CAT and I had a great time at South by Southwest Interactive 2009. One of the panels we went to was called Soapbox Spielberg where the panelists created special effects live during the hour.
CAT and I had the chance to participate as volunteers. Erik Beck of IndyMogul directed us in one of the demonstrations – a short video about a man, a woman, and a cleaver. Check it out!
There’s a complete writeup of the Soapbox Spielberg session over at NewTeeVee.
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With only two more episodes to go, Dave Winer posted his theory about how Battlestar Galactica will end. I think he’s got it wrong. I’ve had a different theory for several weeks now so I’m going to sandblast it into the internet right here so I can get the prestige if I’m right! (If I’m wrong, everyone just move along. Nothing to see here…)
The Galactica has one jump left and they all somehow go through a time warp. They end up back on Earth many thousands of years ago, long before the atomic war and either become the first humans or mix in with them. All except Starbuck who only goes back part of the way and crashes her viper on Earth and dies.
It turns out that Earth wasn’t the 13th colony it was the FIRST and some time before the atomic war on Earth ships leave to form the twelve colonies.
Everyone on Glactica throughout the series was actually part Cylon because of their distant past on Earth. That’s why Baltar could see Six in his mind without actually being a Cylon.
Why do I think this?
“All this has happened before. All this will happen again.” – Pythia
…or to be more old school about it,
There are those who believe that life here began out there, far across the universe, with tribes of humans who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians, or the Toltecs, or the Mayans. That they may have been the architects of the great pyramids, or the lost civilizations of Lemuria or Atlantis. Some believe that there may yet be brothers of man who even now fight to survive somewhere beyond the heavens…
..or not… Who the heck knows with this show?
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“Podcasting” is one of the Oxford English Dictionary’s new words for December 2008. It looks like this is relatively soon for a new word to be entered since one of the other words for December is Rashomon, which has been around since 1951.
The first reference to the word podcast is possibly this post to the Yahoo group ipodder-dev from September 2004. That’s just a bit over four years from made-up-word to “near-ubiquity in 2008.” The power of the internet is on display.
The only thing that disappoints me is that the new podcasting entry only mentions audio. Can a video podcaster get a little love? I guess the video podcasters will just have to wait for a future dictionary update to go main-stream.
I came across this information on Twitter from @GrammarGirl and @MWGblog. Ain’t Twitter great? It seems these days that everything you hear, you hear first on Twitter. Maybe Twitter will be in the dictionary some day. I just hope they don’t call an individual message a “tweet.”
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Choose your own adventure! Chad, Matt and Rob are chased around the office and into a garbage can. Should you get in?
I’ve only watched a few episodes so far. I’m not sure how interesting this particular story is going to be but, wow, imagine the educational possibilities.
Years ago I worked on a series of choose your adventure type educational videos for kids. They were supposed be on laser disc so you could make decisions with the remote but they ended up non-interactive on VHS. Schools just didn’t have the equipment to play laser discs. Easy access to YouTube makes this kind of thing much more viable.
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It’s been two weeks since YouTube went widescreen. In my travels around the “internets” I’ve come across quite a few embedded YouTube videos that use the new 16×9 player. I didn’t expect to see so many so soon. It’s quite refreshing. I’m surprised at how much of a difference it seems to make. The new player gives a refined first impression I guess, so you start off the video on a positive note rather than, “Hey look, another YouTube video. I wonder if it’s crap.”
It’s good to see YouTube finally modernizing their player and their site. I’ve heard that stereo audio and real HD resolutions are coming but I haven’t confirmed it. Can’t seem to find the recommended video specs in the YouTube help pages either. I know I’ve seen this page before and I’m sure the specs have changed with the new player. Anybody know what the new specs are?
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I came across this cartoon the other day.
It’s called “Word of Mouth” but I think what it really illustrates is that impressions that are closer to you are more valuable than others. It speaks to Old Media v. New Media – Traditional Advertising v. Social Networking. The friend isn’t even promoting her drink, she’s just sitting there, yet that influence is more powerful than all the overwhelmingly powerful noise of traditional advertising.
This is the power of Social Media. A video podcast (for example) that has a regular community surrounding it creates a small family. The number of viewers is perhaps smaller but the impressions are much more effective and valuable. I think this needs to be taken into consideration when setting a price for ads or product placement.
Yea, I know, many advertisers and agencies don’t get it. That’s the mantra. But you know what? I think many of them do. They sit around and think about this stuff all day just like we do. I think some of them want to feign ignorance so they can get something valuable for free. Don’t fall for it. A simple mention in the right video podcast is much more valuable than a magazine ad or a banner on a website.
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So a few weeks ago I upgraded Wordpress on this blog and got locked out of the dashboard! It just wouldn’t let me log in. Then CAT upgraded another Wordpress blog we use as a test site and the same thing happened. BOGUS! Anyway, CAT did some research and was able to find a fix today, so now I’m able to post again. YEA! New posts with great wit and insight soon to come…
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For those that don’t know Tom Green has been doing a talk show called Tom Green’s House Tonight from his living room for about two years. New Tee Vee went to his house for a behind the scenes video tour.
Tom’s quite a pioneer. What he does on his show is amazing. The surrealism of a TV talk show in his living room fits right in with his “meta” comedy.
Here’s another tour of Tom Green’s house where we get to see all his plants and what’s on the roof:
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The test of any vendor is not the quality of their products or the price. The true test is how well they handle problems. I’ve dealt with a lot of professional video vendors over my 25 year career and most are mediocre, some are really bad, but occasionally one really stands out. Bodelin Technologies who make the ProPrompter II LCD teleprompter has shown me that they are definitely one of those rare vendors who deliver excellence.
We’ve been using the ProPrompter II LCD on our show Let’s Knit2gether for over a year now. (We first used it on episode 7 – Felting part 1.) I’ve been on the set with and known several different companies that make teleprompters. (I actually used to scotch tape script pages into long runs and load it under a small black and white video camera back in my live news days… but I guess that dates me so we won’t talk about that.) In any case when we started Let’s Knit2gether we needed something simple and easy since this was New Media and it was just the two of us doing everything.
I’ve been a fan of GeekBrief.tv from the beginning and they mentioned on their site that they were using a ProPrompter II LCD and liked it. I’d never heard of Bodelin Technologies but I checked out the prompter and eventually bought one.
The prompter is light and easy. No counter weights. No complicated rail system. It just clamps onto the end of your lens. Setup time is minimal. We were even able to get a foot switch so CAT could control the software all by herself and I could concentrate on what I was doing while we were shooting. It made a significant improvement to our show.
Near the end of last year the small LCD monitor on the prompter just died for no reason. A quick e-mail to Bodelin support with a picture and description of the problem got a response back with within hours. The e-mail even included a return authorization number. I packed up the defective monitor and got a brand new replacement within a few days, no questions asked. I was actually quite surprised. No hassle, no searching for receipts to check warranty status, no extended turnaround times, only one simple e-mail to support. Problem solved, now get back to shooting. This kind of service is very rare and deserves the highest kudos.
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Looks like podshow is re-organizing and changing their name. I was never really sure if Podshow was going to succede. Here’s why:
In 2005 I was heavily invested in my broadcast television career. I saw the writing on the wall however and I was fond of saying, “It’s 1955 and we’re still making radio drama. Pretty soon somebody up in corporate is going to figure out that it’s cheaper to hire one guy to spin records all day and we’ll all be out of a job.” I decided to jump off the old media ship, take a risk, and try something new. But what?
I eventually decided that podcasting was the way to go in part because of what I was hearing from Adam Curry on the Daily Source Code. I followed the launch of Podshow in 2006 mainly by listening to the DSC and Podcast411. I was also studying video shows like, Rocketboom, Tiki Bar, diggnation, Rumor Girls, and GeekBrief.tv. The later two shows were with Podshow.
In the summer of 2006 CAT and I started working on Let’s Knit2gether as a new media test case. We wrote some episodes, started shooting, finished a pilot episode, learned about RSS, and put up a Wordpress blog. We stayed up all night for about a week and finally posted our first episode literally hours before getting on a plane to Ontario, California for our first Podcast Expo. We were determined to be podcasters when we arrived and we were. We had one episode!
At the expo we soaked up everything. We were still new to the game and we needed to learn as much as we could from everybody else. When we were leaving to go back home I remember turning to CAT and saying, “Where was Podshow? It was supposed to be this big deal and they didn’t even have a presence here.”
After we got home I found out that all of “Podshow was there in full force!” They were riding around in limos and having a grand old time. What? We were all over that place, actively searching out as much information as we could find, and we didn’t even notice them. Podshow was obviously in a serious bubble. I wrote them off right then and there. Any company that gets into a brand new industry and thinks they are the center of the universe separate from everyone else, is doomed to failure.
So now they have a new name, Mevio. OK, setting aside the fact that companies typically re-organize and change their branding right before they go out of business, maybe this will work for them. Hopefully this is actually a new direction and not the same old thing with a new name. They seem to be trying to do something more like Revision3 who, in my mind, are doing things right. We’ll see…
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