B. Mann Consulting

Just as spring is hitting the east coast, Mother Nature decides to play a trick on us here in Vancouver. I heard that this has been the coldest spring since sometime in the 1950s. This morning the snow is on hedges and building roofs, but has essentially all melted from the ground. But still...

To put this in perspective for how wacky the weather has been, last weekend was spent wearing short sleeved shirts, getting a sunburn on my nose, and finding a place to stop for popsicles. Check out my Pitt Lake set on Flickr to see more.

And now some quotes to think about:

James Russell Lowell - "Fate loves the fearless."

Free Will Astrology (Pisces, April 17th, 2008) - "If you don't articulate your conscious desires, your unconscious patterns will come true."

I hope your spring is going well, wherever in the world you are.

I don't think I ever posted the "Web 2.0" video created by Michael Wesch, a professor at Kansas State University doing "Digital Ethnography". I was really, well, I'd have to say *moved* by the original video. Much like Lee and Sachi's Common Craft videos in plain English, Michael seems to have taken many things that I've long thought instinctively and explained them a little more fully. Still way more geeky than CC's stuff, but I think understandable and interesting to watch.

In any case, here is the follow up video, Information R/Evolution. It walks us through how we are still exploring how to break free from the concepts of physical organization. The summary seems to be that we participants on the web are helping to build this R/Evolution, and it's based around links and tags, and allow us to put "stuff" at multiple "locations". Take the time to watch the video (and the previous one if you haven't), and tell me what you think.

I had an interesting experience on Wednesday night. The guys at WorkSpace called around some local Gastown businesses to fund a pizza delivery to Pigeon Park, and I stopped in to help hand out the pizzas. Here's a short video that I did with Bill MacEwen talking about why:

Uncle Fatih'z Pizza was the project we took on during BarCamp Vancouver where we built DIY video advertising in 60 minutes. It was some of the most fun, intense, creative time I had and I would do it again in a second. Here's the video that my team did:

I've been spending a lot of time lately looking at video online. Part of it has been technical, and part of it has been thinking about what is needed and where it is headed. I was involved with IPTV / video over IP back at Nortel, and a lot of things actually haven't changed.

As if video on the Internet wasn't hot enough already, the whole Google buys YouTube has upped the fever pitch to...well, something hotter than fever :P

So, for starters, go and read (and link to!) Kevin Marks' five point plan to save use from Flash video. He included "crappy" in the title, and he's right, but...well, it's what works today.

And that's what will stop us from getting any further. Getting stuck in the "works today" mindset is a bad thing. When you sit down to build something new, you're really never building it for today...you're building it for today AND for the next little while. Somebody has to take a chance on figuring out the future. 

In any case, I very much agree with all of Kevin's points. The phrase "detection script" makes me shiver a bit, and Flash is still the only platform solution if you want one integrated application that has interactivity built into it as well, but for straight up video, we can do better, and should be trying to.

Greg Narain and I had a long discussion with the Jive Live team at BarCamp San Francisco. They take high quality video of all sorts of live events, from art openings to the Pride Parade here in SF, and then post it to their website. In some ways they think of themselves as a daily video newspaper.

We talked about using blogs and RSS and existing video communities to spread their content everywhere, to get traffic going to their site. They currently host their own videos, and Greg and I were of the opinion that as soon as they actually got significant traffic, their video costs would start going through the rough. The difficulties of success when it comes to video content on the Internet today...

A large part of the discussion centered around what we all would and would not do on the Internet, including talking about who subscribes to RSS, uses tags, etc. As I have said time and again, feel free to ignore the small part of the population that uses these tools directly....just stick the functionality on to your site, and the structured nature of RSS, the tag glue, and the automated tools and aggregators that are in place will blast your content around the Internet, which has the net effect of raising your Google ranking, which is really how everyone finds stuff on the Internet today. RSS = higher search ranking, enough said.

Om Malik posted a great conversation starter entitled Attack of the You Tube Clones, talking about all the video sites that are out there now from the "majors".

AOL just announced Uncut Video, their own version of online video sharing ala You Tube. (Read Mashable’s take on it.) Niall Kennedy says that Yahoo is working on something similar as well, and said so in its analyst day meeting with the financial analysts. Niall says that “The new video site includes videos from around the web and a few from Yahoo! users as well.”

With Google Video and MySpace Video already up and running, I wonder what are the exits for companies like You Tube and other such services? Will someone buy YouTube for its traffic? What are your thoughts on this?

The bits of setting up a video sharing service are fairly simple. Or at least, the Web 2.0 tech platform for running a community website. Of course the Drupal framework can be used as one example (this story about Bryght in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix apparently quotes Roland as saying we'll build a clone of MySpace for $100K), but Ruby on Rails or any other decent web framework can be used to easily build web applications/community sites.

Wouldn't it be great if you could get the original video files back out of YouTube? Wouldn't it be great if you could just upload videos to YouTube and have them automatically appear in iTunes, correctly transcoded as needed?

Yes, I was as surprised as you when I went poking around the YouTube developer section and found no methods to get back the original video files or to do any of these other things I wish for.

I still like Revver's "bolt ads to your videos" business model, and AudioBlog is still my choice for the most flexible commercial service to easily input/host/etc. all your audio and video service (including direct-to-iTunes support).

But where are people putting videos in order to get an audience? YouTube, of course. Let the chorus of "YouTube sucks" begins...until someone else manages to make something that is as popular.

The New Enterprise Development team from UBC is nearing the end of their class, and are about to do a final presentation. They're asking for people to submit video clips explaining why they want something like the Innovation Commons to exist. Of course, my interest is seeing this actually happen here in Vancouver, but I think the model would work well in any city in the world: throw a bunch of smart, independent, motivated people together in one space and let collaboration and innovation blossom. Hmmm...too schmalzy? Perhaps, but tell us why you want something like this in your own city -- the students are going to put together a video montage. Time is short: their presentation is on Thursday morning, so your post pretty much needs to be up by tomorrow. A podcast would probably work, too.

-- I'll be updating this post later with my own video clip --

Update: Aargh. The video is sitting at home in draft mode. I'm uploading a video filled with a high number of "ums" per minute that I took with my cameraphone just now. Here's the 3gp file.

The best open source media player for OS X. Should play most anything you come across, and in full-screen without the Quicktime Pro tax.

So, after completing the previous post about storing video and other large files, I did go off and buy my AudioBlog.com membership for a year (you can try a 7 day free trial as well).

Over on my personal site, I posted my first moblog: I called into the AudioBlog phone number with my cell phone, recorded, and hit publish. I had previously set AudioBlog up with all my blog details (I have 4 set up so far -- this site, my personal site, Bryght, and Urban Vancouver), and you punch a code into your phone identifying the blog to which you want to publish. You can also just record and handle the publishing details later on through the website.

Everything went pretty easy, minus a few things I had to fiddle with in Drupal to get things working seamlessly. The two things you need to know here are 1) choose MovableType as your blog type...the Drupal one falls back to using the Blogger API, which doesn't even support titles, never mind categories; and 2) AudioBlog uses an iframe to display the Flash audio player, which won't display unless you have Full HTML and/or iframes not filtered by default.