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Archive for September, 2007
Violeta Galagarza: Choreographer
JetSetShow_06082007_Paul_Dateh_Interview
This is a repost of the Smashface Productions interview of Paul Dateh for JetSetShow on 06/08/2007.
Paul's an extremely talented violinist. Check out his music @ http://PaulDateh.com
RealRez: Video Letters From Prison
Milt Lee’s “Video Letters From Prison”
“This is an 8 minute version of Video Letters From Prison. It chronicles the lives of a native American family in South Dakota, through the series of video letters that have been sent back and forth between them.”
Visit Milt’s site @ RealRez.com for more reality from the rez! :D
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Realfans.tv members sell their business!!! :D
Realfans.tv members Joshua Kinberg (Realfans Facebook member) & Jay Dedman are two of the founders of FireAnt, a computer application (called an “app”) that enables users to subscribe to, download, and play video podcasts.
According to TechCrunch [link], FireAnt’s assets were acquired by Odeo for $400,000.
Congrats, Fellas!!! :D
Josh Kinberg’s thoughts on the acquisition: JoshKinberg.com/blog
Jay Dedman’s thoughts: JayDedman.com
Liz Gannes’ NewTeeVee Article: [link]
TechCrunch Article: [link]
Olivia Cammack : “Street Law”
Let’s take a look back in the day… A segment done about Olivia Cammack (OliviaCammackLaw.com) about “Street Law” in Baltimore, MD, USA.
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Eric Johnson plays his crutches @ Handmade Music Night @ Etsy Labs.
I couldn't find any information about him other than his mention in this createdigitalmusic.com article, so if you have a link for him, email it to realfanstv@gmail.com and I'll update this post. :D
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Friends, Acquaintances & Contacts
Kristen “Kroosh” Crusius wrote a post the other day about what’s going on in her “Friendiverse”… her universe of friends. Her post reminded me that I had intended to comment about Robert Scoble‘s videos about how social networks’ “friends lists” really work.
Part I of Social Graph Based Search. 14:41 minutes.
Part II of Social Graph Based Search. 15 minutes.
And a bonus round III. 6 minutes.
I didn’t get around to writing that post because I’ve been incredibly busy for the last two months.
I think the term “Friends”, as automatically used by several social sites is an unfortunate and misleading label. This is especially true when there are no other choices. You’re forced into a binary system…. Accept or Decline… Yes or No… 1 or 0… My-Friend or Not-My-Friend. Unfortunately, as Scoble pointed out in his videos, reality doesn’t work like that. There are different levels and flavors of relationships between people. Business relationships, Family relationships, Intimate relationships, Adversarial relationships… I think linkedin has it right with the generic term “contact”. How many ‘contacts’ do you have? They’re not (your friends) by default, nor are they (not your friends) by default. Still, in linkedin, there are several types of business relationships, including people that you have worked with personally… people you have not worked with personally, but you trust whomever recommended them to you… people you have not worked with and you have no professional recommendations for, but you vouch for them as a person, so you are happy to recommend them to someone who’s looking to fill a position…. people you have no intention of recommending to anyone, but you will still accept them as a contact… people that you are in contact with specifically so you can set them up with other people….. ALL of these are thrown in together under the title ‘contact’.
Because of the misnomer “friends”, some people have selected this to mean their ACTUAL friends and will only add people that they actually know. Here, I agree with Scoble’s assertion that this is an incorrect usage of social networks. How are you supposed to expand your circle of CONTACTS or “sphere of influence” if you limit yourself on the internet to only the people you know IRL? How are you supposed to learn about new people that might have similar interests or ideals if you deny them connection to you? What’s the point of being on a social site if you’re only going to get in touch with the same people you’re already in contact with? I think that if they had levels of acquaintance on these sites, a lot more people would be connected to each other, because the categories would make sense to them. You would be able to see at-a-glance what level each person had placed their contacts on, and make a better assessment of their actual interaction with each other.
Looking at it from the other direction… It’s not fair that someone that sends you a friends request out of the blue has the exact same status as someone you collaborate with or work with or highly respect or go out for drinks with or climb mountains and eat pancakes with. Both the random person and the IRL friend are marked down as “Friend”. There’s no meritocracy. Even with facebook‘s relationship qualifiers, that’s a SECONDARY trait. It’s like having everyone in your military with the rank of ‘Private’, and you have to go to each Private and ask them what their actual importance is in order to determine who out-ranks whom. No. It doesn’t work like that. You can tell from the bars or whatever emblem on their shoulders who’s running the show and who’s going to be digging the trenches.
In the absence of actual distinctions, I think the best approach to accepting/rejecting social site “friends” is innocent until proven guilty, not the other way around. It’s always a good thing when you can see the applicant’s friends list in order to tell who might know them that YOU know and whose judgement you trust. When I know certain people don’t like jerks, and those people are “friends” with someone, I’m more likely to take my ACTUAL friend’s word that this other person is cool. That would seem to go against what I was saying earlier, because what if my friend is using the same “innocent until proven guilty” style that I am? :) I would be accepting an untested “friend”. However, checks & balances will come into play. If the untested person actually interacts with the community, they’ll start getting “reviews” which will help you decide whether you want to keep them as a friend or not. Ultimately, the circle polices itself.
I was thinking about Kroosh’s “Friendiverse” yesterday, while I was watching Drew‘s live stream from PodCamp Philly. It’s a much more intimate format… giving personal, “hand-written” recommendations of places to go, people to see and things to do. I saw many people from MY Friendiverse on Drew’s stream yesterday… Kathryn, Eric, Jackson, Jonny, Steve, Grace, Charles… and ran into others in the text chat who were also watching the stream.
Ultimately, I’ve been inspired to focus more time & energy on the upper echelon of my own personal Friendiverse. In the game called “keeping up with the net”, it’s very easy to miss out on telling the people that matter to you how cool you think they are. :)
Bill Cammack • New York City • Freelance Video Editor • alum.mit.edu/www/billcammack
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Take a walk with me around Bryant Park during New York City's "Fashion Week". You always see the EXCITEMENT on the inside… NOW, you can see what it looks like on the outside! :D
Meanwhile, check out this New York Times article about how Fashion Week is NOT open to the public! :O
Personal Expenses
When I was hanging out with Rox (Darling, from beachwalks.tv and barefeetstudios.com) @ BlogHerBiz ’07 back in March, something striking [at least to me] occurred. We did the conference thing and hung out for a few hours, and when she checked her in-box, she had *80* new emails…. EIGHTY!!!
I remember being surprised by two things. The first thing was that she had so many new emails in the span of probably four hours. The second was that….. she wasn’t surprised by this at all. She looked at her computer screen like “… here we go again…”… like this was something ‘regular’.
At the time, I was probably getting 15 emails tops in an entire day. 80 would have meant I didn’t check my email for an entire WEEK! :D … and that’s INCLUDING spam and bacn.
I remember considering the amount of TIME it would take her to go through all of those emails, particularly the relevant ones. I also thought about how more emails would be coming in during the time she was spending answering the 80 emails currently awaiting some form of action. She also DIDN’T start dealing with her email at that point, so I considered how much more would be built up until she allocated time and mental energy to her process. Months later, I watched an MSNBC video where Andrew Baron from Rocketboom actually DELETED all of his backed-up email! :O [video link].
The ‘problem’ isn’t actually email… it’s TIME as well as energy. There’s only so much time in a day. Some of that time has to be allocated to new things, other time to current thing and still other time to clearing your desk or archiving old things. On top of that, there’s a familiarity of process that’s actually repulsive when it comes to doing several of the same kind of project simultaneously. For instance… Many editors that I know don’t WATCH television. :) We MAKE television all day, so when we’re done with that, we want to do something different with our free time.
I think it’s especially important for freelancers to pay attention to these time and energy costs. It’s easy to overextend yourself if you don’t account for the ‘personal expenses’ of coming down from one project and getting in gear to do another one. It’s not necessarily easier on staffers either, depending on what you agreed to accomplish before leaving each day. A 9-5 could easily become a 9-7 or 9-9 depending on how many duplicate videos you need to create for packaging purposes or backup or delivery to different locations.
Looking back at my own archives, I realize that I lost control of my ‘personal expenses’ back in the beginning of July, two months ago. Ever since then, there hasn’t been enough TIME in each day to accomplish what I need to. Just the fact that I can take the time to think up, write and then post this blog is a testament to my regaining a handle on something that I wasn’t aware I could lose a handle on. :)
Probably back in June, I agreed to do a choreography video for my friend Violeta Galagarza, Founder of KR3Ts Dance Company, based in East Harlem, NYC. At the time, I ‘saw’ very clearly how I was going to get it done, and how long it was going to take me. Right after that, I accepted new client work, started editing a popular internet show, participated in a live internet show that required preparation, contributed a segment to a third internet show, thought up and created a video blog and accompanying social site, traveled out of state a couple of times and edited a cooking DVD. Priorities stacked up, and I have to apologize to Violeta for taking so long, but I literally have not had a block of time where I could get out of the mindset of mentally ‘living in’ my client work or other projects to ‘live in’ her project long enough to get ‘er done.
I realize I’m still too close to this phenomenon to succinctly explain it. :)
My advice is… If you’re in a profession where you need to FEEL the work in order to be good at it, such as video editing, pay close attention to the ‘emotional’ toll that it takes on your system. You end up paying that toll in TIME. People will not understand this, so you have to manage it on your own.
Same thing with email or any other time-consuming process. Nobody’s PAYING YOU to reply to their emails, but they still expect responses. The time you spend answering emails is the time you’re NOT spending clearing your obligations from your virtual desk. It’s time you’re NOT spending working on your own projects or doing what YOU want to do. It’s time you’re NOT spending thinking progressively about something you’d like to accomplish in the future. It’s time you’re NOT spending learning new technology that someone created or exploring a new social site. It’s time you’re NOT spending watching video blogs to check out new techniques or just enjoy what your friends are doing this week.
I understood the look on Rox’s face when she saw how many unread emails she had accumulated in the span of a few hours, but I couldn’t empathize with her. I most certainly do, NOW! I’m going to knock this choreography video out and make sure I don’t lose track of my ‘personal expenses’ ever again! :D
Bill Cammack • New York City • Freelance Video Editor • alum.mit.edu/www/billcammack
