DLTQ.org

Ok, three posts in a night here, but I guess it is one of those nights.

Today is a mere 3 days till the launch of Wreck & Salvage, a premiere website made by some great creative minds.

Here is another promo for the site, asking you to contribute to Wreck & Salvage by bidding on their ad auction.

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When The PAN was active, I was always amazed by the work of Chris Weagel, Erik Nelson, Milt Sherwood and Adam Quirk. These folks have a knack of not only creating interesting content by themselves, but also finding and curating video content from all over the interwebs. I am certain that whatever comes out of this new collaboration will be golden, and with the additional input from Aaron Valdez we are bound to see some hard-punching media.

Wreck & Salvage launches on Thursday March 1st.

My friend Dooser from the east coast of the US of A posted this video yesterday where he tells the tale of how he received a care package from Chuck Palahniuk, who is famous for among other things writing the novel Fight Club.

I really liked this video by Dooser - whom I met at VloggerCon in New York back in January 2005, but haven’t had the pleasure to hang around with since. Maybe VloggerCon 07, Dooser?

Power otter!

While the world for the last years has mostly been focused elsewhere, the people of the western Balkans have continued etching through a life. The last time I was in Bosnia was in March 2005, and since then I also have been mostly focusing elsewhere. Here, btw, are a few interviews with people I met in Sarajevo: Boris, Tarik, Ismar, Bakir.

About a month ago there was elections in Serbia, and the nationalist party, once again, got a lot of votes. I remember when I was in Serbia and saw signs for Seselj all over. It was scary, and it was scary to hear about all the petty techniques that the politicians used against each other. We had friends in Serbia who were chased by mobs of nationalists when they were outside putting up posters, and you always have the numbers at the back of your head: 1/3 of the votes in Serbia goes to the radical party (SRS), whose leader (Seselj) is in the Hague, charged with war crimes.

I would Love to see some videoblogs from The Balkans. For two years now I have tried to get friends in Serbia to start a videoblog, and indeed Mile started one for a period of time, but then he stopped doing it. Too bad.

So now Serbia is an even smaller country, the whole region is not doing too good economically, and there are a lot of youths in those countries who don’t really get to see the outside world.

So, today’s story about the ruling of the U.N. court made me think about my friends in Serbia and Bosnia again. About the important, but slow growth of a civil society there. About the importance of a crack-down on corruption in the countries. About how essential it is that the youth feel they can have a future there.

But then again, I also realize that there are a lot of youths, around the world, who have a lack of hope for their own country. Who just want to get away from their country as soon as possible.

Sad.

On a post on newteevee written a few days ago, Jackson West refers to styles of political videoblogging, in this case the different styles of Obama, Vilsack, Clinton and Edwards.

As some of you might know, Vilsack proclaimed his leaving the presidential race in a blog post last friday, so there seems to be three main players for the race now: Obama, Clinton and Edwards.

How will their campaigns be led online? How will they use videoblogging in their campaigns, and how will the public communicate with them? And further - what will their style be? Beet.tv lost month had this comment after comparing Clinton’s video with Barack:

It will be very interesting to see how viral video is used in the presidential election. It’s inevitable that candidates will communicate directly with the electorate with video. I think the most successful use of campaign video will be clips that can be shared easily.

I agree, and if you are interested in how the candidates for the U.S. presidency are using the web, techPresident is one really good website.

Some of my friends from thepan.org and elsewhere have been preparing Wreck & Salvage for the last months. March 1st it launches.

A teaser:

Check out their auction, bid, and make sure that Schlomo character doesn’t run away with it all.

I have had this post in my pile of drafts for a few days now, so I guess I will go meta with it instead.

The basic point of the draft was

1) Point to this interesting interview with Michael Wesch (yes, the creator of that web 2.0 video). I especially liked the exchange in the comments.

2) Write a bit about blogging in the academic world, and how I wish more professors and staff members (and students!) would put their work out there, in the (viral) networks. Putting it on google video in chunks of 60-minute lecture talks might work for some, but the media is awful to handle then.

3) Write something about the powers of screencasting, something I earlier obsessed a lot over, but which I have not done a lot lately. Mr. Wesch’s video reminded me. [I wanted to write a bit about workflow with screencasting. Wesch mentioned that he uses CamStudio himself. Me, I either use Camtasia Studio or BB Flashback - both are good for their use. While Camtasia Studio records to .avi (which goes well with editing in Sony Vegas), BB Flashback is a much quicker recording/encoding process. Basically, I can use BB Flashback for making a video, showing something specific, and the whole production time could be a few minutes (like with speedvlogging) ]

4) This reminds me of something Mr. Wesch wrote:

The best tools are those that are flexible enough to be used beyond that for which they were intended. The more a web service can build this kind of flexibility in, the better, as it can tap into the collective intelligence of those using the service to extend its possibilities.

(my use of colour)

And with screencasting, we can show each other how we do these things on-screen, like we with videoblogging can show each other how we change 4 tires in 8 minutes.

Basically, that was what I wanted to convey, but I got lost in all the threads. (Now, I need to find different ways to share information along with tidbits of my own commentary. Asides might work, but then again, I am not really a fan of asides. Maybe they will work for me if I work on my template a bit more (I use the brilliant K2). Using del.icio.us might work, but then again del.icio.us is very text-centric. What if I wanted to give a comment through juxtaposing something with a different image or a 3-second video clip? workflow, workflow)

Via Brittany Shoot’s del.icio.us links I found this very interesting personal account by Amanda Marcotte, a woman who earlier headed John Edwards‘ blogging campaign. If you are interested in one take on political smearing campaigns in the blogosphere, I highly recommend the 3-page Salon article.

On her own site, Pandagon, Amanda wrote this on the day the Salon article was published:

… to discuss the culture clash between the more context-heavy, thoughtful blogging world and the soundbite culture of the mainstream media

Back in 2004 and 05, when I was actively trying to get politicians from my own political party to blog and videoblog, I was very hesitant because I did not want to somehow hurt my party by, for instance, videoblogging something that could be abused by others. In the BBC article about my work, this was actually also slightly mentioned. But even though my colleagues trusted me in the way that they did not think I would jeopardize the party - I was always afraid that some bigot bloggers might attack it. Some of the media I took was for instance recordings of what youths representing other political parties were saying to school children during debates. If I had used this kind of footage in remixes portraying for instance the policies of the Norwegian Labour Party, how would that be received? In fact, just a few months ago the Norwegian online newspaper Nettavisen brought an article talking about how members of my youth party were using youtube to smear political opponents (in this case the labour union and the labour party) In the U.S., this is not news at all, but in the context of the smaller Norwegian community, online video campaigns like that are quite new.

Last time around, in 2005, I chickened out of doing a lot of External videoblogging for my party because I did not want any backlash. I guess now that youtube has come around we will have an online community much more used to video on the net. Recordings from different political meetings and gatherings will flourish, and by 2009 there will be a great number of Norwegian politicians who will see video on the net as a crucial part of their campaign.

What will happen then? Will it be the battle of the editors? How will the ecosystem of communication done mostly by young members of the political parties spill out into the more mainstream media?

So, I return to Amanda Marcottes words:

… to discuss the culture clash between the more context-heavy, thoughtful blogging world and the soundbite culture of the mainstream media

I wonder how the culture clash will play out, also in video. I wonder how different video campaigns on youtube, or blip.tv, or elsewhere, will move forward in relation to each other.

About time to get our tools sharpened, because political videoblogging will develop in very interesting ways towards the U.S. elections in 08 and - here on our own little Scandinavian turf - in Norway in 09.

I have not mentioned the Colombia Migration Project here on DLTQ.org yet - and it is about time.

As some of you know, there is a great initiative within the vlogosphere called “Have Money Will Vlog“. It is a system that so far has funded a few projects, and one of these projects is the Colombia Migration Project.

Here I take the liberty to show you one of the videos that have come out of this Colombia Migration Project. It is the story of Rocio, a woman who has lived in the U.S. for 6 years.

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I imagine what a similar project from here in Denmark would look like. If we had access to interviews with people who come to Denmark as refugees, guest workers, exchange students or otherwise. How they deal with their situation here.

I highly recommend Colombia Migration Project.

Also, feel free to go to HMWV and support the current fundraising project.

I just realized today that apparently, in September 2005, there was an article about me in the online version of Corriere della Sera, an Italian newspaper. With the help of babelfish, I could read the article and I read that at one place the author of the article, Francesco Tortora, called all of this “the cult of the vlog”. Haha!

The amusing thing is that I guess the same Corriere della Sera have written at least a dozen articles about the wonder of Youtube and the Google billion dollar deal.

Today, videoblogging is far from a cult, but rather something every major player wants to get a piece of the action on. The question, for me, is if some of the principles of the old ‘cult’ will still survive.

Someone said some time ago on a mailinglist that videoblogging is in itself just a fad, and that video on the net will surely be there, but that it will look like - yes - again I mention myheavy.com

Ok, I guess I am disgusted by Myheavy. Just Look at this! I should make a screencast with audio narration surfing sites such as this.

In the spring and summer of 2005, we were a few people on the videoblogging yahoogroups and regulars at the “flash-meetings” where videobloggers from around the world meet, that wanted to have a meet-up in Europe. So, mid july I registered www.vlogeurope.com and slowly looked with others towards finding a venue and a time to meet. We ended up being about 25 people in Amsterdam for a wonderful weekend in September that year. The event was very low-tech, without any internet access or flashy widescreen tv’s, yet the discussions were, at least in my opinion, stimulating and engaging. The crowd included Peter van Dijck, founder of Mefeedia.com, Jay Dedman and Ryanne Hodson, Jan from fauxpress, Duncan Speakman, Richard Bluestein and several other great people from around Europe as well as from the U.S.

VlogEurope 2006 took place on the weekend of November 18th-19th in Milan, Italy. While I helped with the organizing of the first VlogEurope, I did practically nothing the next year, and it was masterfully hosted by Deirdre Straughan, and co-organized by Andreas Haugstrup and Joel from Joelart.tv. The crowd this time was a bit bigger, it included more international guests including Schlomo Rabinowitz and Richard Hall, and the Sunday trip to Lake Como is a memory I will keep for life.

Next year - VlogEurope 2007 - will take place in Heidelberg, Germany sometime in the fall, and this time I really want to help organize it (if they will let me!). Two things that really struck me at the last VlogEurope was 1) The small amount of female participants (we were Really a boy’s club it seems) and 2) The lack of eastern european participants. Richard Bluestein suggested that we do more to include people from Eastern Europe, and I think that is important.

Basically, I think I want to start thinking about VlogEurope 2007 already now. Not because I suddenly want it to be a 400-person, $300-per-head Conference, but because I want to really work on diversifying the event, while keeping what I guess can be said to be the spirit of VlogEurope. A few things are set: It will take place in Heidelberg, Germany, and Joel, who is an American ex-pat living and working in Germany, will be the host of the event. Joel participated in VlogEurope 05 and 06, and I am sure that he will be a perfect main organizer for the event.

But there are a few questions that I wonder about, and one of them is: What is happening within videoblogging / video podcasting / “tv-on-the-internet” in Europe today? I am sure that with all the exposure that Youtube has received around the world, there are thousands of individuals and quite a few companies and organizations, who have hacked the logical piece: “Video + internet = Interesting communication format”. But where are they? Who are they? And how do they see this fit in to the larger issues?

There are quite a few people who point fingers at “the old school of videobloggers” who are deemed to be purists who, for instance, say that a videoblog without an rss feed (with media enclosures) is no videoblog. I wonder how that relationship will develop. In a world where new media networks like myheavy.com will pop up every week - how will the paradigms of these sites limit or free the creativity of videobloggers or people interested in the medium?

I do not know what VlogEurope 2007 will look like, but I am excited to think about where we could take it. Hopefully, this year, at least we will have all the sessions on-line like they did at both VloggerCons.