DLTQ.org

Monday last week, I wrote Part 1 of this look back at the two years, and here comes part 2, which will cover from the end of January 2005 till June 2005.

So, VloggerCon 2005 was a great experience for me. I had a lot of discussions with people, I experienced New York during a blizzard, and I learned to LOVE Katz’s Deli - a place I can’t wait to get back to.

January 2005
Once I got back to Bergen after VloggerCon, I did more hyping of videoblogging within our political party, I got very much into Screencasting after seeing Jon Udell’s heavy metal umlaut screencast, and I started screencasting different websites. Those days I was also very much into Adrian Miles’ work.

February 2005
Then there is z00r0pa, which is the first video I made with photoshop-animated frames. It was also the first video I made while being more than a bit intoxicated. And hah, the first comment on the post was Jay saying:

“haha
this is the first drunk videoblog!!!!
youre a pioneer.”

Then I interviewed flatmates, obsessed more over wikis/socialtext, made a video I later lost, referred to John Tobin and Steve Garfields work within political videoblogging.

February 4th was when I did my first real remix of someone else, taking advantage of Mica Scalin after she took advantage of me. I made a big announcement out of the fact that the annual meeting of our political party in my county had decided to videoblog in the parliamentary elections.

To Ulvik was a video I made that was viewed by surprisingly many people - I made it to remember a trip I made and I still view it sometimes.

February 7th saw me again writing about political videoblogging, and later that month I posted some recorded minutes from a tea-house with my then-gf Kristina, and I uploaded a discussion about tagging with a friend of mine.

In another example of lost media files, there is the case of my tirade against a Norwegian political blogger. The media files are gone, but the blog text is still there.

Later that february we got our Xacti camera for political videoblogging, and of course I took video of opening the package.

February 25th I announced my receiving a consulting job at a Norwegian blogging software company - a company I still work for. Later, I listed a few things we need in order to have videoblogging go main-stream. I will quote from that:

Firstly, some speccing out of what we need:

* A blogging system where videoblogging is seen as equally a natural expression mode as text, or audio, or MMS (moblogging).
* Access to servers and bandwidth. Ourmedia.org will fix that for original content.
* Easier setup of video feeds with feedburner for video aggregation in ANT or mefeedia.
* Documentation as simple as dirt. Meaning: People should be able to have their videoblog in someone’s ANT feed up and running within 10 mins. Documentation that is super clear and visual will be crucial. No “RTFM” approach here.

Basically, we have come a long way since february 05, and it will be interesting to see what the next two years will bring.

March 2005
My disclosure dilemma was, along with a video post on the same topic, me expressing my questions around working for a company working with among other things videoblogging. I am in hindsight not proud of how I dealt with the issues; the company has not received the full potential of my work for them, and I have felt stuck myself. Especially these last months I have been wondering what to do here. It all links well with another discussion, elsewhere.

After Kristina visited me in Bergen that february, we both made a video from some footage we shot. Kristina later developed her own videoblog called “nordark” which received a decent amount of attention, and was among other things featured on Rocketboom and NPR radio. Unfortunately, she later pulled down her site and videos from the net, even though some videos might be around on some people’s harddrives.

“Home” was a video I made while travelling. It is one of my favourite pieces still. The birth of a letter to Kristina was one of the more private videos I made. Later, I have often wanted to take it down, especially after I started receiving off-putting anonymous emails, but it is still up there. Parts of this video was also used in Erik Nelson’s “The Head of Raymond K” series; recontextualization done well!

March 21st Ourmedia launched, and I was part of the moderators team. During the first three days, Ourmedia had 3000 people signing up, which really took a toll on our servers.

Then there is “Joyride”, which was inspired by Chuck Olsen. I really like to remix material.

While I was in Sarajevo in March 05, I did a few interviews with people: Mr. Hadziomerovic from a popular Bosnian TV programme, Ismar from Republika Srpska, Boris from Belgrade, and Tarik from the Bosnian liberal youth party, who was the host of the seminar we had. (SO many questions from that weekend that I have lost; that I have not followed up on…)

April 2005
A day out with the politicians was a mix I did of footage from a day following politicians from my political party around.

Vlogreply 090405 was a response to Ryanne after she talked about not wanting to be a commercial editor.

In Spirit - this video was inspired by the whole incident surrounding Ricky Rodriguez, who was in the inner circle of The Children of God. I really liked how this video turned out - further direction towards “subliminal videos”.

The Sidebar! - In April I experimented a bit with 16:9, and using the extra pixels for a ’sidebar’ of sorts. Thus the video become 427×240. Here are two videos where I tested this out. I used a similar technique in another video which is lost, but where I responded to Josh Leo. Permalink with comments is here though. Later I tried four screens in one, but the process took far too much time to be worthwhile. But still, I took the time to make a 12-screen tribute to Mica Scalin, whose work has meant a lot to me. (Also, there is The Fan, Fundraising and A New Pope - no Hope. I think the Fundraising movie is the most interesting of all of these)

Dark Night was a series I worked on that spring. It didn’t turn into one first introductionary video, which you can see here.

(This post is weird, but expresses a mood I often have around these things. In a later post I tried to show how twisted i feel it all is)

Once again, I stated my hopes for political videoblogging.

May 2005
As I go through these months of video, I realize that they roughly categorize into three fields: Politics/meta, arty/experimental videos, and momentshowing. When people come to my videoblog, looking for one thing, and they get somethng completely different, it may frustrate or confuse them. But on we go, looking at the videos from these months.

Defaced #1 was another photoshopped series of images put together. Pixellate everything was another video expressing basically the same thing: Reality can be created, adjusted. This links back to the Super 8 Opera video that Ryanne did - presenting reality as we might see it.

MyFilter.tv was a series I then began creating. #1 was a simple pushing half an hour into a minute or so. #2 was to use a soundbyte from someone else and focusing on that. #3 was to filter my walk to a seminar into a piece that I shared with the world. Now, over a year later, I can still remember that morning much more clearly than I would without this media assisting me. #4 : To represent a book. #5: To represent a skewed image of the book. #6 : Filtering points of view. (A response to a discussion on the videoblogging yahoogroups) #7 : Drafting a new introduction to my videos. Filtering letters out, fading in/out. #8 : Twisting time, filtering time. #9 : Filtering by choosing what to point the camera on. #10 : Presenting is at one thing, it being another thing.

5 AM Rant was - well - a rant at 5 AM.

Learning to Bounce was the result of a vlog challenge from Josh Leo, and Green was a moment in the park.

Happy Birthday, Norway! was video from the Norwegian constitution day, May 17th. I shot this in Oslo, the capital of Norway.

Look! A bird! was me bird-watching in the urban surrounding.

Flicker | flutter was a quick animation I made, one of the first outwards signs of my oncoming depression, and the next day I posted a video where I quit my then current job.

On May 21st I made a video for Kristina on her birthday.

A few days later, I went to Copenhagen and met up with Kristina. We also took the train to Malmö to meet some of the guys from Bitlab Malmö. A few days later I went to Stockholm to attend Bloggforum 2. While at Bloggforum, I did an interview with Per Gudmundson, who is a quite well-known Swedish blogger and media person.

June 2005
June began with a text post on my lifecycle as a videoblogger. I also posted another post on “Hacking the attention hierarchy” (here is the original post - attention hierarchy is a topic I really should return to)

A videoblog draft gone bad
was another experiment.

Saturday morning rant was another rant - talking to the camera.

Watch was another experiment, this time dissecting a few seconds from a movie trailer.

In transition was another awkward, personal video.

Dancing is one of those videos that I am really happy that I made.

One more time I asked: What is a videoblog?

Multi-layered (a study) was - well - a study. The same day I also posted this animation.

Reboot 7. Reboot is a conference taking place in Copenhagen. June 05 I attended reboot 7, and I made a blog post summarising some of my thoughts like this. This was the first time I expressed an event like this, and I really like it. However, it is Very time-consuming.

Darn! She won! was a dual post, on the one hand it was about meeting Kristina, but it also expressed angst towards who my viewers are. My period of frustration continued, and I asked more questions regarding videoblogging. Is it banal? Who is my target group in these videos? I guess all of this angst and existentialism connected to my father, who had died of cancer in 2003. And voila, on the 19th I published a video about my father.

That very same day I published another video where I asked for a better taxonomy for my video/media.

Octopus was another experimental videoblog; in this case it was a screencast/vlog, or screenvlog as I used to call it.

I celebrated my 6 months anniversary of videoblogging by doing a short piece on companies such as Cisco capitalizing on censorship in China.

Another post that I really liked doing was “Developing further vs. starting afresh”. Actually, I will post that video here - the question is still valid.

Watch

The last video of June was a piece of momentshowing. Or, wait, I made a few more.

What type of media is this? was in my view a decent post, and here I end the second part of my review of these two years of videoblogging.

Part 3, which will cover july 2005 - december 2005, will be up soon.

On Sunday I will have videoblogged for two years, and I will spend this week actively re-evaluating these two years.

How has these two years changed my life? How did they not change my life? What have I learned, and what questions have stuck with me? How do I view my own previous work? - I will tackle with some of those issues, and I invite you to go into the time machine with me.

I started videoblogging on December 24th, 2004 after a few days of obsessing over this new medium. I felt as if my head was about to explode every few hours, when I realized just how much this could change everything (as Michael Verdi would put it in a later vlog entry). I had no previous interest in film-making, but I was heavily into communication, having worked with communication in different contexts the previous 6 years or so. To me, videoblogging (or video on the net that is downloadable and preferrably with an rss feed) was the missing link. It was what would allow people from regions like sub-saharan Africa to communicate with the world (I have a good friend in Nigeria). Videoblogging, if done with a low-key approach to it, could really change how we communicate.

Actually, the very first vlog entry I saw was Dylan Verdi’s first video, which I found via metafilter. This was massively inspiring to me. Then, what Really got me to want to do this myself was a piece by Ryanne Hodson called Super 8 Opera. This video was what Really got me on fire. I almost shouted into the empty room: “Yes! This is it!!” Politics. Art. Expression. Connection. People!

So, on December 24th 2004, I made my first videoblog entry. Just showing what was around me. Later that afternoon I wrote another blog entry, this time text-only, where I talked about political videoblogging - connecting the dots. A quote:

“vlogging has a lot to do with activism. If we manage to actually stream movies SHOWING our politicians (perhaps from other angles and in other situations than whatever escapes through the narrowminded tabloid media) instead of just writing about them, we have gained a lot. If we can bring in more people to actually communicate with our party, they will soon realize that heey the Liberals are not thaat bad. In fact the Liberals have quite good policies on several areas. At least I am sure more than 4% of the listeners would think so! “

[source]

My next videos were just showing moments (I was clearly inspired by Jay at the time). Then, my first on-camera video. I felt SO strange doing this. Fast forward to December 26th, and I posted a rambling long e-mail I had sent to the videoblogging yahoogroups. Yes, I was all into the political videoblogging. I made videos showing my street, showing some books I have, … and I also did a video called Musings #1 - I later hated how I started that video. So self-important. Douchebag-like. Besides, I thought/think I look like a complete madman in it. Hah! :/

Construction - a draft. In this video I really took a different direction. Started playing with the media more. I never uploaded a new version of it, and months later I lost all the files in a HD crash. But yeah, I guess this was the first time I did text on video in that way.

My next videoblog entry was a response to Jay Dedman. I am re-watching the video again now, and I Really remember the enthusiasm I had back then. Deja vu. Watching the video again helps me remember a question that is important for me: Usability!

Later that month I did a video where I show two newspapers from that day. To me, this video is important. It helps me remember the mood I was in then. In yet another video, I used text to translate my audio to English. It didn’t work out too well, but I had tried it at least.

On Dec 31st, I wrote a post about the Internet Archive, and J.D. Lasica wrote a comment - which was my first contact with Lasica, with whom I would work quite a lot with during the spring of 05.

Then there is dltq0.vlog from Dec 31st, 2004. Hah! - I tried to use links in the bottom of the video - it didn’t work very well as you can see. Later that day I made another video that was a video comment to something Jay posted.

Then in early January 05 I wrote a post about some of the economy around tsunami videos. It was one of those posts that I really spent some time on, calling journalists and doing research. It was also the post that indirectly led to me being guest on Rocketboom during one episode, and I was also interviewed by The World, which is a U.S. radio channel. I don’t have the audio of the interview, but Ryanne made a video about it all, so you can sort of hear it through that. (This is part of why videoblogging rocks! Which is something I will return to later)

Then there is this self-serving video where I talk with a political colleague about political videoblogging in our party. Later I was quite ashamed of the attitude I showed throughout it. Lack of humility. Huh? You saying I got issues?!

One of the few “vloggersations” - videoblog conversations - at the time was the discussion about religion that Ryanne started. I made my own entry about it, but I didn’t involve further in it.

Around the same time I made a small list of videos that influenced me. Of course, I didn’t follow up the “documenting my travels in the vlogosphere” - which I regret that I did not. I wish I had that documentation now.

dltq4.vlog! Yes, this one was so fun making! Animation! (More on political videoblogging…)

Oh, and I was looking forward to VloggerCon

Then I turned back to animation - I was so inspired by the process. And I absolutely love this piece. One of my all-time favourites.

Then later in January I declared my affiliation with Ourmedia

VloggerCon 05: I posted no video from the conference itself, which I regret. I took some footage, but I never uploaded it, and then later the media was lost. In fact, I only uploaded one video from my weekend in New York. I really loved hanging out with Sean those hours that weekend. I have since lost contact with him — which reminds me: I need to try track him down!

Overall, VloggerCon 05 was great. I met old friends, I made new friends. It was definitely worth it, even though it was a bit weird to be one of the very few non-americans present, and I felt like I didn’t really “belong” there. I had barely started videoblogging! However, Chris Weagel interviewed me about Europe, and the resulting video was hilarious.

*****************************

So, in this first part of my wrap-up of the two years of videoblogging, I have only covered about a month.

However, this month of videoblogging from december 24th 2004 till the end of VloggerCon in january 2005 was really important for me. I spent most days being SO hyped up about all this. About the opportunities. The people in the scene, their true idealism, their wish to share. Help each other.

Now, almost two years later, when my enthusiasm for videoblogging has in some ways gone considerably down - - it is important for me to re-live these moments. To see those old videos of me talking about political videoblogging, for instance.

I am sorry about not having any video made for this occasion. I guess text is easier to work with, somehow.

What questions from this month have I lost? What questions have I actually Done something with? Political videoblogging - well, I will cover that more closely in the Part II of this recollection. But as I said again and again during my first year of videoblogging: I should make video as if I had an audience of just ten.

I guess, for some people, they can “perform”, if they imagine that they have an audience of thousands, tens of thousands. If they imagine the drooling masses just wanting to have a piece of them, their daily life, how they ate that pizza, how they took the subway… But for me, videoblogging has become ever more a dubious thing.

Watching those first videos is to watch a more enthusiastic me. Is to watch a Raymond that really believed. (Whereas today, far too often, my mood turns to cynicism and jadedness - “it’s all just about fucking ROI anyway!”)

As I wrote on a piece of paper while preparing for a presentation about videoblogging somewhere: “It’s all about showing your world to the world”.

Video. What video should I choose to represent my first month of videoblogging? I guess “dltq5.vlog: NoRules” is it. So here you are, a video representing the first month of videoblogging: dltq5.vlog

Watch video (.mov)

Part II will come later this week.