CogBlogged Tagged ‘screaming media’

We’re doing a live event in Second Life this afternoon. Yes, we will all sit in rows of chairs, and listen passively to a lecture… no wait a minute, that’s what some people think happens in there. Actually what is happening is that Henry Jenkins is making a first official in world appearance in visiting the Teen Grid, where the Global Kids Island is hosting an event, A World Fit for Children Festival – teams of kids have attended seminars (in Second Life) from UNICEF on world issues, and the kids are building exhibits with their ideas for solutions. Nope, there is nothing novel there, is their doubters? No one is creating?. Anyhow, Jenkins will bed doing an audio address to the students on “We’re not playing around here!: The pedagogical potential of computer and video games”, interspersed with some times for… dancing. We at NMC are helping out by [...]

Are you trying to get a pulse on the wild west of the latest videos streaking across YouTube, or looking to out flank your friends who forward those funny flicks by email? Try Viral Video Chart: We scan several million blogs a day to see which online videos people are talking about the most. We count the number of times each video is linked to and the number of times each video is embedded. Every morning, after we’ve had a cup of coffee, we publish a list of the 20 videos that generated the most buzz over the previous day. We reckon this is a pretty good yardstick of what’s hot and what’s not. At the moment we only look for references to videos on the three most influential video sharing sites: YouTube, Google Video and MySpace. We plan to add more soon. We also considered wiretapping your email and [...]

On a few project front I am wrestling with trying to pick the “best” web video format. Some have boiled it down to selecting the “elusive” best format. In my previous work at Maricopa, e.g. for our digital storytelling collection, I had settled on providing video as streaming Quicktime, .mov, (we had an X-serve server running QuickTime Streaming) and streaming Windows Media, /wmv, (one of our colleges provided us some streaming space on their Helix server). Late in the game, we added as an addition, iPod video versions (.m4v) as a podcast. Long, long ago I was also encoding video as Real Video, but that n was dropped with nary a complaint. SO now on my new Second Life project for NMC and looking at our other NMC video content, i am trying to sort out the best strategy, finding it as clear as Mississippi mud. Most people have a [...]

Web video is exploding, and more than just hosting and tagging clips with exploding soda bottles… Check out this re-mixed clip from the Weblog Project called What is a Blog? The 50 Second Answer: This is a great remix that really shows how much more impact and insight a short well edited clip can do in helping others get, in less than a minute, a good idea of what a blog really is. Jumpcut.Remixed by Alessandro Luccardi on Jumpcut. Sorry, I pretty much lifted the flash source code from the original site. But it is to make a point…. Now this is what gets exciting. Click the “remix” button in the video above. You get all of the vido segments in a timeline, ripe for adding, re-re-mixing, etc. I’ve casually seen a few of these online media mashup tools, and they keep getting more interesting. Jumpcut…. it must be the [...]

My mind is a leaky sieve. Last year, there was a neat web contest for people to submit an example of a digital story down i video format– with the limit that they had to be under 60 seconds– this was the 60 Second Story site. I was more curious about how it worked, and usually when my curiosity is raised with technology, I jump in. So I quickly outlined a story about my first special dog, a Dalmation named “Dominoe” who ventured west with me in 1987, scanned some photos, laid them out in iMovie, and overlaid an audio track. It maybe was 60 minutes of production.. well maybe more. So my “Domninoe” story made it into the pile: I went back to peek tonight as I was grabbing a video example to use for a podcast demo tomorrow… I needed a clip to toss up Ourmedia, to check [...]

I have some feverish work to do this week on an upcoming presentation on, of all things, podcasting. (A previous post titled Sick of Podcasting was titled as a joke- I am not “sick” or “tired” of the concept, it was my own inertia of having done the same presentation twice in a week, and actually it was fun- new disclaimer coming on my titles, “not to be read at face value”). My focus on this session is “Podcasting On the Cheap”- the free/low/no coast ways of at least getting your feet wet. I’ve got my ideas lined up, but could use some help from anyone out there on sharing the sites available for posting the media files one can lump in a podcast feed. This is one of the missing or less clear links- where to hang the media files. I’ve always had my own servers available for stashing [...]

Frequent readers may know I have been a fan of the iRiver tiny MP3 players for their recording capability. I had purchased two for us in my last job, and just from a meeting last week, saw that another colleague at Maricopa had purchased one for doing some audio recording. See, the folks at iRiver ought to know how vast and powerful an influence I am ;-) I was eager to get one for my new job at the NMC- I very much like doing informal audio interviews. Browsing the iRiver iFP 700 series lines, I was dismayed at how many were no longer available, not at Amazon, nore at the iRiver store itself. I managed to get an order in for an iFP-795 (500 Mb) that was sold only as a bundle with a waterproof kit. But I had some problems with my new credit card (another long story [...]

I’m so envious of my Canadian amigos Brian Lamb and D’Arcy Norman– they’ve both made it as quoted by Jon Udell. In the same post. In adjacent paragraphs. In Opening up iTunes: Brian Lamb of the University of British Columbia sums it up nicely: “The Stanford iTunes project benefits from goodwill generated by the growth of open source and social software communities, even as it tacitly undermines them. … I wish they weren’t wrapped in an impenetrable cloak of virtue.” D’Arcy Norman, a software developer at the University of Calgary, asks whether these objections would vanish if Apple provided a Web front end and offered vendor-neutral MP3 files. For the most part, yes. And if iTunes U also provided Web services interfaces to enable creative remixing, I’d be wholly satisfied. Dudes, you rock! Green with envy here in Arizona. Congrats! The first round of drinks at NV2006 is on me. [...]

It’s podcast mania out there. I’m getting more requests for information, demos, etc internally. People are wondering what the implications are for the Apple iTunes U offer (I signed up, what’s to lose?). I have weak optimistic hopes we can move quickly past the “Oh, I can put my lectures online” flash of brilliance. Just the sheer mention of the “p” word has climbed in geometric proportions since the beginning of the year, and mostly attributed to the Christmas New iPod Effect. And as to more of this pre-amble, I am loathe to dicker over definitions of things… but still, almost before I left San Diego yesterday, I had an interesting exchange with Bryan Alexander, who asked me if I thought podcasting was a Social Software. My first thought was “no”. Well actually it was, “gee, Bryan is so damn smart, and I do not even have a good pat [...]

From a recent email discussion came a request for a simple “howto” for using bitTorrent. I’ve been peripherally  interested in BT for a while, mentioning it in my Harry Mudd Future Peeking presentation. So with much better things to with my time, I whipped up this ad for a book not yet in stores: If we could side step the whinges people have about this being the bane of illegal activity and the realm of black t-shirt clad teenage pirates, and just look with interest at this creative shift in the way information can be distributed, isn’t it exciting? I’d been toying with doing some experimentation on using bitTorrrent for sharing digital stories- people are expending great effort to produce fantastic personal narratives, but the file size is unwieldy for sharing… what do you think? I’ve got some content lined up, and as soon as I have read the book [...]