2 posts tagged “video blog”
What is a blog? Really, who cares? While I can understand from an academic standpoint the need to quantify particular genres for accurate apples-to-apples comparisons, really, what is a blog? Part of what I love about the internet is the cornucopia of crap called a blog. Blogging has become a catchall for the personal flotsam of our lives. But I think there is a difference between how we use the web as content providers and content consumers.
From the beginning of my experience as a content provider on the web I have journaled predominantly using photos. From my initial crude homepage, to my various current personas on the web, photo sharing has been an integral part of the dialogue. Perhaps because of ease, perhaps because of the way I see the world, writing about the nuts and bolts of the day is less compelling for me than capturing the moment with a camera. And while I have used this presentational format for sharing my point of view with a personal webpage, I also enjoy sharing with a community at large with a site like Flickr. But the tone of the community dialogue is important to me. When sharing media on a site like Youtube I am put off by the clutter and chaos of the community. I have become a recent convert to Vimeo and I find that the supportive nature of members is not only inclusive, but is an interesting environment for developing thoughtful discourse on personal media. This is knowledge I can then fold back here, in my more traditional blog space. The lines are blurring, and with the ability to marry my written, photographic and video efforts into one central site, I am finding that my need for a personal media portal is fading away. Blogs have become the tool I was trying to create on my own for the past 10 years.
Personal blogging always strikes me as a record of the exceptional rather than the mundane. For a large percentage of authors creating personal blogs, you write because of an exceptional event or feeling, and once it is past your posting frequency diminishes. How does this skew the content of a blog, and is that part of the reason so much of the content is ignored? Are we oversaturated with the angst and disappointment of everyday life?
As a content consumer I read the news… blogs are a part of that flow. I use links to news stories from sources I admire and respect. I love it when someone “pre-surfs” the web and directs me to a discovery on the web. I certainly maintained my own personal “hot links” page in the mid 90s, long since abandoned before the change of millennium. Having constant RSS feeds push content to me is invaluable, and really these authors become my “friends”, even though we have never met.
To quote Clay Shirky, blogging removes all barriers to publishing, so “you have high quality competition that costs nothing.” Then there is this blog. Low quality competition that costs minutes out of your life. Minutes that you will never recover. You do the math. I can’t believe this blog will ever be considered the farm team of any publisher. Shirky’s main point is on target, this is for my circle of friends, my virtual cocktail party. And it is for me. I can’t imagine who else would care.
It is nice to be back... Sort of.
The Video Blog Link
It is hard not to want to stay in Paris. After a while it all goes by in a blur. You have to ask yourself, did I really see that or was it only imagined? There have been so many marvelous moments on this journey. It has been written that we travel as a way to expand each moment. Time stands still as you look in wonder at a familiar site that you have only viewed in your mind’s eye. There have been so many special moments. So many familiar monuments that have not disappointed. The Arc de Triomphe, The Louvre, Versailles, Notre Dame, The Tour Eifel, Sacre-Coeur, even Paris neighborhoods too numerous to even remember. Paris is such a marvelous place that has captured the hearts and minds of millions for a millennia. You can add us to that incredibly long list. For once, a town lived up to the hype and exceeded it. It is such a magical, mysterious, marvelous place. We were blessed to visit. And now it is time to come home. The long awaited journey at last comes to an end. Bittersweet at its conclusion, but forever savored in our mind’s eye.
I have been really surprised by the response to the video blog of the trip. There have been so many positive comments and a bit of a landslide of hits on the site. Thank you for the kind words and support. It was an experiment that I think on the whole works. The process was really not as difficult as I expected. I created the web site before we left for Paris and then only had to populate the server with new files as I created them. Once again we shot little 320x240 QuickTime files on the Nikon still camera. The quality is rather crude, especially the audio and the footage in low light, certainly not what I get out of the HD camera we took. But the advantage of using a strictly file based production path far outweighed having to go through the hassle of capturing video into the computer in real time. All we had to do was move the CompactFlash card over to the PC, import the files into Avid and we were editing. I was able to bang out a finished piece in a little over an hour. Production value was not as important as being timely with the posting. We wanted each dispatch up on the server and ready for viewing on the same day we shot it. Shooting video with a still camera still has other liabilities besides the quality of the resultant footage. It would have been nice to have a tripod for the shots, but that went against the idea of being light and spontaneous. Besides, many of the venues we shot in would not allow a tripod so we were stuck with some insanely shaky footage. Again, I come back to the reason for creating these was to give a sense of the moment, not careful documentation of a location or essay on history. For that watch National Geo or Discovery.
One of the big problems was finding a good internet connection in Paris for moving rather large files. I did not have a connection as I wrote the individual pages and I could not check to see how the files played in the interface. As a consequence, some of the videos ended up odd sized, even though I compressed them in flash using the same settings. It was totally random and now that I am back I plan on taking a few minutes to drill into it and find out why.
If you have any comments or reactions please feel free to contact me directly. There is a link to my mail on the home page of the video blog. Let me know what you think. The feedback is always welcome.
