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This week, I was approached by the Danish-based organization SILBA and asked if I want to

1) Videotape election observers and their activities during the Georgian Parliamentary elections on May 21st as well as document aspects of the election. We will do our election observing in the city of Rustavi in the south-east part of Georgia.

2) Hold a workshop on videoblogging at the May 23.-30. Seminar “Developing Gender and Minority 2.0 Tools” in Tbilisi. The seminar, which is for youths involved with minority issues and who originate from several countries, will to a large extent focus on how they can use new media tools in their work.

It did not take a lot of consideration for me to accept this invitation, despite knowing that Georgia is not going to be the safest place on earth in case there are demonstrations in connection with the election.

I have earlier been holding workshops on videoblogging in among other places Sarajevo, and I am aware of some of the challenges associated with talking about videoblogging to a mixed audience like this. I have talked with the organizers of the seminar, and we agree that a hands-on approach is ideal - that they get to use the tools themselves and experiment with the medium.

I am leaving already in two weeks, so time is short, and there are many questions that need to be looked into. What is the internet situation like in Rustavi? What kind of footage will we want to put up on Youtube and similar sites? What do we do if we find that there are electoral irregularities in Rustavi?

What kind of footage would You like to see? If you had the chance to see the election in Georgia from first-hand accounts and not just filtered through the main-stream media - what would you be interested in?

My second video for videoblogging week 2008 is a short introduction to Joy, one of the presenters at Canal Africa (site will be revamped soon), which is a local tv station in Copenhagen. I will help Canal Africa to put some of their content online as well as use the more interactive elements of videoblogging/new media in their daily work.

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I met Rene Noukeu a few weeks ago through a common friend of ours, and we immediately clicked. We have the same point of view of the image that is attached to Africa (as well as most other regions in the world) by western media.

Why oh why do we need to be bombarded with just the sad news from Africa? Why do many of us keep having the impression that we need to go down there and help them, instead of us seeing us and them as equal partners that can learn from each other and enrich each other’s lives?

One of the phrases that Rene has repeated to me is: “We want Africa to be part of the world, not outside the world”. The whole concept of “the third world” is, however much I can understand its usage in situations, horrendous. We have a bunch of countries, and we label them all “third world” or “developing countries”. Oh, it’s very convenient.

I have never been to Africa myself, and I have in fact never been to a “third world country”, so I may just be blowing out of my butt here, but this is something that I really feel emotional about.

When I first learned about videoblogging, it was this kind of cross-cultural communication that I thought of. I remember being at VloggerCon in NYC in January 2005 and in this session I kept thinking about what I wanted, in the long run, from all of this. In the end, what I said was kind of vague, but the geist was there. Real communication between people in a global context. Since then, I spent more time thinking about all of these issues rather than actively working on the concepts and making them work.

Meeting Rene and his team helped all those old issues come to the forefront again for me, and it is a very inspiring experience. I look forward to working with Canal Africa in developing tools and workflows that work for them, and I will document our process here on DLTQ.

This is basically just a post for showing my friend Mike the whole process from shooting a video to embedding the code on the blog. Spring has come to Copenhagen and even though the wind is a bit chilly, this is definitely an improvement over a mere weeks ago.

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First, a video. This is my first video for Videoblogging Week 2008 which starts today (sunday)

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Man / Nature - how do we include nature in our daily life, and how do we ourselves affect nature?

30. November - 11. December 2009 there will be a Summit on Climate Change here in Copenhagen, and leaders from around the world will come here to discuss. I guess you all remember the meeting in Bali in December last year. Copenhagen will next year be host to a similar summit with, hopefully, more progress on the challenges at hand.

I will be following the process up to this Summit in Copenhagen here on DLTQ as well as elsewhere.

One of my key questions will be:

How do we ensure that real change comes from this summit, and that it doesnt just end up with more luncheon speeches, tiring negotiations, and quite a few tons of emissions from all those flights required to bring delegates to Denmark? How can we use new media tools before, during and after the summit to follow up on crucial issues?

March 2005 is 3 years ago, and this post is about the posts that some videobloggers made in that month.

March 2005 was pre-Youtube. We were still enthusiastic about this, in a different way from today. First I will introduce that month’s work by four videobloggers I deeply respect, as well as my own from that month, and then I will make my own remix of all the footage from that month.

#1: Jay Dedman @ March 2005

Scanning down that archive page we see that March 2005 included the beginning of Videoblogging week 2005, it included the infamous eyeball-video, the coca-cola dance video, and a video about his Northern Voice appearance.

#2: Erik Nelson @ March 2005
Again, some Videoblogging Week 2005 videos are included, and a bicycle video, a view of a Dutch church, and a well.

#3: Charlene Rule @ March 2005

The Belt, doing the taxes, stalking the veteran, ways of seeing.

#4: Chris Weagel @ March 2005

Unpacking the goods, The Fourteen Rules of ealth (watch this!), Robot Hand, Dr Videoblog, Number Thirteen.

#5 Myself @ March 2005

Anne Promotes Sarajevsko, meeting Mr. Hadziomerovic, birth of a letter, going home, a day out.

These five individuals recording parts of our lives and sharing it.

Now: A remix of the videos that I refer to above:

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I am listening to a podcast interview with me that Mark from Citizen Reporter recorded when he was here in Copenhagen some time ago. Although I hate listening to my own voice, I liked the discussion.

One of the problems that was discussed in this interview was depth of conversations. How do we enable deeper conversations on the net?

How do we let these media bits and bytes build into larger organisms? Something that can be tweaked and tuned and remixed into new constellations. Something that can swiftly - and swiftly is the key here - be used again and again in new contexts, while also linking back to the sources.

In Mark’s podcast he also wrote:

In many ways this podcast is an extension of the arguements and discussions brought forth in my podcast with Jay and Ryanne as well as with John Aravosis last December.

Where are the links? Well, I found the podcasts he mentioned: The podcast with Jay and Ryanne is here, while the talk with Aravosis is here.

Now, if the discussion I had with Mark is in the same thread as those others, one must assume that there are tons of other threads. Must be literally hundreds of blog posts out there that touch on the same vein, from different perspectives. How could the people who do not know many of these, but listen to the Citizen Reporter podcast and want to learn more - move on? Do we google a sentence? Browse a blogroll and do searches on the different blogs?

So, Mark, my challenge to you (and me) now is: Let’s gather and display a “Conversation Depth 101″ page with useful links, perhaps some quotes, and perhaps pointing at best practice out there. What do you think?

A few years ago, I wrote about Intermediated Conferences here on DLTQ after the Mena/Ben blowup at the Les Blogs 2.0 conference in Paris. Since then, I have over and over seen how a backchannel has affected the conference, in constructive and - less constructive - ways.

This week at SXSW we saw it again, and - once more - big headlines. The Zuckerberg keynote got its drama, and I refuse to link to any of the accounts. I am sure you will find it elsewhere. Another story which is perhaps less known was how the audience at another session, well covered in this blog post. What I found the most interesting, though, was this chatlog which really showed the development of the mood in the backchannel.

I think All conference organizers who can expect more than a few geeks to attend Really should take the backchannel into account. Even if the conference doesnt provide any “official back-channel”, people are going to find ways to exchange opinions online. And the conference organizers better smart up and find ways to engage in conversations with these people.

When we talk about videoblogging, how do we describe it? Is it a show, is it a window into someone’s world, is it edutainment, or is it content? How do we relate to it? Do we browse through the feeds in Miro, see the next video in line, and move on? Perhaps we write a comment, and, unless we subscribe to the comment thread in co-comment, forget about it.

How about time? There is an underlying perception of videos on the net as being extremely time-critical. I call it the curse of the time-stamp, where video is judged by how fresh it is, as if it is a piece of toast, not media that can enter ever more relationships with other pieces of media.

The serial nature of the media, the time-bound condition, the strictly contextualized environment, it all adds to limiting the media, limiting the video. Or the media, for that matter: Imagine how extremely time-sensitive a twitter-message is.

Some years ago, Howard Rheingold wrote this:

(…) when a metaphor attempts to reify human relationships, to make a dynamic process into a concrete, unchanging thing, what the metaphor fails to describe can be as important as what it imparts.

How we talk about these new media opportunities shapes how we think about them, and how we ultimately benefit from them.

A few questions:

* Do you have examples of how the labelling of a practice has limited the practice?
* How do we as agents work around these labels? Are we even always aware of how these labels affect our own practice?
* What can we - on a very practical level - do to keep reminding each other of the ways in which tools Can be used?

I have always liked Sigur Rós, and I was pleased to see that Youtube has featured quite a few of the “Minn Heima” contest submissions. Here is one of them. Let it play while you read the rest of this post:

Watching this documentary yesterday reminded me a lot of my own background in Northern Norway. I was born in Hammerfest, and I spent years on Arnøya, which is an island quite a few miles north/north-east from Tromsø.

My mother’s family is mostly situated around Bergen, while my father’s family are mostly up there, north. Places with scenery like this:

(photo source)

Having been in Denmark for over 1 1/2 years this time around, I sometimes feel this craving to have mountains around me. If you know anything about Denmark, you know that it is flat. Very flat. In Bergen, I was literally surrounded by mountains, except to the west where you had the Atlantic ocean. But I had my years in Bergen, at least for now. Time to explore Copenhagen more, and hopefully move elsewhere at some point. Somewhere warmer.

In two weeks I turn 30 years old, and I am scared to the bones. I have for various reasons been ridden by angst for the last several months. An anxiety which I have had difficulties pointing out the reasons for.

Today I listened to Faurés Requiem for the first time in a very long time, and afterwards I returned to my old heroes: Rachmaninov, Scriabin, Shostakovich - all those Russians, and Bach.

I felt like I was home.

Home, to me, is not so much a place, as it is an emotion. And through those last years of back-and-forth, anxiety, living with a person who kept making my day a wreck, getting my head knocked over, and in the midst of all that still thinking that I would have the energy required to successfully do a political videoblogging campaign here in Denmark last october/november . . .

It’s like that line in Fight Club: “My eyes are open”. I shudder, thinking how I have lived and acted the last long period of time. As a friend recently told me: “This is not you, Raymond”

Glenn Gould reminds me of things that I had forgotten about. I am thankful for the Arts.

When Mark was visiting Copenhagen last weekend (check out his podcast from Christiania here), I made sure that we went to the Statens Museum for Kunst. Here is video from one of the pieces of art there, a large installation called “Please, keep quiet!” (more info / the artists)

Watch Mark’s first meeting with the piece:

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I want to see more from Elmgreen and Dragset now.