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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 They’re always making improvements to their site, so this post may very well be outdated relatively soon.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
Get Lost… On ABC.com
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
Bill Cammack • Cammack Media Group, LLC
Dude… Where’s My Twitter Link?
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
Bill Cammack • New York City • Freelance Video Editor • alum.mit.edu/www/billcammack
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
She’s Right!!!
Yes sir, fellas…. your girlfriend/wife/whatever is right. She’s correct. No doubt…
……
…….. :/
….. “She’s right about WHAT?” you ask? …..
EVERYTHING!!! :D
That’s right! The key to YOUR happiness is that your girlfriend IS RIGHT! “She’s right” makes her feel good and then she makes YOU feel good, dig? :D If she’s WRONG… then she feels BAD and then she makes YOU FEEL BAD!!! :(
So… If you’re driving to the mall, and you know full well that you need to make a left, :) and she tells you to make a right… what are you going to do???
That’s right! You’re going to make a right! :D And you’re going to drive and drive and drive until you arrive @ the mall purely by luck or until she admits ON HER OWN that she doesn’t know where in the world you are right now and “lets” you figure out how to get where you’re going. Yes. That’s the ticket! :) Even if the mall’s one block away and obscured by trees… do NOT go “Nah, you’re buggin’. The mall’s to the left right behind those trees. See that water tower?”. Nope. Don’t do it. It’s not worth it! :D
If you do that, yes, you arrive at the mall approximately one hour earlier than you would have if you follow her incorrect directions. You also save gas money! :D However, that hour’s a waste of your time (or worse), because now she’s upset. :(
The moral of the story is that it’s better to drive needlessly in circles with a happy girlfriend than to hang out at the mall with an unhappy girlfriend.
Oh…. If you’d like to avoid both her getting upset AND driving in circles, do this:
When she says for you to make a right, drive up to the intersection and SUDDENLY WHIP A LEFT!!! Immediately act like nothing’s out of the ordinary. This makes her think that YOU made a mistake. When she says “I said ‘right’, not ‘left’! :/” point to your right and say “oh… THAT right?” and pretend to be lost and trying to get back to where she suggested you go until you “accidentally” end up @ the mall.
The moral of the story is that it’s better for your girlfriend to be happy, believing that YOU’RE an idiot… than it is for her to be upset that you pointed out that she doesn’t know how to get to the mall. :D
Take one for the team!!! :D
girlfriend+happy > girlfriend+upset
DatingGenius
BeachWalks With Rox #393otr
Click the image for a link to Beach Walks With Rox #393otr from BlogHerBiz 07.
I’m at Day 2 BlogHer Business Conference in NYC talking with CNN Anchor Carol Lin about her new web project for cancer patients and their supporters.
Carol lost her husband to cancer and is developing a social networking web site to combine her extensive news background with her passion to contribute to the cancer community. On hiatus from the CNN anchor chair, she has immersed herself in the world of web technology, and shared with me a remakable combination of warmth and drive, passion and intelligence.
billcammack roxannedarling carollin beachwalks.tv blogherbiz blogher
Recording Episode 01 of “The Lab”
WOWWWWW!!!
OK… So I just spent an hour recording my lines for my first episode of “The Lab”. I’m an editor, not an actor. I had the incorrect notion that what I was about to do was more like talking than acting. It was really something I’ve never experienced before……
That was an amazing trip. I wanted to blog it now, while I’m still feeling it.
There’s a journey that you take when you try to record something quasi-theatrical. I’m even more sensitive to it since I’m an editor. I’m more aware of what I can and can’t use.
What I mean by record is when YOU’RE the on-air talent. There’s so much to think about, but then you can’t actually afford to think about it because you have to deliver the lines… that is… IF you scripted your lines ahead of time, and preferably studied them. I did neither, since I’m not an actor. I had no idea it was going to be so hard to pull at least three directions together and then do the right thing with what you receive to deliver the goods. I have no idea whether I have a show or not. If I don’t, that’s fine. I’ve slated my release of episode 1 of “The Lab” for Friday. I still have tonight and all of tomorrow to do it over if I don’t have what I need.
The first thing I noticed was that I had to stop myself from wanting to deliver the lines in a stoic fashion, just to get them out. Then, I realized things would have been way better if I had scripted the lines and practiced them instead of trying to make stuff up on the fly. I had a couple of cues that I had figured out, but the problem was that by the time I was on the spot, doing the do… I had seen the scenes so many times that I wasn’t naturally affected anymore by watching them, and there was no natural launch into what I wanted to say about the section. I had to fake the launch and then make sure I wasn’t stiff delivering the actual lines that I had just decided upon and hadn’t practiced, ever. :/
The obvious question is why not pause the process until I made something up? :D The problem with that is that I needed to shoot the whole thing in one session so there was no chance of the camera moving from where it was. I decided to run the video from the monitors live instead of greenscreening them or matting out the screens and shrinking and distorting the video. I knew I was in it for the long haul as soon as I pressed the button, so I went for it and now I have whatever I have… if anything! :D
I can’t really feel the effects from the journey at this point, but I remember hearing the click that indicated that the camera had shut off and that there wasn’t anything more I could do about getting the show on tape. I remember this feeling of… ?relief? and a return to ?reality?… I’ll definitely be doing way more pre-production for my next episode, but this time, I was so glad to get the set done that I just had to try to make it happen. Actually, when I was completely ready, I wasn’t INTERESTED in filming the show right then. That was the first battle… actually getting myself to start in the first place. It was only after I was in the process that I realized how important a script is that you’ve practiced over and over.
There’s more to being on-air-talent than meets the eye… I mean if you’re going to do a decent job at it… and I’m not saying that *I* did a decent job! :D It’s that there are things you have to remember, and while you’re remembering them, you have to forget them so you can seem authentic or natural. You have to internalize them and then live with them and “act as if”. I guess this is why some actors *coughnicholascagecough* always seem to be portraying the exact same character. Their expression is the same in different movies, so you get the same effect when you watch the actor’s performance.
Another thing that’s tough is that you’re not talking to anybody! :D I mean, you know the audience is “inside” that little lens, but there’s really nobody there, so you have to pretend you’re talking to someone. Depending on the person or people that you imagine yourself talking to, you’re going to deliver differently. You’re going to sound different. You’re going to use different words. I’m sure my performance suffered from “identity crisis”, but I’ll just fix that in the edit. :D
Just about the only thing that I learned along the way that helped me was in order to get over the fact that I was no longer highly amused by the scenes, having seen them multiple times while I was selecting them, what I DID find amusing was how ‘lost’ I was and unable to recreate my surprise and interest in the shot. Fortunately… I found that realization so funny, that I ended up laughing at how ridiculous it was and realize that that was my out. Whenever I needed a laugh, I got a laugh off of the fact that I couldn’t laugh because the scene wasn’t funny to me anymore. :D WHAT LUCK! :D
So, yes… More scripting… More practicing (more like ANY practicing, since I didn’t practice at all, having no script, just some outline notes). I didn’t want to script it, but that’s because I didn’t know there were so many other things to worry about when you’re trying to make it happen from in front of the camera instead of behind it. About 1/3 of the way through, I decided to get over the fact that I was talking to a lens. :D It wasn’t so tough after that, but that was only one of several ‘issues’ that I was having.
I decided I was going to play some music to see if I wanted to use any of it to get me in or out of the piece. Unfortunately, the way the camera was set up, I had the choices of holding the guitar at a ridiculous angle to play it or play naturally, and the guitar wasn’t in the shot at all. Since I decided on using a single shot for the whole episode, I just had to miss out on the appearance of the guitar. I’ll have to see if anything can be done with that in post.
I was very glad when I heard the click indicating it was all over. It was a weight off, for sure. I learned A LOT about the process, and I’ll be ready for it next time. I’ll also be habituated to certain elements, so those won’t be issues for me. Depending on how it works, I might have to rethink my shooting style as well, or maybe shoot it twice.. once as a practice so I can see how everything works together and then a second time as the real deal. Another issue was that I was sitting in approximately the same place the whole time, so I said approximately the same thing again, closer to the camera…. that is, from what I could remember that I said, since I had no script! :/
Anyway… anyone preparing to do this for the first time, beware! hahahaha :D This is one of those situations where you have to learn by on-the-job training, because you’re not going to feel like this in any normal situation. Even having a normal conversation and having someone tape you isn’t the same as trying to deliver lines that you HOPE are going to connect scene A to scene B, while relating to the audience in an effective and preferably consistent manner. It doesn’t prepare you for talking to a lens and convincing yourself you’re talking to a person or people. It’s not as easy as it looks! :D
Actually, I started doing better (IMO) when I stopped caring if it was good or not. :)
Monetizing Digital Video
A lot of people video blog just because they feel like it. What IS a video blog? or a videoblog or a vlog or…. don’t ask! :D There are as many definitions for a video blog as there are _names_ for video blogs. Some people consider any video that’s placed on the internet eligible for the title “video blog”. Most simply, Steve Garfield would say “A video blog is video on a blog”. :D So expand your idea of what a blog is to include a video… ANY video, and there you have it.
Does that make someone that has a blog with videos on it a videoblogger? Again, don’t ask! There’s the issue of what kind of videos are on the blog. Is it video of kids falling off of skateboards? A cat playing with a ball of string? A scripted, weekly comedy show? Citizen journalism from the streets? Someone sitting alone in their room talking to their iSight as if it were a real person they were having a conversation with? Is it made by individuals? Is it made by companies that were formed and funded with the sole object of delivering video content on the internet? is it made by a television studio as an afterthought or addition to their actual television shows? Do all of those count equally as “video blogs”, assuming they meet the base qualification of being “video on a blog”?
What about production values? Does the audio have to be good? Does the video have to be steady? Does the editing (if there is any) have to be decent? Does the video have to show something about you or your environment? Does it have to mean something to anyone? Who’s watching it? Friends? Family? People you don’t know that live in other cities, states or countries? What’s your responsibility to your viewers? Do you make videos with the viewer in mind or only yourself, and if they don’t want to watch, they can “change the channel” by clicking on a different link?
See what I mean? :) Don’t ask. Let’s just assume that there’s something called a video blog, and lets assume that it’s “video on a blog” like Steve said.
Now, lets assume that someone has this video blog and they want to make some money from it. They have a few options. They could get sponsored by some group, in which case they are paid to put their show on regardless of how many views/hits/clicks/whatever they get. They could sell advertising themselves and include the ad in their actual video. They could have advertising on their web page and not on the video at all. They could place their video on a hosting site that features revenue-sharing.
If you post video to a revenue-sharing host, the basic deal is that the host makes arrangements with advertisers to pay them to place ads on their site or on their videos. The “sharing” part comes in when the host offers content creators (the people actually uploading the videos) a percentage of the money that the host gets from the advertisers which happened to be generated by a video that that creator uploaded. There are wikis on the technical aspects of this, including “cost per impression” (cpi), “cost per action” (cpa) and “cost per click” (cpc). You might get paid if the advertiser’s ad is seen. You might only get paid if the ad is clicked on by whomever views your video. You _might_ only get paid if someone clicks through AND buys something from the advertiser. Even then, “getting paid” depends on you getting enough credits to get over a certain amount of currency, say $20, because it doesn’t make sense for companies to send out individual checks for 15 cents each to thousands of people.
Once you’ve decided on a host, you need to decide (assuming you GET to decide) how ads are run on your videos. There are several options for this, the basic ones being pre-roll, post-roll and mid-roll.
Pre-roll means that the advertisement comes on before your video plays. You will hope that this video is really short, because people are going to tune out if they decide they aren’t willing to wait through advertisements they didn’t ask to see when they clicked on your video. Then again, that might not matter if you get paid just for showing their ad. Since it’s in the front of the video, the viewer already saw it, so you get paid, right? Well… maybe. It depends on what the host considers a “view”. If “view” means that someone started your video, then you’re good. If “view” means someone COMPLETED your video, and they tuned out because of your pre-roll ad, you lose. :)
Post-roll means the ad comes on after your video has played all the way through. The risk there is that the viewer won’t watch all the way through. Once they get to the end, either you get paid when the ad shows up, or you get paid if they click through or you get paid if they click through and buy something.
Mid-roll means the advertisement comes on while your video is still playing. Mid-roll can be absolutely ridiculous, depending on how it’s implemented. I saw a mid-roll ad that took up the whole screen of the video AND replaced the audio like a regular commercial that comes on television. When the ad came back, the video had been running the whole time, and whatever was said during the time was completely lost. It happened to be on an interview show where the accomplishements of the interviewee were being listed. That kind of mid-roll doesn’t work, because they just throw the ad in anywhere. If you don’t care about your content, however, it doesn’t matter. If you weren’t telling a story anyway, and it doesn’t matter to you when sections of your piece are obscured, then it’s fine. As an editor, I can tell you that A LOT OF ATTENTION is paid to where we go to commercial, how many times we go to commercial, how we go to commercial and how we come back to the program from commercial. Throwing up full-video-sized advertisements just anywhere is completely horrible and ruins immersion.
There are other forms of advertising while your video’s being played. There might be visual advertisements that don’t take up the whole screen and don’t obscure audio at all. There might be ads that don’t run on your video but next to your video the whole time it’s playing. These ads might be animated or change every few seconds. I find these types of ads REALLY annoying, because the motion pulls your eye from the video content and ruins immersion. Once again, this choice is good for people that don’t really care if someone’s watching their video or not. If they’re using the video to get your eyes on their advertisements… mission accomplished.
Personally, I’m a sponsorship fan. There’s too much business involved with monetizing video for it to be worth ANY of my time to deal with it. The more time you spend trying to advertise your videos, the less time you spend MAKING those videos. :) I’d rather leave it to the hosting site, set it and forget it. Also, unless you know A LOT of kids that fall off of A LOT of skateboards, you’re not going to be creating consistent viral video…. well… unless you’re one of these video thieves that steal other people’s content and re-post it… but that’s another issue entirely.
Bill Cammack | New York City | Freelance Video Editor | alum.mit.edu/www/billcammack
Kramer vs “The Hecklers”! :O
response to: RE: Michael Richards by Vondra Cornell
The hecklers don’t receive a “free pass”. Unfortunately, we don’t know what they said to him. Kramer may have been reacting to ‘just’ the fact that they were interrupting his show, or he might have felt personally insulted by whatever they were saying. Heckling is something of a sport in comedy clubs, and I’m sure there are people that go there SPECIFICALLY to mess with the performers, if they can. I don’t know what they said, or why, but if someone’s performing and you’re interrupting, be prepared to hear something you’re not going to like. To a degree, I feel like Kramer accomplished what he wanted with what he said, because you could tell from the heckler’s voices that they felt hurt and upset. They ‘attacked’ him, verbally, and he ‘attacked’ them back, verbally, and they left the club feeling hurt. Chalk one up for Kramer. :)
Unfortunately…
The way Kramer CHOSE to defend himself or attack them was by insulting them based on GENERAL characteristics, not SPECIFIC ones. He didn’t talk about the ?guys’? shirts or their haircuts or how their girlfriends looked. He insulted them by bringing up things that happened to people ONLY because their skin was a different color. So… not only did he offend the ?two? hecklers… Kramer offended everyone who knows ANYONE that had ANYTHING happen to them because they were considered to be different. At some point, every new ethnic group that arrived in NYC was considered to be the bottom of the barrel. Italians were the bottom. Irish were the bottom. Puerto Ricans were the bottom. Blacks were the bottom. Mexicans were the bottom. Things happened to people STRICTLY because they were Italian or Jewish, or even PERCEIVED to be something, based on visible, supposedly stereotypical characteristics, like a large nose, for instance. We don’t even have to get into how women were/are treated because it’s visibly clear that they’re ‘different’ from men.
To paraphrase Kramer, :) “Throw them out because they’re [Black]” reminds everyone of when someone said “No Jews allowed here” or “Don’t pay her as much as you pay him for the same job” or “Kick his ass because he’s homosexual”. The “Reginald Denny” beating was as egregious as the Rodney King beating. They’re both GENERALLY offensive situations. You can’t say “ha ha ha… someone got dragged out of a car and beaten up” without offending EVERYONE that knows someone that got dragged out of a car and beaten up, OR had it done to themselves.
Kramer ALSO offended everyone that knows people are going to use this as “evidence” of “what lurks beneath” or whatever he was incoherently rambling about. :D There are lots of people that aren’t gloating about “the good ole’ days” of segregation and free passes for critical beatdowns and killings. There are lots of people that will take this Kramer thing and run with it as if it’s proof of “what lurks beneath” in Whites in general…. or, on a global scale, since that video is viewable all over the world, in Americans in general….
Anyway… Kramer either said what he felt or temporarily lost his mind. :D Do the hecklers get a free pass for that? Nope. However, it’s up to Kramer to represent himself authentically. When he felt like he wanted to upset the hecklers, he dug into his bag of tricks, and all he came out with was [basically] “skin color”. wow. original. some comedian! :D
That’s like Mel Gibson rambling about Jews when the cops stopped him. What does someone being Jewish have to do with YOU drinking and driving? :D :D
Kramer Flips Out! :D
Yes… I know the guy has an actual name, but I wouldn’t recognize it anywhere, so I’ll refer to him as “Kramer”. :D I never looked at the credits for Seinfeld, so I don’t know George Costanza’s name either, though I’m a fan of “George’s” acting.
So my cousin sends me a link to ’something’ in the email, and I click on it, and it’s some guy talking up and to his left, into the air. I thought it was some kind of theatrical presentation, where the guy was doing a skit, pretending to talk to someone high up. Eventually, Kramer starts throwing these insults around. Eventually, I noticed he kept speaking in the same direction and then I figured out that he was talking to actual people. That’s when I had to rewind and start the video all over. :) Up until that point, I thought he was making a point, and this “sketch” was going somewhere. I realized, upon the second viewing, that Kramer had flipped out, and was really going for broke, trying to offend whomever he was speaking to.
The odd part about what was going on was that is was SOOOO personal, but it was happening in a public space. Forget about the fact that someone recorded it… Kramer went off like that in front of a crowd of people. I mean, it was so INCREDIBLY egregious that I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing, and I kept looking for “the method to his madness”. Not “madness” like he was crazy. There are lots of people that feel exactly the way he was speaking. “Madness” meaning I couldn’t understand what he was GAINING by going off like that. :D I mean, yeah, he insulted the living hell out of the people that I found out later had been heckling him while he was trying to do a stand-up routine…. but he insulted them GENERALLY instead of PARTICULARLY. When you insult someone in a general fashion, you ALSO insult everyone else that identifies with the characteristics or traits you’re insulting. That’s why I call it “madness”.
It was clearly professional suicide for Kramer to do what he did, and even though he was small in the frame, and the picture was grainy, he didn’t LOOK LIKE he understood what he was doing. He looked like he was on some kind of auto-pilot or had literally switched off ‘reality’ and was operating under some kind of different understanding. Not only was he incredibly insulting, but he was literally trying to pick a fight. He said something about “you’re brave now…”. What’s THAT supposed to mean? What was KRAMER going to do to someone? Meet them outside? Run up in the stands like an NBA player and start fighting? hahahahaha please. I felt like he had totally LOST IT and was acting like he was in his own personal living room, screaming at a television.
Anyway… I wanted to wait until we heard something from Kramer DIRECTLY, before giving my opinions about what happened. It doesn’t change the fact that he lost his cool, and it doesn’t change the fact that he was brutally offensive to anyone within earshot that took offense to what he said, as well as incredibly EMBARRASSING to people who KNOW that they’re being associated with Kramer, either GENERALLY, in the same way that he generally insulted the hecklers or PARTICULARLY, as in the case of Jerry Seinfeld (whom I also think is a fantastic talent), who knows full well that if it weren’t for HIM, nobody would ever have heard of Kramer, and he wouldn’t have been invited to do stand-up comedy, and this situation would never have occurred.
Here’s the video of Kramer & Seinfeld on Letterman, as well as the video of the actual situation: Kramer Flips Out & Apology Videos.
Actually, after I watched the incident video a few times, I though this situation was really, really, really, really, REEEEEALLY funny, considering that when Seinfeld was on, some people were wondering how a show set in New York City would have basically ZERO minority representation on-screen… not main characters or anything, because it was a small cast, but just no representation at all. Then, years after the fact, one of the MAIN characters on the show stops performing live on stage to do a better job at insulting minorities across the country than I’ve EVER seen on ANY documentary about skinheads, militia, neo-nazi’s, whatever. I mean I just couldn’t believe Kramer was in his right mind and saying what he was saying… not because of WHAT he was saying, but because as a public figure who hopes to make a living off of things like Kramer’s Reality Tour, he was CLEARLY screwing himself with minorities (which, globally, are not minorities) and ‘empathizers’ alike, and didn’t seem to have a care in the world about that.
So now, Seinfeld goes on Letterman as a character reference for Kramer. That was cool of him. He could have just said “I dont know what that guy was talking about” and left him to deal with this on his own. :) Having watched every second of Kramer’s apology and other statements, I believe what he said, and I think that I was right when I was watching the clip and felt like “that guy’s lost his GOT-damned mind! :D”. I think he was totally out of it, which is his own fault, but still… I believe his apology… I believe he’s not a racist… and I believe he REALLY, REALLY doesn’t know what happened to him in that situation. I could be wrong about all those things. He might have apologized because someone told him he had to for professional reasons, and he’d better make it look good. He might be a racist. He might have had full control of what was going on that night. Still… I believe what he had to say on Letterman.
Like I said… I don’t even know the guy’s name, so I’m not trying to vouch for him or excuse what he did. In one of the articles about the situation, someone called him an actor that was trying to do stand-up. If that’s the case, acting on a closed set, where everyone’s interested in YOU doing well is completely different from trying to make people laugh in a situation where they’re out for their own entertainment. THEIR entertainment might be heckling YOU, so welcome to the game. It’s my opinion that whatever happened before the video started that I linked to above, Kramer was so mad that he wanted to really insult the ?guys? that were insulting him by heckling and interrupting his act that he reached out to whatever he felt would be the most hurtful things to say to them and “went for his”. Unfortunately, it seems the only win Kramer felt he had was to insult them based on their skin color… so that’s what he used, and insulted untold numbers of people while trying to ‘get’ these couple of hecklers. I’m reminded of the “Happy Land” Social Club fire (pictures on stevespak.com), where some IDIOT named Julio Gonzalez tried to kill his girlfriend, Lydia Feliciano by tossing gasoline into a social club where she was and lighting it on fire. His girlfriend LIVED, and 87 OTHER PEOPLE GOT KILLED! :/
I decided to post about this because I Kramered-out one time… ONE TIME! :D And after the fever of the situation wore off (which wasn’t until minutes to maybe an hour later), a “new reality” set in where I was able to look back at what happened and see that I was under INCREDIBLE PRESSURE leading up to my reaction, and I wasn’t as concerned with the actual reaction as I was with HOW that pressure got built up so incredibly in the first place. As I was watching Kramer trying to explain what happened, and saying he doesn’t know… I really believe he doesn’t KNOW what happened, having been there, myself.
In my case, it wasn’t in public, and people hadn’t come out to see me perform, and I wasn’t representing a club and I wasn’t representing a popular television show that’s still in syndication as well as (I will assume) a really good friend of mine (Seinfeld, in Kramer’s case) who put me on in the first place. It was in a dorm room, and there were about seven people there, and we were ’snapping’ on each other… ’snapping’, meaning insulting each other in order to get the rest of the people there to laugh at what you said about the other person. Snapping is a MAJOR pastime in NYC, and I will assume other places, so you have to be on top of your game, and I always am. :D In this case, I was being cheated, because I had no audience. Two or three of the seven or so people that were there SHOULD have been on my side, since we were all Frosh, but they sided with the Seniors for “future considerations”. The stuff I was saying about my rival was really funny, or in some cases, actually TRUE and everyone knew it, but they were physically keeping themselves from laughing at him, because they wanted to be ‘down’ with the Seniors. EVERYTHING he said was completely corny and ineffective, yet the crowd backed all of his plays. In hindsight, I was reacting to the unfairness of the situation. I knew that I was ‘beating’ him with the insults, but I wasn’t getting any results from this. I realized that whatever I did, I was going to lose “on the record”, when, in reality, he never did and never WILL be able to out-snap me. I entered a “new reality”, which was “How do I win… in a situation where I SHOULD win, but I’m not GOING to win?” Again, in hindsight, all I was concerned with was salvaging the situation… ‘righting a wrong’ that was currently being done to me by not only ‘enemies’ but friends at the same time.
IMO, that’s what happened to Kramer. According to articles, the people he broke on were heckling and interrupting his show. IF he’s not actually a stand-up comedian, his skin isn’t going to be thick enough to deal with that and keep rolling. IF he’s used to “quiet on the set… action”, then people talking is going to be one thing, people interrupting his act is another, and people disrespecting him still another. Actually, after I re-started the video and watched it to the point where I understood that he was talking to actual people, I was waiting for a fight to break out, because it seemed to me that that’s what Kramer was looking for. What does he mean, “brave now”? :D Does he mean “you’re brave sitting in the balcony (or wherever they were), when I’m down here on the ground level”? Does he mean “you’re brave inside the club, but wait until you try to leave”? Does he mean “you’re brave now, but 50 years ago (when the people in question probably weren’t even alive yet) you wouldn’t even have been allowed in the building”? I mean, he went off on them so badly, I expected him to ask them if they wanted to take it outside.
IF Kramer’s not actually a racist, I’m sure he’s rather embarrassed with himself for the way he verbally attacked the hecklers. In the apology, he seemed genuine. Like I said…. I could be wrong about that, but I know that after-the-fact feeling of “yeah, I overdid it” or “I could have done something else”. I think Kramer’s answer to Letterman’s question “what more can you do besides apologize?” was proper. I think he has personal work to do. If he prides himself on his own control of self, and he really isn’t a racist, he has to come to terms with the fact that when he felt pressurized, he resorted to racist statements in order to “win this situation that I don’t feel I’m winning, but I SHOULD win”. He ALSO has to come to terms with the fact that when confronted by individuals, he lashed out and insulted God knows how many people.
I wish Kramer good luck with his introspection. Unfortunately for him, he lost it as a public figure in a public place. For me, part of what made his apology believable is that it was so unprepared. :D He basically came on TV to be held up as an example of someone who lost his mind. I thought it was dumb that some of the people in the crowd were laughing during his apology. This wasn’t a character playing a role, although you can tell, as I keep calling the guy “Kramer” :D It’s tough to separate an actor from the personality-type you’ve seen him portray. This was a guy, who HAPPENS to have portrayed an eccentric character, coming onto a LIVE television show, where he doesn’t know what’s going to be asked of him OR what’s going to be said about him, and all he knows is he needs to try to make some kind of statement against the egregious statements he made at the comedy club. There’s nothing funny about that.
Similar to the girlfriend escaping “Happy Land”, the hecklers probably left the building and thought to themselves “that guy’s a JERK!” and that was the end of their experience with him. Unfortunately, Kramer threw gasoline on a whole hell of a lot of OTHER people! :D
ridiculous. :/
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