InTheCircle HAS MOVED!!

THIS IS LAST INTHECIRCLE POST: PLEASE UPDATE YOUR FEED

2007-04-24T07:59:00.000-05:00

I wrote earlier about my plans to move my blog to Wordpress. I'm making good progress and yesterday I moved my old posts over. My new blog is News Videographer. Please update your subscription here. Several of you already found out!

Cyndy Green: I feel like I've been brutally pingbacked - did you just start up a new blog?...

Mark Hamilton: I was following some links from my blog pings and came across http://newsvideographer.com/

Is this a new site?

The answer is yes! Please update your subscription here.

Check for good video lesson this summer

2007-04-24T07:57:00.000-05:00

Keep your eyes open for this video lesson plan from Cyndy Green, which may come sometime this summer. She’s creating a text to teach her students … Hopefully she publishes it online for everyone else to use. I think Cyndy’s tutorials are very helpful.

Holy viral video!

2007-04-23T08:58:00.000-05:00

Wowsers, I can't believe how many small start ups are offering online video services. Check out this "complete Web 2.0 directory" and choose video from the list of tags (the usability of this site sucks). There are ONE HUNDRED AND FOUR video sharing sites listed there. Holy viral video!

This may birth a new series...Exploration of the teeny video start ups.

Link via Cronkbyte.

Goodbye page view, hello common sense

2007-04-23T08:56:00.000-05:00

Saying goodbye to the page view is like finally getting rid of an annoying house guest who stayed way too long. Nielsen NetRatings and ComScore will start to emphasize time spent on a site instead.

as the technology that publishers use to deliver content to the user moves away from static, reloaded pages to be more streamlined content-e.g. online videos- the page view is becoming a less relevant gauge of where might be the best place to advertise online.” …

Page views were fine for the static web, but that’s going away. Since all digital content can be separated from form, it can be presented in snippets via AJAX and other technologies. This makes for a marvelous user experience and brings about page customization.

I’m hoping this means news sites will encourage and promote online video even more since it will hold people on a page for a good amount of time. Maybe we can get front-page status more often? Maybe we can have an easily-found Video section? That would be super cool.

It’ll be interesting to pay attention while the new metrics are being set up and as advertisers decide how they are going to value them. How much time is a good amount of time for users to stay on a page? Will advertisers pay a more or less based on how long a page captures users’ attention? For example, people will spend lots of time on the Video player page, and less on the business news page. Would ads cost more on the video page?

Link via Journerdism.

Other interesting comments:
Mindy McAdams
Ryan Sholin

Vote in the Webby Peoples’ Voice awards

2007-04-22T11:25:00.000-05:00

You can go vote for Webby award winners for this year. There’s four categories and like 100 choices. I don’t think I’ll take the time to go through all of them, but I’m going to take the time for the online video category. MediaStorm is up for an award.

Link via MediaStorm.

Battle of the Media Players

2007-04-22T11:23:00.000-05:00

In the right corner we have Microsoft Silverlight. In the left we have Adobe Media Player (link via yahoo group). Here’s a third article about Silverlight vs. AMP.

Here’s some stuff I like:

Silverlight:

Free

Cross-platform

Plays HDV

New Expression (VC-1??) video codec will be “’cheaper, faster and better’ than Adobe’s”

“faster delivery via Longhorn, the code name for the new Windows Server and the IIS7 Media Pack”

Backwards compatible with Windows Media systems

Template-based publishing. Example, “a ‘nightly news’ template”

AMP:

Free

Flash video available for download and viewing on desktop or mobiles

“higher-quality Flash Video, anonymous metrics for content publishers and advertisers, and a social media component including tagging and consumer ratings”

Supposedly intuitive for consumers to use

"Consumers won't see Adobe's brand at all," says Craig Barberich, group product manager in Adobe's Dynamic Media Organization. "Our philosophy is to let media publishers take over the experience and customize it to their liking.

Publishers can monetize content through advertisements

users can't pirate or share it in ways that conflict with the publishers' intentions.

Stuff I don’t like:

Silverlight:

Still in development

Plays HDV and “Depending on bandwidth, videos start playing either immediately or after a few seconds of caching” (I sympathize with people with bad connections/computers)

Adobe Media Player:

Gives Flash video DRM

User information is collected anonymously via cookies

Who will win?

Silverlight is at a disadvantage because “the cold, hard issue of the number of eyeballs that Flash currently owns”

It’ll take a long time to find out

“While Adobe Media Player is clearly at least partially an attempt to compete head-to-head with Windows Media Player by offering downloadable content and DRM, the fact that it doesn't impose Adobe's brand on the player should create a user experience that is more in line with what consumers are demanding in the Web 2.0 world-access to content and the ability to interact with as few intermediaries as possible.”

Silverlight formed partnerships with Limelight, Brightcove and some other big names

Microsoft knew “it took them years to lose their market share in online video and that to do it right, it will take years to win it back."

Profile of Internet video viewers

2007-04-21T16:14:00.000-05:00

eMarketer has a new survey with an interesting profile of Internet video viewers.

From the summary:

The survey indicates that over a fourth of online video viewers are 45 or older ...

58% of those who download videos were age 28 or younger ...

eMarketer senior analyst and online video specialist David Hallerman says that the idea that online video is only for the young is a stereotype.

thePlatform is another option for video syndication

2007-04-21T01:34:00.000-05:00

NBC-universal and News Corp. just partnered with a video service provider called the Platform, which is new to me. It’s a subsidiary of Comcast.

George Kliavkoff, Chief Digital Officer, NBC Universal and interim CEO of the NBCU/News Corp. joint venture. "Together, we will provide our partners with an efficient system for managing, syndicating and generating revenue from broadband video."

The news release said thePlatform works with Hearst, the parent company of the Express-News, where I work.

thePlatform offers media management and publishing tools, allows adaptation of its systems to create unique media players and supposedly will “support your revenue model as it evolves.” The about page also says it will “publish digital media to a wide variety of broadband media sites.”

You've got to aggregate before you can hyperaggregate

2007-04-21T01:33:00.000-05:00

Here's a new idea from Read/Write web: Internet Video Hyperaggregation.

While partnerships like NBC Universal/NewsCorp demonstrate that offline video content will be coming online, how those videos are organized and delivered to end-users still is an open question. I believe a new set of companies serving as 'hyperaggregators' will emerge to fill that role.

The post predicts that a service will come up that will organize and distribute videos from the available video sharing sites like YouTube, Revver, Brightcove, etc. An example of hyperaggregation:

The way of the Web is to go meta - a website is born and covers politics, then another, and another, and that leads inexorably to ... a blog that covers all the websites that tackle politics.

Once a video hyperaggregation service pops up, it's not going to be very useful for the news orgs that haven't aggregated in the first place! Now is the time to find some system for syndicating and distributing videos.

The post points out three video services that already fill a hyperaggregator-type role:

Vod:Pod--Check out the News & Current Events "pod"

Magnify

VA Tech

Dabble

Tip of the hat to ICM for Va. Tech coverage

2007-04-20T14:44:00.000-05:00

I just want to say I'm really impressed with how Bryan and the gang at the ICM blog covered the way that college media sites covered the Va. Tech shootings. If you haven't checked out these posts, to browse them now.

Just starting to shoot video? This tutorial is for you!

2007-04-20T14:03:00.000-05:00

I found this awesome new video training site called Make Internet TV. Despite the fatally flawed title (WE DON'T WANT TV ON THE INTERNET!) this site is awesome.

This guide has step-by-step instructions for shooting, editing, and publishing online videos that can be watched and subscribed to by millions of people.

So many newsrooms are thrusting cameras into reporters and photographers hands, but there's still the question of how to train them to shoot and edit. I think this site could help.

It features sections on equipment, shooting, editing, licensing, publishing and promoting. It's an extremely basic shooting section, but it may be exactly what beginners need. I noticed there's one important lesson missing - USE A TRIPOD! Check out the awesome tutorials in editing section (there’s one for Windows Movie Maker and one for iMovie).

Can online video syndication learn lessons from TV?

2007-04-20T11:45:00.000-05:00

I got a very interesting anonymous comment on my last YouTube/newspaper video analysis post that explored the pros and cons of posting news video on YouTube. The comment raises the idea that perhaps newspapers who are looking to syndicate and distribute their content online could learn something from TV synication experiments of the past.

The anonymous commenter said this about the idea of posting on YouTube:

The idea of this is soooo wrongheaded I don't know where to start.

So every one of you is comfortable with GIVING your PRECIOUS local content (that no one else can create or duplicate) to a MEGA company owned by your competition (Google) so that useless eyeballs (that don't bring you money in ANY way) can see it?

Keep drinking that KoolAid.

Guess why *local* TV websites DONT put their video on YouTube? (at least most or the smart ones don't)

That's right. They UNDERSTAND why not to. They have EXPERIENCE with syndication and an affiliation relationship.

They know that your site needs to be come the central part and destination for the video in your market. The web is like TV in that it is about developing audience and usage patterns. You don't do that by giving away your content to your competition with no way to make money on it.

It's a lose, lose, lose.

Now, I agree with the fact that it's better to get paid for your content than to give it away for free. But I don't think the online video market is as similar to TV as this commenter thinks. I think that if news orgs want to get a piece of the enormous online video market, it's absolutely essential for video content to be posted in as many places as possible.

What do you think?

Great public service package, but design doesn't do it justice

2007-04-19T12:10:00.000-05:00

Will Yurman, staff photographer of the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, emailed me yesterday requesting a critique on this audio slideshow package that documents homicide victims in the Rochester community. He's the first to email asking for a critique since I added the "email links" message in the sidebar. Woo hoo! Keep them coming to angelabgrant [at] gmail [dot] com.

First off, the journalism backing this package is absolutely top notch. I watched four of the 12 audio slideshows in this package. Will attended the funerals and families' homes and did in-depth interviews with loved ones to find out humanizing details about the deceased person. The photos and audio are interesting and the stories keep moving, so it's easy to watch them to the end. The slideshows make it impossible to think of homicide as a statistic. You find out who the person was, and you see the grieving loved ones who will miss him or her so much. What Will is doing is a great public service for his community. Good work!

I like the design of each slideshow page. You see a mug on the left and some facts about the murder, including whether the murderer was brought to justice. It's refreshing to see a slideshow that ISN'T soundslides (not that I dislike Soundslides; but I DO dislike generic).

I have a question for Will: Do you release these slideshows individually as they happen? I think that would be the most successful presentation for them. This won't be very successful if you release it all at once at the end of the year. There's a huge amount of data here, and it'll take a considerable amount of time to absorb all of it at once. People usually don't spend that amount of time on one web site, especially on multimedia. They'll watch one or two, run out of time, then forget about all of it. That means a bunch of hard work down the drain! However, if you are releasing them individually and then just providing this flash package as an archival system, that is a great idea.

I have a huge problem with most of the design though. First, I hate the intro because the text comes in one line at a time. I can read faster than that. Just bring it in all at once. THANK YOU for putting a "skip intro" button. It would be better if there were some visual elements on the intro page because it would hook your viewer better. What if the intro text showed up at left, and at right a photo montage of mugs of some of the homicide victims? For example:

Next, the design of the index page, where you click the names to see the slideshows, is fatally flawed. This is a visual story: Where are the visuals? There is so much data: Where is the organization? I think this is an example of a "warehouse" story that Mindy McAdams was talking about yesterday. I see that the names are arranged chronologically by death date, but it's still hard to see. MEGO: My Eyes Glaze Over (that was my journalism professor Marvin Olasky's favorite expression when a student's writing was boring).

I think if you created a visual timeline graphic that would be better. You could do a timeline broken down by month that slides back and forth sort of like the index I created for this roller derby story. You would put the info, names AND mugs above the timeline. If you like this idea and need information about how to create a scrolling index, please post a comment and I'll post a tutorial later.

That's not the only way you could organize it. I've seen two homicide packages that profiled victims, and both of them arranged the data on a map. I think the benefit of that organizational structure is that when people look at the map, they're naturally going to want to know about the homicides that happen near where they live or work. The coding for that would be considerably harder.

I want to stress again that I am very impressed with the journalism behind this package. I think the design needs to reflect that same level of excellence. It's very important because it will correlate directly with how many people actually ABSORB that journalism.

Will, thank you so much for putting yourself in the hot seat! I encourage any other readers to add rants or raves: Be honest, but always constructive.

Also, everyone send me more links!

How to tell humongous multimedia stories?

2007-04-19T11:19:00.000-05:00

Mindy McAdams asked a great question yesterday about something that I often think about myself. Because attention spans online are short, especially for multimedia, how can you deliver huge packages in a way that will respect viewers' time limits and attention spans?

The way most of these big stories are presented online makes me think of a warehouse ... a warehouse has no standardized system, so each one has its own rules -- and browsing and scanning just do not work at all in a warehouse.

She points out four huge multimedia packages that won Pulitzers this year:
House of Lies
Altered Oceans
Muslims in America
A Mother's Journey

There are good stories in there. This is excellent journalism. But do these online presentations hook a person who comes fresh to the front page of the package? Do they present the story in its best light? Do they make you want to stay and find out more?

We should think about how we can do this better.

My first impression when I click on them is that I'm intimidated because I don't know if I have time to experience them. Where do I start?

For Muslims in America and A Mother's Journey, it looks like I'm viewing the archival pages for the packages. I'm not sure, but I have a feeling that each story and corresponding multimedia piece came out in a series. If so, I think that's a great way to tell a huge story online. As each element comes out, people can spend only a little bit of time ingesting the whole thing. They can go back the next day and see more. However, when you come upon the story late and see the archival page, I think it's really hard to take it all in...People won't spend that much time in one sitting. But if a person is really invested in the subject, I bet they would go back.

I know that Altered Oceans came out all at once. This is probably the worst way to present a huge story online. Most people will watch one or two elements, run out of time, and then forget that the package even exists.

Tell me a story. Make me want to know what happens

2007-04-18T12:25:00.000-05:00

I was riveted to the screen for these five clips promoting Operation Homecoming, a new PBS documentary that features the writing of U.S. troops.

Why? They told me a story. I couldn't close them because I had to know what happened at the end.

If we can do this with our videos, instant success.

Link via MultimediaShooter.

TV news coverage of Virginia Tech

2007-04-18T11:22:00.000-05:00

Verge New Media's Jim Long covered the tragedy at Virginia Tech and talks about the resources that his station used for the coverage.

... Before you read another word of this blog, please take a moment to see the hard work of my colleagues and me. Did we do this story justice? ...

We’ve thrown tremendous resources at this. We’ve shipped in crews from Burbank, New York, Washington DC (my bureau), Dallas and probably others who I don’t even know of.

I checked out the pages (one, two and three) that Jim pointed out. I think Jim and his NBC colleagues did a fantastic job of covering the shootings for TV, but that doesn't automatically convert to great Web video coverage.

When something like this happens, the first thing people (including newspaper people) do is turn on the TV. NBC was there when people needed them. People also read online news. When the stories come out the next day in the paper, the information is already outdated.

So, for TV coverage, Jim's work is outstanding. For Web video coverage, in my opinion, it doesn't quite hit the spot. When people go online for breaking news, they're probably going to read it. They might have already been watching TV too. So all the factual information is absorbed by the time they click to see an online video. They don't need all that factual information again. What they need is to SEE things.

For that reason, I'm not impressed with most of the videos that I watched on the sites Jim listed. Most of them show anchors talking to me, giving me the factual information that I've already absorbed.

However, I did come across some things that SHOWED me what I wanted to see. For example, this "Tuesday night's closing montage" video. Oddly enough it's an audio slideshow, not a video. I thought the music was a bit cheesy, but it was still emotional and SHOWED me something. It was probably produced for TV, but it works on the web too. This collection of photos with some audio slideshows, specifically produced for the Web, is better.

InTheCircle will change soon

2007-04-18T09:20:00.001-05:00

Months ago my friend Aaron Morris planted a seed in my thoughts about InTheCircle: It needs a more professional image to mirror its more professional content. I blew it off at first, but that seed stayed and started growing. A couple months ago I asked everyone a question: Time for a new look? I had in mind a new blogger template, but the overwhelming response was I should use Wordpress, learn CSS and create my own design.

I'm taking all of your advice.

I signed up with my new web host and got my new domain yesterday. In the coming weeks I'll be customizing my new template, and when I'm ready I'll invite everyone to the housewarming party for my new online pad.

It's exciting!

Requesting critique on roller derby video

2007-04-18T09:20:00.000-05:00

Sunday was the second bout of the season for the Alamo City Rollergirls, and I produced this video recapping the bout. Any critique you can give would be much appreciated.

More YouTube/newspaper video analysis

2007-04-17T09:57:00.000-05:00

Last week I started researching the question, Should newspapers post video on YouTube? I got so many good responses that I'm considering them again.

The overwhelming response to the "should we post" question is YES. One common justification is that videos on YouTube are reaching a different audience than videos on the newspaper's site. With 35 million viewers, you could attract lots of people who never would have seen your video otherwise.

Chris of The Battalion: With sites like TexAgs and the huge numbers of Aggie alumni scouring the internet for any type of Aggie news, I think our videos are hitting people who usually don't come to thebatt.com ...

Lauren of knoxnews.com: ... we post videos on YouTube and it's brought added exposure. We use our branded intro/outro images and videos to protect against copyright. There's no saying anyone still can't steal a video, but it's a risk we're willing to take for extra viewers who wouldn't find us via our homepage.

Thomas Davidson of the Tribune: ... Truth is, tho, from limited experimentation by us (and others who share their data - ain't that nice of them?): YouTube (or some other aggregator) is almost certainly additive to whatever traffic you have on your site. So: More people are seeing it ...

But how many more viewers are we talking about? From my previous queries, I got four sample video channels from newspaper.coms. I'm going to check out their channels and see how their videos are doing.

The Battalion is the student newspaper of Texas A&M. Here's the battvideo YouTube channel. The channel itself has only 16 subscribers and 470 views. But the individual videos are a different story. The numbers are all over--from 25 views to 2,410 to 3,038. The majority of videos seem to do very well. Chris of the Battalion said in his comment that the newspaper uses YouTube to embed videos on their own site, in lieu of having a suitable video player. So the views could have come from YouTube users, or from Battalion viewers. There's no telling.

journaltimes is the YouTube channel of The Journal Times of Racine, Wisconsin. There are 117 total videos as of this post, and the view numbers are still pretty good. It seems that the majority have an average of about 200 views apiece, but there are pretty consistent spikes. 1,314 for a fire story. 1,222 for a belly dancing video. More than 2,500 for a cheer leading video. The most popular video I saw was pole dancing, with 13,506 hits. All of the videos have a branded intro and icon in the top right corner.

It seems like the majority of knoxnews channel videos are doing slightly worse on average, but there are still big spikes (but fewer spikes than journaltimes). This Reno 911 video has more than 10,000 views. A Sarah Silverman video has 2,600 views. There are several more spike videos at about 2,000 hits. I got an email from Jigsha at knoxnews, and she told me their videos have a total of more than 34,000 views. If that is in addition to the views on the paper's own web site, you can't complain!

The nashuatelegraph channel has only nine videos. Views range as low as 20 for TCast to as high as 1,681. Maybe it takes more videos to get the chance to have more significant spikes? Like gambling?

I'd love to take the chance for one of my videos to get a big spike! It seems like with a branded channel, branded intros and logos in the videos, at least some traffic would come back to your site. Is that enough?

A couple other comments on my previous post issued warnings about potential revenue lost from posting on YouTube.

Elmer Ploetz says: ... You'd be losing potential ad revenue, but gaining potential for massive exposure ... The danger is that it may be short-sighted in that once you give up a potential revenue and start doing something one way, it can be hard to reverse it ...

Last week I published a synopsis of many articles I've read about media companies that partnered with YouTube. I concluded that it's mandatory to spread video content to more sites than just your own newspaper.com, but I ran across the same type of lost revenue concerns.

YouTube may compensate content creators for videos sometime in the future. For now, sites like Revver and Brightcove already do. For most videos, there's no way you'll make money from sharing them. But for videos that see the big spikes, there's a chance you could get some cash. If you've got them on YouTube, you're not going to get anything. If you've got them on a sharing site that pays, there's at least a chance that you'll get something.

However, the other sharing sites have only a fraction of the audience that YouTube has. So, if you post your videos there, will you EVER see spikes big enough to pay?

Maybe it's worth putting videos on YouTube, even though you don't get cash, just for the traffic that it could drive back to your site. As a content creator myself, I'd be happy with the simple fact that more people were watching my videos. But businesses may think differently.

What do you think?

We've answered "The Archive Question"

2007-04-17T09:39:00.000-05:00

Will Sullivan, author of the fabulous blog Journerdism, asked this question on the yahoo group:

How do you / your paper archive the video you shot?

I know DV tapes, in themselves, act as an archive and a lot of TV stations use that method with their tapes. But we'd prefer something digital that we can access/search/manage more quickly.

I thought I had already written about our (perhaps temporary) archive solution but I searched my blog archive and can't find it. I guess I dreamed it! Anyway, here it is:

The photo department uses Jobminder for assignments. When we shoot a tape, we go into Jobminder and create an entry for our assignment. That gives us a Jobminder number, which goes on the tape label. Jobminder is a completely searchable archive of assignments.

We use NICA for our photo, story and page archiving. For our videos, we create a frame grab and enter in all the File info that we would for any other photo. We include "Multimedia" and the Jobminder number in the caption section. Those frame grabs get archived in NICA, which is searchable by the entire newsroom. We also get a NICA number assigned to the tape. The NICA entry points people to the jobminder number so they can find the tape.

We create an envelope labeled with the Jobminder number, NICA number, shoot date, photographer's name, and a brief description of the tape contents. The envelope gets filed by the Jobminder number.

Here's the contents of the envelope:

Tape

Printed jobminder assignment sheet

CD with highest quality Quicktime file of finished product, WMV file of the Web version, and the FCP file which includes all the log/capture information (that makes it easy to re-capture footage at any time)

So far it seems to be working very well. Eventually we may move to a digital archival system, but that will take a lot of planning and a whole bunch of storage space. I think this system will do very well in the meantime.

Online response to Virginia Tech

2007-04-17T09:30:00.000-05:00

Arvinder Kang, who writes a new blog called Our News Network, has done an interesting analysis of online responses to the Virginia Tech tragedy. He checked a ton of news sites, social networking sites and blogs and writes about his findings. Check it out.

The best video compatibility rant in the world

2007-04-16T21:28:00.000-05:00

I love this rant so much I have to republish it in its entirety (even though it bitches about MySA.com). I could never say any of this better. It's from a message by Matthew Hinton on the yahoo group.

Mr. Grothe said:

“it's alway been a source of great frustration in our video department that our videos are

not easily seen, especially on Macs It took our tech people almost a year to figure out how to

view them easily”

These software incompatibilities are issues that have astounded me with the new “video revolution.” How on earth are you supposed to have a web presence if no one can see the videos?

I know a lot of people in the Newspaper industry work with Macs and Final Cut Pro. So maybe you aren’t aware of the rest of your audience. If you haven’t already, you need to bring a PC into your workflow.

http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2007/March/browser.php

This site counts your audience. Your audience as of March 2007: 58% use Internet Explorer 6 another 25% use Internet Explorer 7. That’s 83 percent of your total potential audience using Internet Explorer. Firefox is 12% and Safari is only 3%.

According to the same site 83% of your audience uses Windows XP, only 4% use a Mac OS, the rest use a different Windows Operating system.

http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2007/March/os.php

I have a PC and have heard complainants from others photographers in different states with different ISPs who can’t get the Dallas Morning News videos to load. So it’s not a single computer issue. I can sometimes get the ads for local KIA dealers to play on the DMN website but the videos rarely play. All I see is a Windows Media Player window that keeps saying “Connecting to media. . .” I could get the Tornado video to load but only after several minutes and I’m using a cable modem. Other videos never seem to load and I wonder if the average web surfer is going to bother to wait several minutes for a video to load. If I can’t do it then that means there are probably issues with 83 percent of your audience who can’t see it either.

You’re on a Mac and worried about Safari issues. It’s a poor use of your time if you only fix Safari issues for 3% of your potential audience, you need to worry about the majority of computer users on Internet Explorer 7 and 6. I realize these issues are likely beyond your control, so please don’t take anything I say personally. I’m commenting on sites as a whole.

At the very least you need a warning at the top of the page that tells people which browser and which settings to use to view your video. Also include which versions of Windows Media Player or which versions of Quicktime or Flash Player. If IE doesn’t work put a big flashing banner on the site that says “Download Firefox here”

This is also happens with other sites. The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle doesn’t work either with IE 7. http://www.democratandchronicle.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?Category=VIDEO The videos never load. If I click on the video a few minutes later after it fails to load it says “Error 404, Sorry” But if you click on the USAToday.com tab on the same page the USA Today videos load instantly. http://usatoday.feedroom.com/

The same Rochester DNC video site works great with Firefox, but not for 83 percent of the audience using IE 6 or 7! And there is no warning or explanation for the rest of the audience!

It astounds me that one site in the same company can get their video to load instantly, USA Today, and the other papers can’t get them to load.

So this whole video revolution seems like a ridiculous amount of time, money, and effort wasted when only a small percentage of people can actually view your videos.

Another issue is archiving videos. How do you find the video after it’s been bumped off the front page for a breaking news alert (almost every site has these breaking news alerts now)? Do the videos disappear or get lost in links?

Where is your video home page or does every department have to go through a similar story like Mr. Hernandez?

“after two months of 'company' time finishing the site we

needed to post it on a server to see if it would actually work.--

another road block.-- the online department couldn't/wouldn't host the

site. don't ask me why. so the photo department paid for an outside

ISP for 10 bucks a month and it went live. now, on it's own, we get

50,000 unique visitors and another 50,000 from the hard-to-find link

on the homepage, which we fought tooth and nail for. so 100,000

uniques. nice pay off.”

As Mr. Hernandez pointed out they now have a new site which they have control over and “gone are the days of

visitors to our site saying they can't find the 'multimedia' cuz it will be on the home page, nice and big!”

But not every department gets their own site and many are hidden in odd terminology and links like “Online extra, Multimedia, Interactive, Slideshow, Web Cam, Online Special” On some sites all of these terms can be found on the homepage. Which one is for video?

How do you get your work seen if you are sharing your site with a TV station?

The San Antonio Express News’ videos are available through a link called “Interactive.” What the $%$ does interactive mean? It’s also on a shared site with KENS 5, a TV station, www.mysa.com. Kens 5 gets the video link, San Antonio Express News staffers get the “Interactive” link. It’s hard to find, it’s below a link for “web cams” on the site.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it does it make a sound? If a photographer spends a week on a long-term project then no one can find the link then it what’s the point? Who is served when there is no audience?

Edward R Murrow once said to a bunch of television executives in a speech about television: “This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box.”

Are your computer departments, your website departments, and the top executives at your papers determined as you are? Or do we all have to get our own site like Hernandez and the San Jose Mercury News?

UPDATE: Fixed typo.

Requesting critique on artist profile

2007-04-16T15:02:00.000-05:00

I produced this piece about a local artist who creates animated works of art from her paintings. She was cool enough to allow me to use one of her animations for the video.

ICM workshop attendees: Go watch yourself

2007-04-16T14:10:00.000-05:00

If you attended the recent ICM workshop, check out this vlog post by Ralph Braseth. You can see all the teachers and many of the attendees.

Happy Birthday to me!

2007-04-16T14:08:00.000-05:00

Yay! I'm 26.