May 2, 2008
07:07 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment
There are lots of options when it comes to uploading video to the internet. You can use your own server or any number of hosting services like blip, revver, youtube, veoh, vimeo, viddler, etc.
There are pros and cons to either DiY hosting or using a service. Either way, the result is the same. Your videos play on your site, and there are some kind of sharing or downloading options. However, it might make a difference where you put your videos...
We're starting to see some video hosts fold or focus on other areas of business. Off-Hand, I can think of http://videoegg.com and http://www.stage6.com . Here's what Stage6 has to say:
Stage6.com has been shut down. Thank you for supporting the service.
We created Stage6 with the mission of empowering content creators and
viewers to discover a new kind of video experience. Ultimately, the
continued operation of Stage6 was a very expensive enterprise that
required an enormous amount of attention and resources that we at DivX
are not in a position to continue to provide. There are a lot of other
details involved, but at the end of the day it's really as simple as
that.
The DivX experience will continue, of course. Every day
new DivX Certified devices arrive on the market making it easy to move
video beyond the PC. Products powered by DivX Connected, our new
initiative that lets users stream video, photos, music and Internet
services from the PC to the TV, are hitting retail outlets. We remain
committed to empowering content creators to deliver high quality video
to a wide audience, and we'll continue to offer services that will make
it easy to find videos online in the DivX format.
It's been a
wild ride, and none of it would have been possible without the support
of our users. Thank you for making Stage6 everything that it was.
So... what's your plan in case your chosen host veers away from serving your videos to your site?
Do you have one?.....
If you have one, how easy is it to implement?
Even if you hyperdistribute with a service like Tubemogul, if the host that you use to embed videos to your site folds, you're going to have to re-link every single video you ever posted. The quality might not be the same. The sharing and embedding features might not be the same. Worst-Case, you might end up needing to download all of your videos from the closing site and re-encode or re-upload them all to the new destination.
Either way, it's a hassle. Your best bet is to keep harcopies all the videos you upload so that you can "break glass in case of emergency".
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February 16, 2008
10:18 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment
Asynchronous Video Threading
I spent the day on Seesmic yesterday and had a 90-post conversation involving several of the members. I'll say first of all that Seesmic has made TONS of improvements since Andrew Lipson gave me an invite 3 months ago. They're always making improvements to their site, so this post may very well be outdated relatively soon. :)
If you don't know what Seesmic is, it's basically like having a conversation with people on a bunch of stickies. In a way, it's like Twitter, except it's video and audio instead of text. You get to record a video which goes into the "public" timeline, and other people can watch it just about as soon as you post it. People who see your video can record their own video and make it a reply to your video if they so choose.
They relatively recently implemented threading as a one-dimensional, reverse chronological timeline. This was way better than no threading AT ALL :D but having held a several-hour-long conversation on it that was about actual intellectual concepts, not "what to name a dog" or "who's going on a date tonight", I got to experience the downsides of asynchronous video threading in Seesmic's current format.
The reason I make a point of it being asynchronous is that it's not a real-time conversation. It's more like twitter or an email group than it is like Yahoo Live where several people speak to each other simultaneously, or even chat rooms, where everyone's there at the same time and can jump in with their opinions if they feel like it.
Liz Burr made some excellent points that I hadn't paid attention to as I was absorbing so many other things during a full day's use of the app. Someone had made the point that because you record your own video and decide when to stop it, you get to say what you want in its entirety without being interrupted. Liz mentioned that since it's asynchronous, you can be turned OFF at ANY point, or not listened to at all, as your screen name and icon are attached to your video in the thread. This means you have more of a chance of not.being.heard.at.all. if someone decides that what you have to say isn't worth listening to based on your behaviors and what you had to say in previous videos. I "knew" this, but I hadn't processed it until she mentioned it to me. I was already employing that behavior, for example, after listening to a post from someone that I determined was garbage, I would skip anything with their face on it after that.
At this point, I should mention how Seesmic is set up for people to become aware of people's posts. It's important to understand this to understand why one-dimensional threading is NOT optimal for an application like this. There's a "public" timeline that catches everyone's videos. This is world-wide, but you can set it to only pick up posts in your language. That's still A LOT of people, and it's not even open to the public yet. Your next option is a "friends" timeline. You get to choose to "follow" people, and only their videos will show up in this timeline. This is another way you can elect to bypass people whom you've determined have nothing valid or intelligent to say... don't "follow" them. They'll still show up if you're looking at a thread that they've contributed videos to, but then you resort to visual parsing and skip them as usual.
These abilities to select people to follow and people to "allow to speak" by clicking on their videos and watching them all the way to the end absolutely alters each person's perception of a thread they arrive to. Seesmic member Otir read a perfect analogy of the situation, telling the story of a bunch of blind people whom were all offered different sections of an elephant to feel and then to give their opinion of what an elephant is like. Each of them had their own perception of "an elephant", and that perception colored what they had to say about elephants.
First of all, if you're following certain people, their posts come up in your "friends" timeline. If you click on the member's icon, you go straight to their opinion. That's a good thing. However, you're jumping in in the middle of the thread. You can click "conversation" and see the entire list of posts in that thread. This is where your personal bias comes into play. If you don't have any respect for the people earlier in the timeline, you might skip their videos entirely, bypassing much of the context of the situation. If there are a whole lot of videos before the person you're following, you might not be inclined to watch an hour's worth of posts before you enjoy what you really came here to see... thus, bypassing much of the context of the situation. If you've determined that the person you're following is more credible than others in the thread, you may be inclined to reply along the lines of that personal bias. This is where we get the blind people approaching the elephant from different sides and angles.
Another "problem" with this layout is that what you're looking at is NOT actually linear other than chronologically. The posts are laid out by the TIME that they were posted to the site, but they are not differentiated by the TANGENT of the thread that that particular post followed. This leads to a circular, "telephone game" situation, because people show up to a thread hours after it started, read something a "friend" of theirs posted, which was dealt with hours ago, and respond to that person's post without watching all of the surrounding material.
My thread was 90 posts long. Even if each person took only one minute to say what they had to say (and I've seen videos that were 5 minutes long, so if there's a time limit on individual videos, it's NOT shorter than that), that means that to absorb the entire thread, you'd have to sit there as long as a feature film. People aren't going to wait that long to reply. As a matter of fact, people started showing up and making NEW threads asking for someone to summarize my thread because they didn't want to go back and read it all. This is another way that posts get "lost in the sauce". People show up and want to be involved, but don't want to put in the work to go back and experience each post.
Another reason it becomes circular is let's say you have three tangents in a thread. As the original thread participants scramble "left and right" (since it's all appearing as a one-dimensional timeline) to deal with tangents, 20 posts down the line, someone reads something from a tangent that was already resolved, hits "reply" and now, your 21st post is actually a response to your 5th post. :/ Then, THEIR "friends" see what THEY posted and continue the previously resolved tangent, causing the original thread participants to scramble over there and put out THAT fire... AGAIN. :/ Meanwhile, the thread splinters more and more and is misinterpreted more and more but LOOKS like a single, chronologically-ordered discussion. The snowball rolls further downhill when someone shows up to post #60, which is really only three posts removed from post #5 and doesn't want to read the rest of the material, so they assume that all 60 posts have been along the same tangent.
Like I said, this only comes into play if you're trying to have an intelligent conversation. If you're just socializing via video, you don't need to worry about tangents and following thoughts and concepts. You just throw up a "me too" post and you're good... you feel like you're a part of the conversation, whether people are "following" you or not.
Jan McLaughlin mentioned an addition that I think would work very well in these situations... the ability for the originator to moderate their thread. I suppose the ability to assign mods would be useful as well. A couple of days ago, I left a 32-post thread of mine for a few hours and when I returned, it was around 60. Thinking that there was much interesting material to sift through, I clicked on it, only to realize that two people had started online dating in my thread. :/ Instead of taking their chances in the "public" timeline, the best way to try to get each other's attention was to click "reply" so that it would show up in their "replies" folder (an alternative timeline to "public" or "friends". The unfortunate side-effect of this was that as they kept "reply"ing to each other, their posts were being added to my thread.
It would be lovely to have a way to separate irrelevant posts from your thread. It would be lovely to be able to remove videos posted to your thread by people that just showed up to act dumb. Not *delete* them, just remove them from YOUR thread so that new people arriving after the fact wouldn't bail on your 70-post thread because there are 30 posts worth of online dating inside it that's completely indistinguishable from on-point conversation in a one-dimensional reverse chronological timeline.
Seesmic's making tons of improvements, so I'm sure features are coming down the line that will facilitate intelligent conversation, such as GROUPS. The ability to have a discussion only amongst the people that *you* choose would be a major development. There's no need to block others from reading it. Just stop them from diluting the content and making the originators waste time running around putting out fires. Like I said, they've progressed in leaps and bounds in the three months that I've been on the service.
Personally, I'm a fan of synchronous interaction, whether we're talking live video or text chat. Even IRL, I enjoy holding arguments against 5 people at a time. :D The upside of asynchronous conversation is that you only have to make your point ONCE, and everyone hears it and we can all move forward and explore greater depths of the conversation. The downside is that you have to actually BE THERE at the time it's happening to be a part of it. If you show up hours later, all you can do is watch the archive, if there is one.
The upside of asynchronous conversation is that you can join in on work breaks, when you get out of class, whenever it's convenient for you, you can add something to an ongoing discussion. The downside is that depending on how much time has elapsed between the beginning of the conversation and your arrival, you might not be willing to put in the work to absorb the entirety of the conversation anyway.
Bill Cammack • Cammack Media Group, LLC
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February 2, 2008
07:39 am | 1 recommendation | 9 comments
Jonny Goldstein interviewed me back in August 2007 on his show Jonny's Par-Tay [link]. Looking at the countdown timer to the end of the show, around -18:00 he asks me "So... Did you feel a little lonely before you got into all the social media stuff?" to which my response was that I'm actually LESS social NOW than I was before...
Jonny's response was that it CAN lead to socializing, and he mentioned an instance of an IRL event, Vloggercue, hosted by Wreck and Salvage's Adam Quirk that he was going to attend BECAUSE of the people that he met and knew because of social media.
While I agree that it CAN... How often *DOES* social media lead to actual social inteaction, for YOU? My point was that I became less social instead of more social because of the fact that my friends are always at my fingertips. For the sake of this post, I'm defining "social" as actually going somewhere to hang out with friends of mine, IRL.
Everyone sitting at that table (Grace, Rachel, Charles, Obreahny, Sandra & Mike), I'm only *seconds* away from interacting with, via social media, wherever I am. Instant messaging, status updates, texting, email, sites, forums, groups. I did a shoot in Central Park with Obreahny and uploaded it to my server sitting out in Central Park, using the park's wireless access. I get footage from clients overseas via FTP, talk to them on skype or iChat and send them quicktime files for approval/changes. I watched a live stream of PodCamp Philly from NYC and appeared on-screen @ PodCamp Boston while I was sitting in a living room in Maryland.
There's no reason for me to physically go ANYWHERE unless physically interacting with that person is the reason I'm going. You can't go snowboarding together unless you actually go snowboarding. Other than that, the current state of communications enables you to be AS in-touch with someone as you want to be. I talk to my friend @CaliNative all day, every day. We're both MIT Graduates, but we live 3,000 miles apart from each other and never met each other IRL. Meanwhile, there are people that have given me business cards, right here in NYC, that I never spoke to again after that particular day that we met.
Social media allows you to define your enviroment. You can create and maintain relationships that transcend physical and territorial boundaries. You can hold 5 completely separate instant message conversations at a time, which is absolutely impossible on the phone. Does that make you MORE social?... or LESS social? Is "social" being re-defined by technology enabling us to envision new directions?
I also say I'm less social because my tolerance for idiocy has plummeted. :) I didn't have a lot of that to BEGIN with, but when you get to pick and choose the people you interact with on the basis of their intelligence, common sense and relevance relative to what YOU find interesting or important, it becomes really tough to tolerate people talking about 'nothing', or their own agenda which has nothing to do with what you find to be valuable in life.
Anil, Mike, Justin, Debbie, Grace, Bill, Kenyatta, Eric
Photo Credit: Jared Klett
So, yes. Social media DEFINITELY leads to situations where we all get together and have a good time, IRL. I think that more often, social media allows us to FEIGN getting together, which is actually *less* social than more so.
Bill Cammack • Cammack Media Group, LLC
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January 6, 2008
03:50 pm | 0 recommendations | 6 comments
I told my ex-girlfriend not to lie to me... I mean, she was still my girlfriend at the time, and now she isn't. The reason I told her that was that I was catching her in small, seemingly insignificant lies. VERY VERY small lies... Not even worth telling, to be sure. I explained to her that the most important thing you have in a relationship is trust. Without TRUST, you have nothing at all, because any communication you have with anyone will be tainted... untrustworthy... disbelieved. Lying to me about small things is WORSE than lying to me about important things, because it's not necessary. If your character can't stand up to the smallest criticism and you feel the pressure and need to LIE, then you CERTAINLY don't have the stomach to tell me the truth when it REALLY counts.
WHAT does this have to do with "Technology", you ask?... Because the same holds true in many situations, *including* posting on the internet. The way a lot of blogs are set up, including this one that I'm posting to right now, after the main entry, there's a section for comments. This is the place for viewers/readers to weigh in and let you know if they agree OR disagree with what you said, and why.
The benefit of having comments is taking a post from being a soliloquy to being the beginning of a conversation. It's like having a lecture and then at the end, opening up the floor to any questions your audience might have. *YOU* are just as responsible for and will be held accountable for what happens in your comment section as you will be held accountable for what you post in the main entry. Just like I told my ex... (paraphrasing, hahaha) the way you carry yourself in dealing with comments can make or break your credibility in EVERYTHING ELSE that's MORE IMPORTANT than your comments section.....
Let's take a very simple example that everyone should be able to follow:
Let's say you have a company that sells widgets. Let's say your business blog is "widgetblog", and is a blog about widgets. Let's say you also author "personalblog", and what you post there has NOTHING to do with widgets, and only to do with your personal life. Unfortunately for you, you can not separate these three things if people know that you're connected to all of them. Similar to a chain, your credibility is only as strong as the *WEAKEST* link.
Now, let's say you post that "the sky is blue". Let's say that several people post "I agree, the sky IS blue!" and those comments are not tampered with. What do you do when someone posts "the sky is actually grey"? This person has now added their personal opinion to the discussion that you started. Do you leave this dissenting opinion on your site so that people can see the HONEST, TRANSPARENT format of how the discussion actually unfolded?.... OR.... Do you log in as "admin" and CHANGE THAT POST so it now reads "the sky is blue"?
Let's say you get five more "blues" and two more "greys" and even a "red"... What now? Do you log in AGAIN, and tamper with your comments AGAIN? When someone comes to your post the next day, will EVERYONE be in agreement with your position? Is that fair? Is that HONEST? Is that *transparent*?
Now, in most cases, you can get away with this underhanded behavior. There's only one thing you have to do to maintain your credibility and look like people agree with you..... Be. Faster. Than. Everyone. Else. That. Reads. Your. Blog!
If you come to your blog, and the dissenting posts have been sitting there for an hour, consider the possibility that SEVERAL PEOPLE may have ALREADY READ THEM and will see you for who you really are and what you're really doing if you tamper with your comments. :/
What's the problem if you get caught tampering with your comments?.... "Trickle Up"! :D
If you get caught tampering with comments on PERSONAL posts, your credibility is *SHOT*. You can NOT be trusted. If you can't be trusted with the comments on your personal post, you can't be trusted in what you POSTED either. Why tell the truth, when you could make up a convenient lie to make yourself look good? Now, your entire personalblog is tainted. Meanwhile, you're the same person that writes and moderates widgetblog. Why should we believe that you're willing to risk your business by allowing people to have opinions contrary to YOUR best interests? Now, the posts AND comments on widgetblog are tainted.
Meanwhile, you're the owner of the widget company. Why should your character in doing business with someone face to face, shaking their hand and looking them in the eye be any stronger than when you're posting a business or personal blog? So, unfortunately "this person is a liar" trickles UP to where you don't want it because you didn't have the stomach to leave your comments alone and perhaps POST A REBUTTAL? Stand up for your own statements? Explain to the dissenting commenter why you think you're right and they're wrong? Seriously. :/
Assuming you feel you're prone to resort to underhanded tactics to make yourself look good in the future by tampering with people's comments today... Here are some things you can do that will still make you look like you have something to hide, but there's no PROOF, like when a statement that was "X" for 45 minutes, suddenly becomes "Y" merely by clicking 'refresh' in your browser. :/
Turn Off Comments - Your word is law and that's it. Anybody who comes to personalblog or widgetblog will get what YOU have to say about things, and that's it. Nobody else has any say.
Turn On Moderation - Make it so that NOBODY'S comments make it to personalblog or widgetblog unless YOU approve them. That way, when everything ends up positive, you just look like you spun the situation by only letting the comments through that you liked. This is DIFFERENT from changing people's posts because there's never anything negative for people to see in the first place, AND dissenting comments don't become agreeing comments with the same person's name on the top, posted at the exact same time.
Delete Dissenting Comments - MUCH, MUCH better than changing what people had to say from "X" to "Y" is deleting their comments altogether. That way, you look like someone who can't handle the truth instead of someone actively cheating to make it look like everyone's on your side in this situation.
Don't Blog At All - Really, I don't understand why some people post things on the net in the form of a blog with comments, when they don't REALLY want to hear what people honestly think about what they're saying or doing.
Maybe two years ago, I read something I thought was interesting on someone's blog. I thought it was very interesting..... as well as COMPLETELY WRONG! :D I explained to her very professinally and clinically WHY she was wrong by posting a comment on her blog. Eventually, I got an email from her saying that she was going to erase my comment, and suggested (to her credit, because I hadn't saved my post anywhere) that I copy it and post it on my own blog and link to hers.
I wrote back to her, thanked her for not deleting my post FIRST, and explained to her (in not so flowery terms) that I thought she was lame for having a web site where all she wanted on it was her opinions and people that agreed with her position. She was doing a disservice to her readers, because with all of them commiserating and rallying around the flag, it was the blind leading the blind, and they were never going to get to the solution to their problem, because they had the question wrong in the first place.
Since then, I've come to realize that many people post NOT to START a conversation, but to appear as if they're an authority in something. They think that as long as they post something and nobody disagrees, they look intelligent or wise. I now realize that a lot of people use the internet to make themselves feel better or to doctor the results so as to convince themselves that they're in the right and someone else was in the wrong.
That's all well and good, however, if that's the type of person you are, don't think that people aren't figuring you out. Don't think that you're getting away with tampering with comments or juking stats scot-free. Your credibility's taking a hit, and you may find out down the line when nobody wants to buy your widgets that it's because more people than you know saw you tampering with comments on some seemingly insignificant post and decided that your credibility as a businessperson has been seriously undermined by your personal character.
Bill Cammack • Cammack Media Group, LLC
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January 4, 2008
07:34 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment
NewTeeVee's Liz Gannes reports that ABC.com recently posted all three seasons of Lost for HD streaming.
Check out Liz's post for more information. This is *certainly* good news for the people that found out about the "Lost" craze late and would like to start from the start and absorb the entire experience.
The season 4 premiere airs on January 31st! :D
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December 24, 2007
06:52 pm | 0 recommendations | 3 comments
Are *you* a Tech Elitist? If so, how's that workin' for ya?
As it's now Christmas, and we think of The Grinch sitting high on the hill, looking down on all the little people of the village with contempt... Let's consider our own positions in our respective fields and how we've chosen social media sites & groups as well as whom we've chosen to affiliate ourselves with.
There was much change during 2007. More ways to communicate. More social sites to join. More video hosts with their own little gimmicks that made them slightly different from the rest. New video editing software. New storage solutions. New live streaming options....
As new opportunities arose, there was a lot of bandwagon-jumping. Sometimes it stuck, sometimes it didn't. When Twitter was initially unreliable, OFTEN, eventually, Jaiku came along, and there was a mass exodus. The backup plan for when Twitter would go down was for people to immediately start posting on Jaiku until the problem was resolved. Eventually, Twitter became stable, and I didn't hear a peep about Jaiku for months until they got bought by Google. All of a sudden, here come the Jaiku friend requests.
Even within Twitter, there was bandwagon-jumping. Apps were created so you didn't have to use the twitter web page with your browser. Some people stuck with them. Some people bailed back to the web site when they realized how many twitter posts the apps weren't picking up. Eventually, people found found satisfaction in how they received twitter posts. At some point during '07, Pownce became a player as well.
There was much debate about which status update application was better between the three of them. I ended up sticking with Twitter, and once every so often, I copy/paste redundant posts to Pownce & Jaiku for people that primarily (if not exclusively) use those sites. I'm also biased towards Twitter because I have 341 contacts there vs. 117 on Pownce and 50 on Jaiku, many of which are redundant for the reason I stated earlier. So, for the sake of this post, I'll say I made the 'elitist' decision that Twitter was better for my purposes and essentially neglect the other two services.
On the social site front, I used to have a regular MySpace presence. I had somewhere around 500 "friends" that were rather randomly acquired. What I mean by that is that I had probably 100 contacts that I knew from some other site or forum or that I actually knew IRL and then another 400 or so people/companies that sent me a friends request and then essentially never talked to me "again". :D ... "Again" has to be in quotes, because they never TALKED to me the first time. All they did was click a button that sent me a friends request, and I accepted it. I enjoyed interacting with my actual friends on MySpace, but the vast majority of it I found to be utterly worthless. MySpace is fantastic if you're a musician or an artist, but I didn't make many new relationships on MySpace that were worth anything.
Eventually, Facebook stepped its game up, and I migrated to "the better site". Similar to my Twitter bias for status updates, my MySpace dealings dwindled to ZERO. In fact, if someone didn't have a facebook account, I wouldn't even bother to look them up on MySpace. :) "Everybody who was anybody" was on Facebook, so there wasn't any need to 'waste' time on other mass social sites. Recently, someone mentioned MySpace to me, and I inadvertently laughed and said something like "You *still* use your MySpace account?" She replied that she interacts with the people that she knows because of business on Facebook, but her IRL friends are all still on MySpace. I hadn't thought about it before, but as I sit here on my Facebook hill with contempt... I'm now wondering how many of my ACTUAL friends are still down in the MySpace village, having never made the jump to "the better site".
The reason Facebook is better for me is that I deal with social media every day of the week. Now that I'm thinking about it, for the average joe, MySpace is more than enough, and there's no reason for them to look for better connectivity to more REAL people. So now I have to consider whether it's more beneficial to me to move some of my Facebook-time back to MySpace instead of concentrating solely on the site that's clearly superior for my purposes.
Next, you have video hosts. I use blip.tv because the options and functionalities serve my purposes as I maintain my own video blogs using WordPress, Show-In-A-Box and vPiP. Meanwhile, other people talk into their webcams and post videos to YouTube. I've posted a few videos to YouTube for test purposes, but I wasn't impressed with the video compression quality at the time, I wasn't impressed with the Terms of Service and I *CERTAINLY* wasn't impressed with the dimwitted remarks people love to leave in the comments sections.
For those reasons and others, I've left YouTube just about completely alone... However, you can't argue with the numbers of views that people get, assuming they get "featured". YouTube has become the go-to for people looking for any kind of video under the sun, so just by having your video there, you have more of a chance of it going viral than if you oh-so-elitely plan, film, edit, compress, upload, post, tag and advertise your own videos like I do. :)
The question, again, is "How's that workin' for ya?". Fortunately, another 2007 development is TubeMogul which enables you to upload a video once and have it distributed to multiple video sharing sites. TubeMogul also tracks statistics for you across several sites. So now, there's less incentive to keep "all your eggs in one basket".
I'm sure we can look forward to lots more fantastic developments in 2008. :) Personally, I'll be paying more attention than I was this year as far as whether I'd like to consolidate or expand in the areas of status updates, social sites and video hosting sites. I didn't even get to talk about live streaming options, like how I think Operator11 is infinitely better than BlogTV..... except Operator11 went completely offline for more than a week, so people like Jonny Goldstein had to retreat to other live streaming sites to keep their shows going. Of course, there's no way to add a BlogTV archive to your Operator11 show archive, so c'est la vie. :/
Anyway... I think it's in all of our best interests to pay attention not only to which new app or site has cool features or the elite people flocking to it, but also to whether we're trading away communications with our core viewers, friends, contacts and followers. Just like The Grinch found out... it's lonely at the top.
Bill Cammack • Cammack Media Group, LLC
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November 10, 2007
09:44 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment
Chuck Barney, of the Contra Costa Times posted an interesting article on freep.com today, entitled "'Quarterlife' ready for Internet debut".
According to the article, "Quarterlife", a series by Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick (creators of the hit TV series "Thirtysomething") is being touted as the first time a "true, network-quality series" has been produced directly for the internet.
Herskovitz is quoted as saying "It's a very risky, expensive gamble, that's for sure", and the article later mentions:
While each hour of "quarterlife" -- at $400,000-plus -- costs substantially more than the typical online production, the overall budget for the project is "way less than half" of a typical network drama. Also, the crew is much smaller, and they're forced to shoot on location because there's no rent money for soundstages.
I'll assume that an "hour of Quarterlife" refers to finished running time of the series. They have made (or are still in the process of making?) 36 eight-minute "webisodes". The article doesn't state their release schedule... daily? weekly? Either way, it's 288 minutes of finished material, which is 4.8 hours, which @ 400k per..... comes out to One Million, Nine Hundred and Twenty Thousand dollars.
$1,920,000 = 36 x 8-minute shows? Hmm... maybe I calculated incorrectly... Let me try it a different way. :D
How about if we break it down to minutes instead? :D
While each hour of "quarterlife" -- at $400,000-plus -- costs substantially more than the typical online production...
(60 minutes = $400,000) / 60 => (1 minute = $6,667)
(1 show = 8 minutes) x $6,667 => (1 show = $53,336)
(1 season? = 36 shows) x $53,336 => (1 season = $1,920,096)
Hmm... ok... Good... ~$7,000 / finished minute for a "true, network-quality series" being produced directly for the Internet. I, for one, will be *VERY* interested to find out what the ROI will be for this project... as will the Yahoo Videoblogging Group, where we often discuss the intricacies of and potential for monetization of internet video. I'm sure the currently striking Writers Guild of America will be paying close attention to how well this project is received on the internet as well... especially for this reason:
The "quarterlife" concept was conceived three years ago as a pilot for ABC. The network rejected it. Instead of bailing on the project, Herskovitz and Zwick revamped it for online purposes. But they're quick to emphasize that this isn't just another case of producers dumping a failed pilot onto the Internet.
If 'Quarterlife' works out, financially... that means an entire world (literally) is opened up to television professionals as an alternative method to put bread on the table or even to have entire successful careers based on creating online content.
Caroline McCarthy, a CNETNews.com staff writer (c/net: the social), previewed the first six episodes of "Quarterlife" and is quoted in the article as saying:
"Obviously, it couldn't have come at a better time for the show," McCarthy says about the strike. "It might appeal to some people who are looking for something new to watch and are ready to change their viewing habits."
This is an interesting point, considering many people watch television from their computers already, and some people don't watch television at all, choosing instead to derive their entertainment from online sources such as web sites, aggregators and rss feed readers. If struck shows go into reruns, people may very well turn to online content such as
"Quarterlife" merely to receive 'fresh' entertainment. While they're browsing 'the space', they might end up checking out
Rocketboom or other daily- or weekly-produced internet shows.
Yes... This will be very interesting. I'm looking forward to finding out what a ~$7,000/minute internet series will "feel" like. We can already tell what it will *look* like from the video posted to the "Quarterlife' site. The show is scheduled to start on November 11th on MySpace, so "tune in tomorrow" for the jump-off, and let's see if a "true, network-quality series, produced directly for the internet" helps to revolutionize the online media and content creation space.
Bill Cammack • Online Strategy Developer • New York, NY • Chesapeake Beach, MD • CammackMediaGroup.com
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November 7, 2007
10:42 am | 0 recommendations | 1 comment
Facebook launched Facebook Pages today. This makes it easier for businesses, musicians, etc to represent themselves to the Facebook population, and makes it easier for the population to affiliate themselves with or review their favorites.
They have also launched Social Ads, which make use of your self-created affiliations to customize the ads you're likely to see. This is a good idea, since the latest ads I've seen on facebook were for Microsoft Windows (which I don't use), Harvard Business Online (which was down the street from my school, but I didn't go there... except for parties! :D), and Elite Online Dating..... Are they trying to TELL me something? :D
I think this is a great move, since a lot of people now use Facebook as their main source for daily information. It's better to allow people to make business pages inside Facebook than have people search for a link and then go off-site to get the same information.
It's also a great way for companies to enhance their online presence without spamming people's friends lists.
PS - In case you can't find the link to Facebook Pages, go all the way to the bottom of the page and click on Businesses and then you'll get the options, including Facebook Pages.
Or, just click here. :)
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Bill Cammack
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November 2, 2007
07:04 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment
Google's "OpenSocial" site is live! :D
"OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network's friends and update feeds."
Head on over to http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/ to find out what the buzz is all about.
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October 3, 2007
04:36 pm | 0 recommendations | 1 comment
As I reported back on June 28, 2007, Twitter 'ruined my life' [link].
I realize _now_ that there's something that I left out.
Today, Charles Hope twittered... Yes, "twittered"... There's no such thing as a "tweet" or else the app would be named "tweeter".... Anyway... Charles twittered that the "older" link was no longer at the bottom of our Twitter pages. I checked it out, and sure enough, there was no link allowing me to check back past my first page of the most recent posts. I figured that since they're always doing tests and trying to improve how twitter works, it was a programming error and that it would be quickly replaced. Then, someone mentioned an issue with spam, and that the link was deliberately removed in response to it.
I still wasn't concerned, because I know that I can type http://twitter.com/home?page=2 directly into my browser to get to the next-most-recent page of posts. No dice. Pages 2, 3, 4 and 5 all returned the exact same Page 1 entries..... MINUS the entries that had fallen off the edge of the flat Earth, because new people had twittered since I had last refreshed. :/
The link removal wouldn't be a big deal to people following a handful of people, but when you're following > 230 people, like I am, it's a major 'problem' and jacks a critical amount of functionality that I get out of Twitter. Fortunately, out of the > 240 people following me on these social status-update sites like Twitter and Pownce (and Jaiku? ... Haven't heard from that app in AGES!), Veronica Belmont replied to my status update on Pownce [link], informing me not only that it was a temporary issue, but pointing me to the Twitter blog where Biz Stone had already addressed the issue earlier this morning. Fortunately, she replied on Pownce, because on Twitter, her post would have scrolled off the bottom of my "page 1" and been (temporarily) lost forever, unless she had added an @BillCammack to it and it would have alighted in my "replies" section. So, thanks to Veronica, this is a different post than it would have been. :)
Photo Credit: Jared Klett
For me, one of the values of Twitter is that you don't have to pay attention to it and it will save the status updates for you. I've gone back as far as 11 pages, which span several hours. That's normally where you lose the "older" link. This means that when it's crunch time, and I'm being my most effective and efficient, I can release Twitter from my mind entirely and only get back to it when I have processing cycles for it. Removing the "older" link from the first page means that I have to constantly remember Twitter to check it on the web site or I'd actually have to install a widget which would keep sending me the messages, non-stop, all day, consistently distracting me from what I'm trying to do. Neither option's optimal.
It's one of those things that you don't miss until it's gone. :) Taking the "older" link from the front page of Twitter turns it into the home page of Facebook. As far as I can tell, there's no way to increase the number of pages of updates that you can see on Facebook's home page. They're not even in chronological order. If they were, you wouldn't see that an entire stack of your friends just joined a new group... You'd see individual instances with other types of updates in between them. When I get to the bottom of Facebook's ome page, I invariably wonder what happened BEFORE the edge of the flat Earth that the rest of the updates fell off of. Of course it's a good ploy to make it so people go to Facebook more often specifically so they DON'T miss the revolving-door updates, but that doesn't work for me personally, so removal of the "older" link on Twitter is nothing short of a disaster. :)
I just checked my page right now, and there are only 20 twitters on the front (read: ONLY) page. Amongst the > 230 people I'm following, the oldest post is a whopping 22 minutes old. :/ I've been writing this post for more than 20 minutes, so there's an entire 'generation' of comments that I've entirely missed and will never ever see unless they fix their spam bot issues within the next 8 hours or so.
This isn't the stock market, so it's not mission-critical for me to know in real-time what my Twitter friends are doing, thinking or saying. However, I was glad to read in the Twitter blog that the "older" link is going to be reinstated ASAP. Part of my daily productivity is using down-time during rendering, uploading, etc to catch up with what's been going on in the last couple of hours since I even THOUGHT about Twitter at all. 22 minutes worth of status updates from > 230 people isn't even a drop in the bucket.
Good thing I checked twitter within 20 minutes of Charles' post, or I would have been completely in the dark as far as WhereTF my "older" link went! :D
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Bill Cammack
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