Lost photos: I shot this photo from my office window last April. Unfortunately, I can’t locate the photos shot from the same location on April 16, 1998.
My first ever accidental online “citizen journalism” (before the term existed) experience occurred ten years ago, today. Unfortunately, because of the ephemeral nature of the web and certain “wish we knew then what we know now” practices, there is no place for me to point to what I did on that day.
Today, posting “weather photos” is one of those participatory “user-generated-content” activities that even the most up-tight control-freak media company encourages. In the past week or so, I’ve been emailed by at least two big brand online services requesting that I join their network of weather watchers due to my practice of posting photos of weather outside my office window on the 7th floor of a building near Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
Ten years ago today, Will Weaver (then an employee at Hammock, now the big-guy — literally and figuratively — at the e-mail marketing company, emma) and I did a rather remarkably dumb thing. We had an early digital camera and decided to take photos of a tornado that was heading straight towards our building.
All the smart employees (everyone but the two of us) headed to the core of our office building, but we were thinking how great it would be to take some photos and post them on the Hammock.com website. That was a rather out-of-the-box idea as the site was your basic brochure site at the time. Not like today where not only do we have several work-related blogs on the site, but every employee also has a “people page” where they can post information they’d like to share.
Back then, Will and I shot a series of photos (actually, I think Will was “shooting” and I was “photo directing”) of what turned out to be the tornado passing by our office as it touched down in Centennial Park on its way to hitting downtown (including the stadium, then under construction) before doing major widespread damage in East Nashville. (Today, the Nashville Tennessean has a retrospective of the days events.)
After the tornado passed our office building, Will and I and a few other Hammock employees jumped in a car and (I don’t recommend this to anyone — indeed, do not ever do this) drove out to survey the damage in the area immediately surrounding our office. A few blocks from our office, we came-upon what turned out to be one of the most tragic events related to that day. As we watched, a large team of Nashville emergency service and fire department personnel were attempting to save a Vanderbilt student who was pinned beneath a tree in Centennial Park. Unfortunately, the student died later.
When we returned to the office, Will posted the photos at the URL (which no longer works) hammock.com/tornado. Within an hour, CNN.com and other news services were pointing to the photos and the site, which perhaps on a good day got 100 visitors, was (thanks to a robust server) getting tens of thousands of viewers. Sometime during the night, a radio talk show host I had never heard of until then, Art Bell, linked to the photos and started talking about them on his show. (Later I learned that visiting aliens and bad weather were a staple of his show.) The link from Art Bell ended up crashing our servers, as I recall.
Several years ago, we discovered that we had “lost” those photos and any archive of what the site was like on that day. I haven’t actually given up on them turning up somewhere, but searches of the WayBackMachine and other services have not turned up any mirror sites that captured the photos.
One of the reasons I now am obsessed with backing up and organizing digital media — and displaying it on multiple platforms — is my disappointment in having lost that April 16, 1998 moment in time — as experienced by a few of us.
Today, Hammock Inc. would have the photos uploaded to Flickr.com/hammock and YouTube.com/hammockinc instantly and the photos would be backed up on three different servers in our offices and off-site. And, oh yeah, they’d also be posted on that “Out My Office Window” Flickr set. Additionally, we would grant rights to anyone wanting to display the photos for news-coverage purposes.
We’ve come a long way in the past ten years. Today, the city of Nashville has a network of siren alarms that warn people of weather emergencies. Vanderbilt students can be contacted immediately via text message during any type of emergency. And today, the notion of individual witnesses of an event providing personal coverage directly to an audience, and not mediated by a professional news operation, is accepted as a norm — and even “covered” by traditional media.
Later: Laura Creekmore, who then and now lived in East Nashville, recalls the day’s event (she was one of the smart people who went to our building’s basement). I spoke today also with Will Weaver whose recollection is similar to mine. If Lewis Pennock or others are reading this, please comment to fill-in-the-blanks of any details from that day.
I’m sure there will be lots of chatter suggesting Flickr is way late to the video party. Of course, the reality is that those who live far out on the leading edge often lose sight of the fact that the vast majority of people still don’t even share photos via e-mail. The majority of people still don’t have digital cameras, much less some easy-to-download means of capturing video. And what Flickr is doing — starting out by allowing only 90 second videos — makes it clear that they’re not trying to be another YouTube — this is something different.
But, then, I confess. I love Flickr. I love just about everything about it. While there’s a “free” version, it’s one of the few online services I gladly pay an annual fee for a “Pro” version due to its incredible array of services and features. It’s one of the few services I use that I believe is just about perfect.
I shoot video and photography using the same camera (well, most of the time) and I upload them both to the same desktop software (iPhoto), so why wouldn’t I want to save and share them on the web using the same service? It just makes sense to me.
I’ll still use YouTube, just not the same way I’ll use Flickr.
Later: Some folks are already harping on the ‘90 second’ limitation. While I think Flickr will probably expand this time limit later, the time-collar is actually an opportunity for thinking about video in a new way — in my opinion. One of the challenges with video is the editing process — it’s a new skill for most of us. However, sharing video doesn’t have to be limited to the linear narrative piece we’ve come to expect after years of watching TV. In reality, those linear pieces are typically a series of clips. What if, using a Flickr set, you can present those clips in a way in which the viewer can understand why they are being grouped together, but watch them in a new non-linear way? For example, people can already present non-linear video stories on a map, for example — posting small clips of video on maps using the MyMaps feature of Google Maps (example, how-to). Flickr’s new feature will enable this type of video story-telling as well. Here is a great insta-tutorial from Andrew Baron (of Rocketbook) about using Flickr sets to present a series of videos in a way that could be very helpful to viewers. (Andrew’s post via Twitter from Dave Winer)
I’ll be experimenting in the morning and will update this post with quick review then.
In the meantime, here is an embed of the video Flickr used to launch the service:
I only watched the final 30 minutes of the “YouTube/CNN” debate, but what I did see leads me to agree with Jeff Jarvis who said, “CNN selected too many obvious, dutiful, silly questions.”
The producers — or did they outsource this to Andrew Keen? — seemed hellbent on displaying how inane YouTube users are. They didn’t just select the obvious and silly questions, there seemed to be an attempt on the part of the producers to choose video from questioners who were stereotypical to the point of trivializing their issue.
In probably the worst example, CNN selected YouTube user Jeredt Thompson from Michigan (or was that David Koresh from Waco) for the “gun-control” question. “Americans want to know if our babies are safe,” he said. He then holds up an AR=15, the non-military version of an M-16 and says, “And here’s my baby.”
Joe Biden responded — in what, if this were a debate in which one actually scored points, would have been the play of the game — that Jaredt would likely flunk the mental-illness back-ground check == and then Biden worried out-loud that he’d “come looking for me.” All of which the audience loved. And frankly, it was probably one of the better answers in the history of such cattle-call appearances that go by the false labeling, “debate.”
Okay, so CNN found someone to play Travis Bickle. Great theater. And a great chance for Biden to knock one out of the park. But what did it do for either side of the debate? Nothing. It merely reinforced gun-control advocates perception that gun-owners are crazed lunatics. And for gun-rights advocates, it merely reinforced their belief that the main-stream media is out to disparage them and confiscate their shotguns.
Next debate, Jay Leno needs to host it. He should get questions from the people who appear on his “Jaywalking” segment — the ones with the IQs of fescue grass. That way, there would be no doubt that the questions are being selected to display how dumb people-on-the-street are.
People hear “YouTube” and they think dorm-room lip-synching video. So while others may be reading the announcement that AppleTV and iPhones provide a means to stream video from YouTube are thinking water-skiing squirrel videos, I’m thinking of closed-channel distribution of video on the cheap (i.e., without having to pay phone carriers or having to invest in a closed-circuit distribution system). Sales meetings, CEO talks, corporate training — video content that companies now distribute via systems that can cost millions in creating and maintaining.
I’m having deja vu all over again.
When Apple started supporting RSS in iTunes (another way to say they started allowing anyone to subscribe to podcasts), I wrote about 10,000 words explaining why it would change everything. Most of those predictions came true.
Podcasting was an amazing gift to Apple. Before podcasting was supported by iTunes, one had to purchase everything that flowed through the iTunes store onto ones computer and iPod. After iTunes supported podcasting, “free content” flooded through the iTunes channel in the form of all the things I predicted: church sermons, university courses, crazy kids doing crazy things. As I said then, all that free stuff would make Apple lots of money because they make money from selling smart hardware devices and elegant software that operate them. (Dave Winer said it wonderfully yesterday: “The business of the valley is not publishing. It is not advertising. It is not retailing. It is not pet food. It is cool packages of technology that thrill people with empowerment and novelty.”) While tech analysts and tech insiders don’t always understand this, Apple does. They make stuff that thrills people with its simplicity and with the novelty that you can do something with it — you didn’t even know you wanted to do. And something Apple maybe didn’t think of when they came out with it, because they’re not a publishing and dog food company. They create cool tools creative people use to create other cool stuff.
I’m not going to do a “how the iPhone will change everything” series of posts. I don’t have to, because many of the ways are on that old “how podcasting on iTunes” will change everything series. It will change things because iPhone and AppleTV — like iPods after podcasting — are devices that will let you watch any video created by anyone, anywhere. Drop-dead simply. Without a computer. This is not a new cell-phone, people.
The iPhone will change lots of stuff in ways the pundits don’t get. My favorite clueless punditry so far has got to be this Advertising Age column by Al Ries. I must say, it takes a lot of courage to base ones prediction on why something will fail by suggesting that “convergence” products fail and “divergence” products succeed. If such an argument were correct, I wouldn’t be writing this post on the device that converges how I view video, make Skype calls, do video-conferencing with people on iChat, review graphic design files, pay bills, edit photography, edit video, etc. In other words, if Ries’ argument was correct, I’d have about a 20-30 divergent hardware products sitting on my desk for every task I do. Apple, more than any company, gets this.
I own one, but I think the AppleTV is little more than a gimmick product today. But once in a while, I’ll discover that I didn’t DVR an episode of the Office and I’ll purchase it via iTunes, then from my computer, I will use the AppleTV to watch it on my TV. The other day, I realized that AppleTV is a great way to look at movie Trailers — like an on-demand channel — that totally by-passses iTunes; that totally by-passes my comptuer; that works whether or not my computer is turned on. It grabs and streams the movie trailers from the Internet via wi-fi and my broadband connection. I know that others must have figured this out a long time ago, but that’s when the light went off for me that an AppleTV can be a cable box-like device for streaming any video from the Internet directly (as in, not through a compuer) to an HDTV — not merely a means to stream video you collect via iTunes on your computer. At that point, I realized this is a corporate communications device. Within days, I’m sure we’ll be learning how the streaming can also support real-time, live video as well as pre-recorded video posted on YouTube.
One consistent reason why the nay-sayers predict the iPhone will fail is that it won’t be supported by corporate IT departments, like Blackberries, etc. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal summed up this school-of-naysaying in this article.
Today, with Apple’s video-distribution announcement, I can only imagine one big-co CEO demo’ing to another big-co CEO how he blasts out a video message to 1,000 executives each morning via their iPhones, computers and AppleTV. I think the whole “IT department won’t support it” argument will go away once CEOs discover they can be video stars.
This morning, someone asked me if I’d seen the Hillary video. It was sort of asked in the manner of, “of course, you’ve seen the Hillary video, haven’t you?” I confess. I must be living under a rock. It’s been on YouTube for a couple of weeks. Forget the politics, it’s one of the most incredible mashups I’ve ever seen: a hack of Apple’s famous 1984 ad. I can’t believe Apple hasn’t ordered it down, as it probably violates all sorts of copyright laws. However, the “parody” and “satire” and “fair use” protection issues may be providing some cover. I can say this: if the Clinton campaign seeks its removal, it will backfire, as it will appear in a thousand other places and the “big brother” message will be reinforced. Whoever did this produced an amazing piece of mashup art…and some impressive guerrilla campaign marketing.
Let’s all feel sorry for those business-to-business writers and editors who cover the marketing beat for a “professional” marketing audience. See, they have to use terms like “user-generated content” or “consumer-generated content” or “amateur content” to make the distinction clear between video, audio or words that are created by “ordinary” people who are not necessarily guaranteed they will be paid for that self-expression and video, audio or words that are created by those who are paid to create it, whether it’s self-expressive or not.
For example, here is a link to a story on Adweek.com that has the headline “Southwest Picks Consumer-Created Spot” (how one “consumes” air travel beats me, but I have pity on the reporter, so I’m not going to repeat my rant about the term “consumer”). In the article, we learn that Southwest Airlines’ experiment to solicit advertising created by amateurs will be seen during an April telecast of the NBA playoffs. (And on Youtube right now, as embedded below.)
The winning consumer-amateur was Brian Cates, a member of Southwest’s Rapid Rewards frequent flyer program, who produces videos for a local comedy troupe in Oklahoma City. Wait! Have those folks ever been paid to perform? Has Cates ever been paid to produce a video? Let’s check with the NCAA of “amateur content” and see if we have a violation of the amateur-status of consumers to create user-generated content. Surely there must be a “professional content creators guild” who maintains such guidelines.
Obviously, this post is amateur humor generated by me, an excessive consumer of Southwest air travel. By the way, it’s a funny ad — see below. Sidenote: I’ve been on close to 120 Southwest flights during the past 12 months. None of them, as I recall, were the result of an embarassing moment from which I wanted to escape.
A Vanderbilt professor’s research into a new approach to peer-to-peer multimedia streaming has gained funding from the National Science Foundation. A University press release says engineering school professor Yi Cui has received a NSF “Career Award” for his work to make “it possible for centralized multimedia streaming servers to route video and audio signals through a vast network of subscribers, all with varying capabilities in terms of connection speed and processing power.” According to Milt Capps, in an (paid-subscriptioin-required) article at NashvilllePost.com, Professor Cui’s grant could total $400,000 over five years.
According to the press release, “(Cui) intends for his system to allow entrepreneurial Internet streaming video services to succeed without huge investments of capital on hundreds of gigantic computer servers. His plan will involve the computers of the subscribers, themselves, who will share video streaming data with other subscribers through an automated system.” Says, Cui, “The NSF sponsorship will enable us to assess networked computers; ability to transmit multimedia data, based on the customary use of the computer, the inferred bandwidth available to the computers, and a variety of customer usage patterns,” Cui said. He will test his system through the Open Source Teaching service, using his system to deliver multimedia educational materials freely.
Sounds cool. But I’ll keep using BitTorrent (which is P2P, but not streaming) until he figures it out. And despite my being all for Vanderbilt professors getting government money for research, if I had an extra $400,000 sitting around, I think investing in these guys might provide a better ROI.
Nashville is going to elect a new mayor in 2007 and from my vantage point up in the bleacher seats, it seems easier to keep up with who is not running rather than with who is. However, via Brittney at Nashville is talking and an IM from Laura, I wanted to point to this YouTube posting of a clever YouTube-posted video from one of the candidates. It’s a witty and (surprisingly) well-done parody of a Geico ‘celebrity’ ad. Is this the future? Running campaign ads on YouTube is a lot cheaper than buying TV airtime. However, it better be plenty clever to go viral — even on a local level.
Disclosure: I don’t know David Briley but after viewing this, I’m thinking of hiring Bill Shick as my attorney.
Susan Mernit points to a product that is spreading virally across the YouTubeosphere. These things are going to be harder to get than a PS3 — which is good. But I don’t think the nickname, Rex the Humper is that great. However, thanks, I guess, to the people who thought of (and e-mailed) me when they saw it.
Introducing a new buzz term: video sidebar. At least that’s the most obvious term I can think to call a great use of embedded video I’m seeing more and more. I am crediting YouTube with making the concept of embedded video (in simple terms, the little boxes on a webpage where video is displayed) easy to understand — and do. As I’m told often by the rexblog director of hackology, YouTube didn’t create embedded video, they just made it simple and easy for people like me to do it.
For someone with a print editorial background, seeing a text story wrap around a box in which someone can view a related story or graphic is a very easy concept to grasp: It’s a sidebar. However — despite the predictions of futurists for the past couple of decades — in print, we’ve never been able to publish a video sidebar.
More and more, in blogs and big-media sites, I’m beginning to see great examples of video sidebars. For example, there’s a great one in the online version of this New York Times article today on new approaches to the design of acoustic stringed instruments. While you can click off the page to view the video, scroll down and you’ll see the embedded video sidebar: a 3:30 minute overview of how sound is created on a guitar (and more). In this case, the video sidebar is a slowly paced NPR-ish story in which the reporter and “expert” are jamming in a workshop. The production values are excellent (perhaps better than necessary for the web), but the reporter seems a bit uncomfortable with the medium — which, frankly, adds to its believability. He comes off as someone who is passionately interested in his story and genuinely excited about sharing what he’s learned with the reader/viewer. As the story is about sound and music and design, the video displays concepts that are impossible to convey in text only.
While I’ve only been noticing video sidebars for the past few months, here are some early observations on how they are best used:
1. Use a video sidebar to enhance, rather than re-tell the main story.
2. Use a video sidebar when sound and movement are central to the story. (A sports highlight, for example, or, as even I’ve tried, a software feature).
3. Use a video sidebar when a short “how-to” will help the reader comprehend what you are trying to explain.
4. As a video sidebar merely enhances the main story, it is different than a video-blog post. On a video-blog (or other video-centric web space), the main story is told with video. [On a video-blog, the sidebar is text (i.e., links mentioned in the video) or graphics like maps, or even a transcript of the video.]
5. If you make the reader go to another page to view the video, it’s not a video sidebar. (If your boss’s metric-of-choice is page views, a video sidebar will make your reader happy, but maybe not the boss.)
6. You should allow the reader/viewer to start the video. It shouldn’t startup just because someone has landed on that page. In fact, you are a bad, bad person if you do that.
In a coming post, I’ll review some tools for creating and adding a video sidebar to an article or blog post.
At least to me, Bob Garfield’s way-too-long “exploration” of YouTube” in both Wired and Adversing Age sounds like a speech from a grown-up in a Charlie Brown special: “Wah wah-wah wah, wah-wah, waaaahhhh.”
Mark Cuban asks some questions about Apple, Google, YouTube and the music labels: Billioniare blogger Mark Cuban has been blazing the ‘osphere recently with proclamations of how crazy certain deals are. I’m perceiving he’s mellowing a bit now, since with this post about Apple, he puts his opinions in the form of questions rather than declarations.
Quote:
So we could have an interesting year of watching Apple to see if this change in where music is discovered impacts their competitive situation. Watching the labels to see how much they can get paid for licensing their catalogues. Will it be 15mm plus ad share per year or get sued? What will other content providers who didnt get their 15mm think Will they sue to prove a point that you cant leave them out? Will Google just write checks or give stock to the entire universe?
Scott Karp, in a typically insightful post, lobs a grenade disguised as a statement-in-the-form-of-a-question at the end of the post. He writes, “Does media have anything to do with content anymore, or is it all about aggregating people’s attention by any means? Was media ever really about content?”
When it comes to media companies and the executives who run them, the three words “content is king” is the comfort blanket they cling to as they attempt to fall asleep at night. While Scott is saying (in the form of asking) something that appears obvious to the world, he’s doing something akin to yanking their sleeping aid out of their arms and scream, “It’s just a dumb piece of cloth. Get over it.”
Of course, Scott is correct. Content is not king. I’m sorry. Frankly, I could make a strong argument it never was. Frankly, I could make an even stronger argument that the word “content” is stupid when used as a metaphor for writing, reporting, film-making, song-writing — however, Doc Searls has done that so profoundly, I’ll skip that one. (Also, the last time I did that rant, a wise reader of this blog asked me what I was going to rename the Table of Contents in our magazines.)
The ability to attract an audience is king. The ability to create a foundation (a platform, a brand, a community, or whatever you want to call it) that attracts readers and visitors and users who are enticed into creating with you, an entire (since I’m using buzzwords) ecosystem to which they all belong to, add to and gain identity from, is king.
But don’t fret, traditional media companies. Some of you are great at this. For instance, business-to-business media companies who have created conferences, tradeshows, databases, publications, websites, etc., that serve as a part of the eco-system that holds together their market. That’s king. Associations who have loyal members who attend conventions and read magazines about other members and participate with each other online — that’s king.
Audience (in the form of readers, watchers, users, listeners, members, contributors) is king. A “media business” better be about making them happy, healthy, wealthy and wise — any way possible. We (and I’m speaking as an audience member, not a media creator) are quite fickle when it comes to the “content” we “consume” — but we always are loyal to those things we think bring us happiness, health, wealth and wisdom. We “belong” to those things we believe belong to us. That’s king.
(From the post, “What Google didn’t buy“) “(For $1.65 billion) Google could have bought the New York Times…(That Google) bought YouTube, not a media company, and the fact that doesn’t even surprise anyone one anymore and that it makes perfect sense, that, dudes, is a paradigm shift.”
People hear “YouTube” and they think dorm-room lip-synching video. So while others may be reading the 
For example, there’s a great one in 
At least to me, Bob Garfield’s way-too-long 
