Bill Cammack

Lindsey Chen, my blogging partner in our Lindz & Bill series, is today’s host for Next New Networks’ “Fast Lane Daily”. YAY!!!

Check it out above or click here to download for your iPod!

Congratz, Lindz!

Tags: Fast Lane Daily, FLD, host, Lindsey Chen, Lindz, Lindz & Bill, Next New Networks, NNN

So I’m chatting with Adrienne Brawley the other day, and we’re discussing web shows since we’re both shooters and editors. We were talking about my post Personal Brand? No Crossover, and the topic of internet show hosts came up.

I “matter-of-factly” mentioned how several female show hosts either ACTIVELY HIDE their boyfriends or whatever and some of them merely omit the fact that they’re in relationships, to which Adrienne replied something to the effect of “But the guys don’t have to say who they’re dating.”

That’s where I lost whatever point I was about to make, because all main & auxiliary mental power was diverted to attempting to recall even ONE instance where a guy was asked about that.

Once I realized I wasn’t going to be able to cite a single instance in the 2+ years I’ve been involved with internet shows, I started thinking about WHY I couldn’t come up with one. What I decided was,

Nobody Cares Who Guys Are Dating

According to my Quantcast demos, my site has a 65% female readership. BlogHer has 61% female readership. Rocketboom has 65% male readership. Digg has 58% male. Wallstrip has 56% male. Blip.tv has 51% male. The point is, that according to statistics, it’s mostly males that are watching internet shows (even though studies are saying there are actually more females on the net, they just don’t identify themselves in surveys as female).

So, basically, there are a lot of guys that watch these shows, and if you go to IRL conferences or at least look at the flickr sets from these conferences, you’ll see there are a ton of guys at these things as well. There really isn’t a lot of representation for the female population. So that’s one reason why there isn’t any pressure on guys to disclose their dating status. Nobody cares. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Adrienne Brawley, Bill Cammack, Chris Boucher, digatechgirl, digatechguy, disparity, female, host, male, on-air talent, Oz Sultan, Social Media, tech

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

Tags: acquaintances, Adam Quirk, antisocial, CaliNative, card, Central Park, friends, frisbee, host, how social, idiocy, Jared Klett, Jonny GoldStein, Jonny's Par-Tay, life, love, media, Obreahny, relating, relationships, Social Media, status update, tech, the social, tier, togetherness, toleance, Twitter

I’m co-hosting this week’s:

“The Shirtless Apprentice” #28: “Matching Color Hue in Final Cut Pro”

Permalink: www.TheShirtlessApprentice.com

Tags: 2008, Final Cut, ForYourImagination, host, podcast, Shirtless Apprentice

I’m co-hosting this week’s:

“The Shirtless Apprentice” #27: “Color Correcting Whilte Balance in Final Cut Pro”

Permalink: www.TheShirtlessApprentice.com

Tags: 2008, Final Cut, ForYourImagination, host, podcast, Shirtless Apprentice

Permalink: http://www.shirtlessapprentice.com/podcast/2008/1/11/26-the-sony-pmw-ex1.html

The Shirtless Apprentice reviews the Sony PMW-EX1

I’m in this video around the 2:25 mark where it mentions the show I co-hosted that’s coming up next week.

Tags: 2008, ForYourImagination, host, podcast, Shirtless Apprentice

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”. … “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

Tags: 2008, bandwagon, community, contacts, decision, editing, elite, elitist, Facebook, fan, film, friends, fun, game, holier than thou, host, incentive, jaiku, Joe, Jonny GoldStein, love, media, Music, myspace, numbers, Operator11, pownce, relating, relationships, snob, Social Media, status update, stuck-up, superior, tech, the social, Twitter, Viral, youtube

Reader Derek writes:

There are people out in the public eye that grabs your attention.

Using the “Dating Genius” tried and proven methods, how can someone make any good of this? Generically and academically speaking, mind you.

Actually, this is a very good question, Derek.

Becoming enamored with public figures happens to people all day, every day. That’s why the tabloids make so much money. Everyone’s interested in what their favorite celebrities are doing and saying as well as whom they’re currently dating.

There are two ‘problems’ with this. The first one is that you’re not getting the full experience of a person by watching their show. The second is that you usually don’t have any local access to the person in question, so you never get to experience what they’re really like.

Because of this, what people ‘fall in love’ with is only 1% of the actual person at best… unless they’re doing a personal videoblog where they’re authentically telling you about themselves, their lives, what they think and feel.

For example… I have a friend that’s very PHYSICALLY attractive… very beautiful, but her personality is so *CRASS* that I can’t imagine anyone wanting to date her for who she is as a person. Guys put up with her shenanigans because she’s an easy lay. Other than that, she doesn’t have any wins… None of them are actually “WITH” her. You could take that chick and make her the host of a television show or internet show, and guys would be ‘falling in love’ with her too, but that’s because she’d be reading a script and her true personality wouldn’t be revealed at all by what she’s saying.

There’s actually a third ‘problem’ with celebrity crushes… You’re not the only one.

Depending on your level of taste in women, there could be easily 100, 1,000 or 1,000,000 guys that ‘fell in love’ with her for the exact same reasons that you did, so even if she’s available and you have local access to her, it’s gonna be an uphill climb to get on.

DatingGenius

Tags: attractive, beautiful, celebrity, crush, dating, DatingGenius, host, love, personality, relating, relationships, videoblog, women

Online Videos by Veoh.com

This is a cool video from Veoh’s channel/series “Viral”. Sunny Gault hosts. Featured Guru = Bry Sanders, Director of Photography on the set of Hayden Black’s “Good Night Burbank“.

Tags: Bry Sanders, director, Good Night Burbank, Hayden Black, host, online video, Social Media, Sunny Gault, Veoh, Viral

I just got my Hulu beta access code, so I’m checking out the embed function. The clip above is from the “Dick In A Box” SNL Short hosted on hulu.com.

There’s a timeline you can drag to make a custom length clip. It’s not easy to use right now, because the thumbnail doesn’t scrub with the playhead when you’re selecting in and out points.

For some reason, when it gets to the out point I selected, when you close the box, the video keeps playing.

Actually, if I drag the playhead back in the timeline, it’ll play the entire clip, so it’s embedding the entire clip regardless, just setting different start and finish points.

–
Bill Cammack

Tags: dick in a box, fun, host, Hulu