anyhow... no.. anyone really... It's not a "normal" demographic. It has more to do with style, with those who explore and strive to discover, without really knowing what it is they are trying to discover. Those who are "chasing windmills" just like us (like our characters).

Vlognik: I was just going to bring up the title, based on what you just said about striving. I take it that the title is a Don Quixote reference?

jadelr: YES!

Vlognik: Do you see a futility in what you are trying to do?

Cordova: In everything. But the joy comes from the effort, not the end result.

jadelr: I see a futility in trying to pursue everything I was taught to pursue growing up.

Cordova: In the end, there's nothing wrong with chasing windmills, i guess.

jadelr: There isn't one company out there that I would want to work for, Love is certainly nothing like all those love songs and romantic comedies -- well, maybe it is a little like a couple of Woody Allen movies.

Cordova: But that doesn't mean "there is something wrong with it." It's just... different.

jadelr: It is really about the delusion of trying to achieve a normalcy that doesn't really exist.

Cordova: Exactly.

jadelr: I have read a lot of comments of people saying how they have a hard time liking the characters, and going back to a previous point Cristina made -- they are are so irrevocably human. I find them vulnerable, and willing to lash out, out of insecurity and frustration. That's the thing, I never doubt that they care about each other, they just express a lot of things we supress.

That is what I like about the episode "Solitude" -- that the whole thing is like this lame sappy Hallmark card, but if you listen to it, it is just a list of serious complaints. Here is someone who does not feel appreciated, and who resents it, but she loves him - I think real love is closer to that kind of acceptance because in the end you know that someone's flaws, even when they hurt you, are not wrapped in malice. So it becomes a sweet postcard, in a really dark way.

Cordova: We see these things, and we dislike them, hence showing how unaccepting we are of these characteristics in ourselves. But they are real. They are us. And I'm not going to say that we have to learn to love ourselves, because that would be way too creepy, but... we have to accept who we are and look upon the world and ourselves in it a bit differently -- reassess.

jadelr: Phew!

Cordova: We're both just full of shit really. It's just fun!

Vlognik: I also have read the comments that the characters are unlikeable. And I agree they don't always come across sympathetically. This may be because they are being evaluated in limited, 2-minute chunks. As I watch more of the videos, I am developing a more nuanced appreciation for the characters' insecurities and frailties.

So why tell these stories in 2 minute chunks? Why does vlogging not seem to be working in longer formats?

Cordova: First of all, as a former teacher, I have closely witnessed the growing limits of our attention span. Second, people (like us) lack the time. Third, people (like us) lack the commitment. For a long time we kept going to see movies and leaving infuriated because we just wasted two hours. We keep doing it from time to time, don't get me wrong, but this requires less of a commitment and less of an attention span.

In the end, everything comes in two to three minute chunks anyhow. It's all a matter of how many of those chunks you are receiving at once. You can break down almost every movie or sitcom into these chunks. And if you watch contemporary films... the action is more and more fragmented.

jadelr: But I think the short format is part of the evolution of the medium. If you think about it, the legth of movies developed as a way to make the movie experience more worth the trouble. You dress up, you pay, you go to the big movie house... So they would have news, and film shorts and serials and then the movie.

Cordova: The internet is all about processing information in chunks -- bits and pieces -- bytes, if you will. This is the evolution of the medium, of our brains, of us.

jadelr: I agree. I think nowadays, if you want to say something, say it fast, say it clear, and boldly. If you don't, people will tune out.

Cordova: Most teenagers can only process information in bytes now. That's the truth. The important thing is that in the end there is some correlation between bytes so that there is actual critical thinking going on. Otherwise, we lose that too, and that would be doom in my little world .

jadelr: It requires a certain discipline, to edit and polish your message to be effective.

Vlognik: The correlation is what I think is most interesting about Chasing Windmills. The pieces are too fragmented to be much about plotlines, but what emerges over time is the development of these characters as human beings. So using the vlog model seems to be well adapted to character more than plot. It's not about what happens, its about who the people are.

Cordova: We have found that to be true. We keep talking about introducing more plotlines, and i think that will happen.

jadelr: I agree that it favors the character, much in the same way television does...

Cordova: We're stilll learning. I think vlogs can still be about plot somehow, but we haven't quite reached that. I don't know if we necessarily want to in this particular case... but there ought to be plot-driven vlogs out there.. to experiment and play, if nothing else

Vlognik: You have many ideas and opinions and a rigorous curiosity about people and their lives, and this all seems to be telling me that you have "something to say," that this is not a random or frivolous exercise. You seem to be trying to take this new medium seriously as a way of communicating things that are important to you. Do I have that right?

jadelr: Definitely.

Cordova: Sure. It is both random and serious, as are we, with everything.

jadelr: One of the analogies I have used from the beginning are the comic strip serials like Prince Valiant, because to me the format is really a video comic strip. It can feed from that continued relationship with the audience. Think about the complexity that Charlie Brown acquires over years of short strips about unrelated incidents.

Cordova: We'll be introducing the dog and the annoying bird any day now.

Vlognik: I like your comic strip analogy, because I think this is something people understand. Calvin and Hobbes is funny in each short installment, but over time Calvin emerges as some kind of weirdly unexpected philosopher.

jadelr: PRECISELY!

Cordova: yes!

Vlognik: If a bird and dog are possibly in the future at Chasing Windmills, what else lies ahead? A baby I suppose? Or not? What can we expect for your characters?

Cordova: Ahhhh... that is the question, isn't it? Well, just remember to expect the unexpected. -- That's lame!

[laughter]

jadelr: We still don't know about that phone number in his pants...

Cordova: There will be a birth, but it will not be an expected one.

Vlognik: Wow. CGI mutant baby? Messianic birth?

Cordova: Good call! Perhaps. They will conintue to chase windmills, and just... get by... the only way they know how. Is that evasive enough?

Vlognik: Yes. I'd like to ask about your writing method. It sounds like some things are planned ahead of time, and some things you make up as you go. How does that work? Do you write a script? improvise?

jadelr: Good question.

Cordova: Some episodes are very tight, others much looser (obviously). The tighter they are to begin with, the smoother the editing process. Time gained in one arena is lost is the next. If we overwrite, our acting sucks! If we underwrite, our shooting sucks. Can't win for losing.

jadelr: And the process is still evolving. The first episodes were very loose and improvised.

Cordova: We are still doing a balancing act and falling off the wire. At least there are fewer injuries at this point.

jadelr: There is now a combination. Sometimes we know where the scene is going, other times it just finds itself while we are shooting it. Because we post daily, we are trying to do a little more planning, but it is more in the process of shooting it than in the dynamic of the actual scene.

Cordova: We also really want to keep throwing in the more "random" episodes -- more metaphorical ones -- in order to mix it up a bit and have variety. We don't want to subscribe too strongly to any one style, just a consistent voice overall.

jadelr: There has to be this sense that this is a couple of lives offered in disorganized pieces, but still maintain a narrative thread that gives it coherence.

Vlognik: There is a new episode quite frequently, how often do you shoot and edit? Do you run off 25 of these things in a weekend and release them over time, or are you really acting a new scene every day or two?

Cordova: It's extremely time consuming. We do most of our shooting on Saturdays and edit during the week. But it's really a full time job. Sometimes I come home from work during the week, we shoot an episode, and still have to edit it that evening. That's when life becomes very difficult. But it's great fun, too. We try to shoot on the weekend and edit during the week. "Try" being the key word. It actually worked this past week. We hope to make a habit of it.

Vlognik: Before we wrap this up, is there anything else you guys would like me to include that we didn't cover?

Cordova: Just that.. hmm... we're really not that cool!

Vlognik: Perfect. Not being cool is the new cool.

"Show" or Tell: Where's the Themed Content?

2005-10-19T23:05:00.000-04:00

At the Converge South conference a couple of weeks ago, Amanda Congdon from Rocketbook delivered a presentation entitled "Themed Content for Videoblogs." Introducing her topic, she said "I'm dying for shows!"

What does she mean? I think she's talking about what a number of vlog-watchers are talking about. I hear this cropping up in online discussions and video conferences. And I confess, sometimes I'm the one bringing it up. My echo of Congdon's question, "Where are the shows?" usually comes after I try to explain to my friends why videoblogs are so great.

The conversations often go like this:

Me: Wow I watched more than 15 videoblogs last night.
Friend: Really? What were they about?
Me: Uuhhh...

Or sometimes, if I'm feeling ambitious, like this:

Friend: So what are all those video thingers you watch about?
Me: Well, see, in this one, this person sort of just talks about her life, like what she thinks about how many choices of shampoo are at the store, and she'll take her camera to the store and shoot herself talking about it.
Friend: You mean it's a show about shampoo?
Me: No, she talks about whatever's on her mind, it's different all the time.
Friend: You're kidding, right?

Some videobloggers don't want to discuss this subject. They hear a call for "shows" as a call for old, dead media. They see vlogs as a wholly unique and personal expression of free speech that should not be shackled with the conventional expectations of old media. "Hey man, I'm the media now, back off! You don't like it, then don't watch!"

The question at hand is, why are so many (the majority by my estimation) videoblogs not about any single thing or set of things? Or as wikipedia characterizes them, "personal?" They don't seem to have a theme or focus. They can't quite be described as being "about" something. (This includes my own vlog). In other words, they're not shows.

I concede that the folks who don't want them to be shows (for lack of a more imaginative term I'll call these good people "vlogging purists" in this post) make a compelling argument. It goes something like the following...

Videoblogging at its core is about The New Way. A new way of making media. A new way of distributing media. New paradigms, new approaches, new rules -- scratch that: no rules! We needn't limit our new selves with old expectations, which were created by our old nemesis, TV.

The categorization of "shows" by genre, subject, and content is mostly the result of generations of marketing and advertising trend-setting. Slicing communities into demographics, pigeonholing individuals as consumers, and creating expectations based on the dominating agenda: to sell us all something.

The purist argument insists that we don't want to be sold to anymore, and I happen to agree (mostly). So now this raises a fascinating question that the purists deserve an answer to: if there were no money at stake, what would media look like?

For the sake of fairness and simple intellectual curiosity, the vlogging purists deserve the space to find out what happens to media when the corporate interests (such as "audience size and attention span") no longer dominate.

If you don't have to maintain a Nielsen rating, if you won't lose your job when viewers get bored during sweeps, if you don't need to wrap it all up in 22 minutes between commercials and before the Seinfeld reruns come on -- if you don't have to worry about any of that, then why not shampoo?

Discovering this radical concept of newness is an organic process, and will take time. Old habits need to be examined, debunked, and discarded. New ways of framing content need the freedom to emerge over time. Not to put too fine a point on it: NO SHOWS!

This is an idea that does have appeal, and it has the potential of producing new genres and ways of seeing the world. In the meantime, I enjoy watching people work this out. It's not always Shakespeare, but it's something new and interesting and it should be allowed room to breathe.

But then what is there for Amanda Congdon, who still wants shows, but not the old kind of shows, she wants shows made by new creators for new audiences from a new point of view. She does, after all, participate in making one of her own.

Where are the vlogged sitcoms? Where is the vlogged murder mystery? It doesn't have to slavishly immitate Hollywood. In fact it would be better if it didn't, I'm ready for something subversive like The Blair Witch Vlog.

The podcasters seemed to figure this out fairly early on. Podcasting's infancy spawned "soundseeing tours" of the walk to the train station ("Now I'm walking past a fire hydrant.") I like these personal podcasts and I'm glad they're still around.

But it didn't seem long before the majority of the podcasters declared, "I'm passionate about something, I'm totally into macrame, I'm going to make a great Macracast!"

Is it somehow harder to do this with video? Is there something unique about spoken language, as opposed to moving images, that tends toward themed content?

I'm aware that there are some videoblogs that are more thematic. Rocketboom is an exercise in programmed content, even though they will often break the programming if the fancy strikes them. We can count on Minnesota Stories meeting a certain loosely held set of expectations. The Steve and Carol Show, while undeniably "personal," is still indeed mostly about Steve and Carol. Vlogs are not universally random rambles.

I'm simply wondering how and where more structure and production programming will appear.

And most importantly for the vlogging community, is there room for both approaches? Will the people who eventually create weekly installments of "Desperate Vlogwives" do so without trashing the Shampoocast? And will the vlogging purists understand that experiments in structured programming represent an expansion of territory, not a betrayal of principle?

Most conversations I have about this with other vloggers end with the un-profound yet nevertheless probably true: "Time will tell."

Participatory Journalism: What's in it for the Participators?

2005-10-16T20:09:00.000-04:00

According to his online biography at the BBC, Richard Sambrook is "Director of the BBC's World Service and Global News division, responsible for leading the BBC's overall international news strategy across radio, TV and new media."

If anyone at the BBC has a job description that puts him in charge, it's Richard Sambrook. But Sambrook says that no one at the BBC is in charge. At the BBC, the audience is in charge. Sambrook says, "We don't own the news anymore."

On July 7th, 2005, 4 hours after the bombing of the London subway, the BBC had received 20 videos, 300 still images, and 20,000 emails from which to report the events. All of it was submitted to the BBC by Londoners who were nearby when the attack happened.

Sambrook, speaking at a conference on participatory media, said that the BBC had used material from its audience for decades, but this was "on a scale and quality the BBC had never experienced before." This audience created content started to "dictate the line and tone of coverage."

The next day, July 8, the BBC evening news led with a package of video entirely shot on a London citizen's camera phone. Sambrook says the news organization, which reaches 190 million people each week, had reached a "clear tipping point" toward audience media ownership.

Guided by Sambrook and like-minded directors, the BBC is shifting into a highly participatory, interactive operational model. A March 2005 interview with Sambrook characterized the BBC's future as a shift from broadcaster and mediator to facilitator, enabler and teacher.

The approach at the BBC seems to be experimental, covering digital storytelling, requests for a wide range of user created audio, video, and writing, blogging initiatives, and highly interactive Web content.

The BBC is the leading edge of a wave The American Press Institute's The Media Center predicts will create a future newscape where in the year 2021, 50% of the news will be generated and distributed by citizens peer to peer.

The videobloggers are contributing to this wave. In 2005 we've seen an occasionally clumsy but consistent attempt to generate with handheld video cameras and home grown audio setups what in the hands of any professional can only be called "news."

Steve Garfield documents Boston City Councillor John Tobin's political activities (working cooperatively with Tobin). EvolveTV is a news information and commentary program run on what the founders claim is no investment capital. Rocketboom is the daily darling of the vlogosphere, delivering news headlines with humor, but also collecting the video reporting of "correspondents" who deliver video from author interviews to raw disaster footage. Minnesota Stories is a bright star of short, local documentary, sometimes public, sometimes personal.

As vloggers become more settled in their diverse voices, and audiences continue to record news events by being in the right place with the right cell phone, this content will inevitably make its way with increasing frequency into the programming of large media producers, either on TV, the Web, or in print.

Eventually the question will have to be asked: "What's in it for the vloggers?" Clearly this audience-created footage is valuable to the news organizations (like the BBC) who end up holding viewer attention with it. Will broadcasters start paying citizens for the right to reproduce their flickr streams? Will citizen journalists continue to send in their documents for the satisfaction of informing their neighbors?

I would like to see a Google AdSense or Amazon associate sort of arrangement worked out between media companies and participating audiences. In the way that Amazon affiliates collect pennies each time they send a buyer to purchase books featured on the affiliates' blogs, media corporations should deliver micropayments each time an editor selects an online piece of user-generated media for their evening broadcast (or Web gallery, or news magazine).

This could be through some functionality attached to the media documents themselves, or through an iTunes-style central database where news-conscious vloggers and digital photographers can deliver their work through feeds.

Ready for Mantime: Soon We Will All Be Our Own Media

2005-10-13T20:42:00.000-04:00

Each week I meet with friends for what we call "Mantime." I'm not sure why we call it that. I guess it's because the founding members of the group are men, though women (spouses, friends, colleagues) are welcome and often present. We do a mix of things together: console games, belching contests, rude jokes. Also we talk about relationships, bake cookies, and look at pictures of kittens.

Though it's called Mantime, the activities don't fit stereotyped categories. Just like the media we watch.

Dave P. has a large TV screen so we meet at his apartment. He's connected it to his computer, and we use the computer to take control of what we watch, when we want to watch it. There's no top-down dictation from one or two huge multinational entertainment conglomerates calling all the shots. Here's what we watched last night...

Eric was visiting from out of state. It was great to see him, and part of what we did was share with him the video we've enjoyed in Mantime over the last year or so. We sat there for over an hour asking things like, "Have you seen the Numa-Numa guy?" A keyword search at an amusing video Web site called that up on the screen. "How about the King Kong trailer?" It looked so cool we applauded. "How about the slide show of the Amazing-Smile girl? Or the pantomime of the Natalie Imbruglia song?" We watched that one twice.

For an hour we were our own media station, in complete control of programming.

Over the evening we watched movie trailers, home made music videos, hilarious TV commercials, videoblogs, news photos with user-photoshopped captions, pictures of cats from pet owners across the world, re-mixed movie trailers, clips of stand-up routines, a very grim Canadian public service announcement about domestic violence, and stuff I don't even know how to categorize. We could watch them as many times as we wanted (and we did). We could skip ahead to the best parts. We could pause the whole show to take a break for cake.

We watched it all on our terms, as a group of friends rather than individual consumers, with no intrusive advertising, without caring what any network wanted us to see, and it was a fantastically great time.

This was a glimpse of things to come. People ask me what I hope to see happen with all my blathering about vlogging and shake-ups in media creation and distribution. Last night's party is the start of what I'm excited about in these changing times.

But it's only a start, because I've left out of this story how hard it was to set up and navigate this new media landscape.

Connecting the computer to the TV was way harder than it should be. Lots of switches and cords for audio and video. Some video formats play through to the TV and some have to be watched on the computer monitor. Mirroring the monitor to the TV isn't seamless, and sometimes the person at the computer can't see the TV in order to click the play buttons. The resolution could be better on many of the videos.

Finding what we wanted was chaotic. We rarely remembered which site aggregated which videos. Google was helpful at times, but it took Don's super-ninja search skills 10 minutes to call up one of the clips. I suggested checking delicious, but no one had tagged the clips we were looking for yet. There is much, much work to do in streamlining the process of putting people in charge of making, distributing, and watching their own media.

But here's one reason to be hopeful: the evening we spent being our own media programmers was on the day of Apple's release of the video-enabled iPod, and iTunes 6. This is why an iPod that stores video (and plays it, and outputs it to a TV!) is cool: because we wonder about the potential of all these new gizmos to effect some kind of positive cultural change.

Anything that puts more control into the hands of people who want to decide for themselves how to engage our changing culture is something to celebrate.

Al Gore Throws Down the Gauntlet; Will Vloggers Pick it Up?

2005-10-12T15:23:00.000-04:00

Love him or hate him, vote for him or against him, the man who never said he invented the Internet is hoping it can serve in re-inventing the media. On October 5 Al Gore addressed the 2005 We Media conference, a gathering meant to generate conversation about distributing news and information through the Net.

Gore's keynote address was a cogent assessment of what has gone wrong with what he refers to as the "public discourse" necessary for democracy to work. Despite some omissions and overstatements (such as his idealization of America's hyper-literate past and his reluctance to explore the public's complicity in the pandering nature of TV news) Gore's critique is one of the best summaries I've heard from a politician of what's gone wrong with how people make political decisions and receive information about our society.

"Our founders knew all about the Roman Forum and the Agora in ancient Athens. They also understood quite well that in America, our public forum would be an ongoing conversation about democracy in which individual citizens would participate not only by speaking directly in the presence of others -- but more commonly by communicating with their fellow citizens over great distances by means of the printed word. Thus they not only protected Freedom of Assembly as a basic right, they made a special point - in the First Amendment - of protecting the freedom of the printing press."

He goes on to lament an intellectually lethal combination: 1. a shift from print to TV as the dominant forum in which our ideas are exchanged, and 2. the takeover of media heirarchy by corporate and political interests, thus shutting out a truly democratic plurality of voices.

"Consider the rules by which our present "public forum" now operates, and how different they are from the forum our Founders knew. Instead of the easy and free access individuals had to participate in the national conversation by means of the printed word, the world of television makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation today.

Inexpensive metal printing presses were almost everywhere in America. They were easily accessible and operated by printers eager to typeset essays, pamphlets, books or flyers.

Television stations and networks, by contrast, are almost completely inaccessible to individual citizens and almost always uninterested in ideas contributed by individual citizens.

Ironically, television programming is actually more accessible to more people than any source of information has ever been in all of history. But here is the crucial distinction: it is accessible in only one direction; there is no true interactivity, and certainly no conversation."

Jay Rosen, speaking at the same conference, thinks the speech had something to say to anyone concerned with the collision between old-form heirarchical media and bloggy-form democratic media. Rosen heard the speech as a challenge to those of us creating media alternatives. He says it's our job to figure out how to use our new ideas, new access, and new models to rehabilitate the rule of reason in public conversation.

Accepting this challenge is a good reason to be involved in videoblogging. Not only is videoblogging (or as Apple is calling it now, "video podcasting") a good way to work through the technical twists and turns of distributing grassroots media. It's also a chance to experiment with creating new sorts of content that we hope to distribute.

What will an aternative to the 30-second political commercial look like? If we're not going to be looking at a one-way image-driven PR blitz, if we're not watching pointlessly polarized entertainment professionals scream at each other under the guise of "balanced debate," if we aren't going to watch political operatives endlessly repeating meaningless talking points, then what precisely will we be watching? Here are just a few examples. Certainly not a fully realized dream. But it's a start.

This past summer a group of video bloggers began an on-again off-again discussion of content that I hope will continue. Now that the iPod plays video, more people may be watching.

Waiting for the iPod video

2005-10-11T05:01:00.000-04:00

Why are so many videobloggers mad with impatience waiting for an Apple iPod video? Tomorrow Apple will hold yet another Very Special Press Event, revealing one more one-more-thing. It's likely to be the rabidly anticipated Apple-branded portable video device. Well, actually, it will not be the video enabled iPod. But wait! Yes it will be! Or maybe not.

Frenzied speculation is common around Apple product launches and updates. Apple works hard at cultivating a brilliant marketing atmophere of blended hype and hope, making the tech press, and those of us who obsessively follow it, positively jittery with anticipation. Shownotes for The Mac Cast podcast lists a round-up of the range of rumors, whispered back and forth across the blogosphere like kids passing urban legends back and forth on the school bus.

Do we need an iPod video? Not everyone thinks so. The concept has its detractors. Sadly for true believers, Steve Jobs seems to be one of the biggest.

I think some would consider Apple to already be too big for its britches in its dominance of the personal audio market, prefering for personal video a less corporate, more open source, pet platform from somewhere else (though where else this would be is a mystery to me, unless we're talking about the cool video-enabling Linux iPod hack promoted by do-it-yourselfers like the good folks at Make).

Or maybe we should be satisfied with the devices already taking up space in our lives, calling instead for a clever integration of our computers and our television sets. This is also already available to some extent, yet The Revolution remains sluggish.

What's not yet transforming the world of personal video distribution is our current setup, and this is likely why the hankerin' is so great for a piece of hardware that will do for videoblogging what the iPod did for podcasting. There's much work to do in streamlining the process of distributing new media to the average citizen commuting to work or working out at the gym.

There is a lot of video moving around the Net with the desktop computer as the most common access point. But whenever we're nearby a desktop monitor, we're usually doing something else, whether it's checking e-mail, surfing the web, or, most commonly, doing our jobs at work and simply hoping a friend will forward a link to footage of a meteor dusting up some weirdo's truck.

As a result, online video becomes little more than a (very) brief distraction from other tasks, and seems limited to narrowly humorous, cute, outrageous, or weird content. I'm among the crowds who hope for a break from what I've called the Tyranny of the Access Point. Will an iPod liberate us? I'm not sure.

For myself, my iPod has brought audio to 2 primary spaces of my life: commuting on the highway and running on the trail. Neither driving nor jogging are activities into which video is likely to ever penetrate, and so I'm stumped for now about just precisely where and when I would be watching my iPod video.

True, many commute on a train rather than in a car, and many workout on treadmills rather than in the street. I can imagine that these folks could at least in theory watch a handheld video device to pass the time. I'm not convinced there are enough of those people to make handlheld bideo successful, but of course it's hard to predict. Theoretically, any place someone could take and give attention to a paperback book could be a place someone could take and watch an iPod video. Whether we want or need any more reasons to leave the books at home is a seperate discussion.

It seems to me that the most sense would simply be to bring videoblogs to places where people are already watching: their living room sofas and recliners. You don't need a handheld device for that, unless the dock connector plugs easily into the back of the TV set, or the TiVO, or the DVD player. The iPod photo can technically plug into the TV, but I never once met anyone who did this regularly. Will an iPod video have a better chance?

"Everyone Look at My Narcissism!"

2005-10-08T01:25:00.000-04:00

In the MPR interview with übervloggers Ryanne Hodson and Jay Dedman the interviewer ponied out this old saw:"Isn't this just a narcissistic exercise?" In Saturday's video blogger flash meeting, Josh Kinberg said that Jay handled this question in the best possible way: concede the point without equivocation, and then laugh it off.

We don't hear the medium of television run-down because the people making the shows are "narcissistic." What could be more narcissistic than making a living as a Hollywood actor or network anchor? We don't hear about it because it's understood that people who spend their time in front of a camera kind of, um, like to be in front of the camera.

I think video bloggers are derided as self absorbed and in love with themselves because our detractors are often afraid to admit the truth: they don't care.

It's likely that critics don't want to say, "I'm comfortable being pandered to by Big Media! These little videoes are not endlessly amusing me with a stream of passively received corporate crap! I don't care about real people!" So they invent this weird vice: "narcissism." If it's applied to video blogs, then that's the reason they don't have to be interested. They never have to admit to a lack of patience or an unwillingness to listen to an idea outside of mainstream packaging.

I think it would be more fair if new viewers would consider evaluating vlogs in the same way that mainstream media is evaluated: according to content.

Why do I like Deadwood and loathe Fear Factor? Both are irrelevantly populated with narcissitic (and many other irrelevant adjectives) people. The point is when I watch Deadwood, I'm emotionally engaged. I hear important truths in the stories about society, culture, human interaction, and religious faith. All of this speaks to content.

I _don't_ watch because of the distribution technology or the personality traits of the actors (narcissistic or not). I watch because of what I consider to be powerful story, character, and cinemagraphic content. Similarly, it's easy to personally judge Fear Factor as unwatchable also by virtue of the content: buff men in speedos eating maggots afloat in a vat of horse testicles (or whatever).

I didn't get truly excited about videoblogging until I felt that chill up my spine that comes from good content. It wasn't a huge chill. I didn't feel my world tilt on its axis like I do after some episodes of Deadwood, but there is content there to respond to and admire. And it is becoming more intriguing every week.

Often videobloggers drinking their coffee bore the crap out of me, because I'm not interested in whatever ideas are there. So I just move on to something else, I don't feel the need to cast 4-syllable judgments derived from the flaws of Greek mythological figures (yes, him).

But then I see someone else with his coffee and at the core of the story is a very compelling (and I think profound) idea.

It's _all_ of it narcissistic, but the _content_ of some is worth my time.

Why Josh Kinberg is an Important Person You Shouldn't Know About

2005-09-09T23:31:00.000-04:00

The vlogosphere is made of many pieces: communities, individuals, and ideas converging through technology. An exemplar piece of the puzzle has been the vlog aggregator FireANT, thanks in large part to the applied engineering of Josh Kinberg's brain. You can hear about part of vlogging's history from Kinberg himself in this interview from Futuremedia.

Tools built and refined by people like Kinberg are essential to the future success of the fledgling media revolution. But really, the majority of people who will watch new media shouldn't be aware of what he does. That's because a good tool is good because we barely notice its presence, let alone do much thinking about why or how it works.

This is especially true of media tools -- what we want is the media content. Any awareness of the technology that brings us to that content is a distraction. This is the burden of a good designer or engineer: anonymity.

One thing that the top-down, vertical media heirarchy model (media produced by a few Big Players talking one-way to a mass of consumers) has going for it is a streamlined user experience with simple, transparent tools: 1. place buttocks on sofa 2. Look across the room at square thing 3. Congratulations you are now consuming mainstream media.

In contrast, there's still a self-conscious layer of technology between me and the videoblogs I want to see. I need to juggle several things to get what I want: computer access, a Net connection (and it better be speedy), plus several pieces of software. Every time the good folks at FireANT or Freevlog or Vlogmap or Mefeedia or any of many tool-builders releases an improved version of whatever groovy tool they build, they are simplifying one more piece of a distracting process.

It gets easier to bring more people onboard every time the process becomes more user-friendly, when the aggregators get an interface tweak, subscribing becomes more streamlined, searching and commenting and tagging get simpler -- all of this is to say that the technical tools become more transparent.

There are many puzzle pieces that remain jumbled in the box, and I have tremendous respect for the folks who think hard about fitting them together. We need further improvements to aggregators, clever ways to integrate Web services, smoother (read: invisible!) implementation of RSS.

And of course, we're still waiting for the holy grail of videoblogging: a way to break videoblogs from the Tyrrany of the Access Point. Videoblogs must move freely from my computer monitor to either A) my television set or B) something I can hold in my hand and look at on the train (or, best of all, both).

When that happens, videoblogs will make a leap into the lives of people who never heard of Josh Kinberg, and have no idea why what he does is so important to their own experience.

(in)Frequently Asked Questions

2005-08-11T23:37:00.000-04:00

Who is Dave Huth and why won't he shut up?

I come at this stuff from several angles.

The content angle: I have an MFA in computer graphics design from the Rochester Institute of Technology, thus I make pictures with digital tools (I like to make media).

The egghead angle: I teach art, digital video, and the occasional media-related sociology class at the college level (I like to analyze media).

The consumer angle: I love a good story well told (I like to see media).

The insatiable curiosity angle: I believe this stuff is very important for culture, democracy, and individual life (I like to talk about media).

Where does this site's dumb name come from?

Gotta be unique. Gotta be snappy. Gotta be obscure. I started out calling the site "Vloggie," which, let's face it, is even worse.

What exactly is this site about?

I'm not "exactly" sure. There's a growing group of people who think that something has gone terribly wrong with public discourse in the U.S., and they're searching for ways to restructure the communication forum democracy needs to thrive. There's also a small but rapidly growing group of people who believe the primary means of mediated communication in our society is about to (or has already begun to) undergo radical change.

The concerns of these groups are producing a huge creative effort trying all kinds of communication experiments with new tools, distribution, and subject matter. I'm fascinated by this social movement, and use this space to comment on it and participate in related discussion. You're invited to participate as well!

What's a "vlog" and is that all you talk about?

"Vlog" is shorthand for "video blog," which is nothing more than a simple, streamlined distribution of video moving across the Internet. Video blogs are not all I'm interested in, but they're at the core of what I'm most interested in.

Cultural communication and public discourse are undeniably dominated by television. Tomorrow, TV as we know it may be gone, but I tend to think that moving pictures will still be the focus of whatever comes next. So I pay special attention to attempts at creating a new system of visual media. That doesn't mean I don't think/talk about podcasting, text blogging, and interesting experiments in TV and film. But I do give the most attention to those who are messing around with video online.

Aren't you just another opinionated blowhard with too much time on his hands?

Probably! Why don't you share your own ideas on this blog and see if we can figure it all out collectively?

An Introduction to This Site

2005-07-13T23:21:00.000-04:00

There's a growing group of people who think that something has gone terribly wrong with public discourse in the U.S., and they're searching for ways to restructure the communication forum democracy needs to thrive. There's also a small but rapidly growing group of people who believe the primary means of mediated communication in our society is about to (or has already begun to) undergo radical change.

The concerns of these groups are producing a huge creative effort trying all kinds of communication experiments with new tools, distribution, and subject matter. I'm fascinated by this social movement, and use this space to comment on it and participate in related discussion. You're invited to participate as well!