Bill Cammack

Yesterday, there was an horrible earthquake in Haiti that measured 7.0 on the Richter scale‎. We won’t know until the sun comes up how horrible it was, because electricity AND telephone service was knocked out.

My long time friend and college homeboy, Pascal Antoine is Haitian. He founded and has been maintaining a website called HaitiXchange.com for a lot of years now.

I normally don’t watch the news at all, but I’ve been fascinated by the recent trend of channels showing 3% news and 97% punditry (people giving their OPINIONS about what the news means instead of showing us a bunch more news stories). So I turn on the television around 8pm and flip to CNN, where the slot says “Campbell Brown”, so I’m like “*yawn* Here we go!”, and she has a different look on her face and the marquis below her reads something like “Hospital Collapses In Haiti”. Read the rest of this entry »

I wrote a bunch of articles about branding a bunch of months ago. I recently started thinking about branding again now that Dave & I been brainstorming projects over @ TribeNineCreative.com.

My position towards the middle of 2009 was that I had several personal brands, none of which are equal in popularity based on number of hits to my sites and the frequency that each brand would come up in IRL conversations. At the time, I wasn’t sure why, for instance, my “socializing” brand was so much stronger than my “video editing” brand. Pretty much the LAST thing I started advertising about myself, chronologically, became what I was most known for by people I had never met before.

People love to toss around the term “Organic” these days when it comes to Social Media. I checked out about eight different articles and received about eight different ideas of what “Organic Marketing” or “Organic Social Media” or “Organic Branding” is. According to Webster’s, the closest definition of “Organic” that might possibly be relevant to any of this is “Developing in the manner of a living plant or animal”. This is why I decided to call this particular article:

Organic Branding

Back in the day, when I was trying to decide what I was going to blog about, I asked Penelope Trunk (far right in the pic) for her opinion and she told me something pivotally important, which was essentially “Blog about what you WANT to blog about and not about what you think is going to be popular or lucrative”.

This turned out to be INCREDIBLY GOOD ADVICE!!! :D and I kept it in mind as I started writing about things I THOUGHT I was interested in, but it turned out that I wasn’t. For instance, I was going to do a blog about my favorite television shows, like 24, Prison Break, eventually Sons Of Anarchy and now Jersey Shore, but paying attention to how I *FELT* about writing a blog about that, I realized I completely wasn’t interested enough to make a blog about that topic sustainable. Read the rest of this entry »

As we move forward into 2010, Guilt By Association is going to become a major issue. This year, the civilians found out about Twitter and flooded it with new connections. Sites like Facebook have seen dramatic increases in membership, bringing increases in connections and shared media. If you’re involved in “the game”, sooner or later, you’re going to be associated with someone controversial either on a local scale or an international scale. When/if that time comes, you’re going to have to decide how you’re going to deal with people’s new perception of you based on something you had nothing to do with, whatsoever. Read the rest of this entry »

So I’m watching this video that was made by my Facebook friend, Meghan Asha and a couple of her homegirls,

and one of them says something like she doesn’t Google people before going on a first date with them so she actually has to ask all the questions…

HA! Later for that! :D This is the year 2009. Unless I meet someone randomly or happen to be introduced to someone on the fly at a party, like when Walt introduced me to Miko recently (whom I am NOT dating.. She’s just the first person that came to mind when I thought of people that I didn’t google before I met them), The *FIRST* thing I do upon becoming aware of someone new is check their Social Media or internet presence. Read the rest of this entry »

* Click the HD button for a clearer version. Click the fullscreen button to watch full-screen! :D *

Bill Cammack explains how to make a blog post using WordPress (or pretty much any other platform).

Topics include hypertext / hyperlinking, images, media & style.

Recorded as part of New in November 2009 (newinnov.tumblr.com)

Requests For Action

I’m not sure what I think about Requests For Action (RFA)… What I mean by that is that for instance, I’m about to take part for the second year in a row in a videoblogging series that a few of my friends and I do called “New in November” (newinnov.tumblr.com).

Personally, what I would do regarding the site/series is INFORM people that it’s going on or that it’s available. What I would NOT do is request for them to do something about it, such as follow it, reblog it, RT it and DEFINITELY NOT “Please rate my video 5 stars!” :/ Read the rest of this entry »

“Content is King” is a lie that’s been perpetuated in web video circles for a few years now. “Eye Candy” has always been… Queen.. but I’ve recently noticed that the tables have turned and Content actually *has* overtaken EC…

I wrote about EC in March 2008 and mentioned “the formula”, which was that whatever actual content you had, the way to get views for your show was to have an attractive female as the ‘front’ or the ‘face’ of the show. She didn’t have to know or understand JACK about JACK so long as she could look good and read her lines. I probably noticed this formula in 2007, since I got started in online video in 2006.

Regardless of the content, the most popular shows were headlined by a female that was nice to look at. Period. (with the one obvious exception being Ze Frank’s “The Show”)

It was even worse on YouTube, because everybody knew that YT took the picture that represented your video from exactly 50% into your episode. If your video was 6 minutes long, the still YT would take was @ 3 minutes. So.. Regardless of what the actual content was, people would figure out the final length of their show and insert a few frames of a chick in a bikini exactly in the middle. They’d upload their show, YouTube would pull the image of the bikini chick, all the boys would click on it expecting to see some ass, the video would get popular and then eventually ‘featured’, where it could really take off and get more views. Read the rest of this entry »

21 minutes into this video, Kevin Rose asks Google’s Vice President of Search Product and User Experience, Marissa Mayer “Is Google Skynet?” on behalf of someone who asked the question online and 182 people who voted for that question.

Her first two words are “Uhhhh.. Well…. :D”

There are a lot of people that think Google is SkyNet. What’s SkyNet?

Skynet (Terminator): In the fictional Terminator universe, Skynet is a computer software-based defense system created by humans in the late 20th century.

In the Terminator storyline, Skynet gains sentience shortly after it is placed in control of all of the U.S. military’s weaponry. When they realize that it has become self-aware, and what the computer control is capable of, the human operators try to shut the system down. It retaliates and believes humans are a threat to its existence, it then employs humankind’s own weapons of mass destruction in a campaign to exterminate the human race.

The obvious parallel with Google is that every time you turn around, Google’s acquired another company or created or announced a new product. The bottom line is data. Information. Evidence of connections. The attempt to predict patterns… purchasing tendencies… communications networks… social trends… Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, I was invited to speak @ the 2008 NYTVF (New York Television Festival).

Here’s the video of the entire panel discussion. My section begins @ 2:40.

This panel, featured distinguished content creators and arbiters offering audiences a primer on the best approaches to producing your Web series. Should you produce it yourself or wait for production money? How long should the show be, and how frequently should it appear? Do you syndicate, or offer it exclusively. Lastly, how do you get people to watch it? Panelists: * Paul Kontonis (Moderator) – CEO, For Your Imagination * Bill Cammack – Video Editor and Consultant * Kirby Ferguson – Writer/Director/Producer, GoodieBag.tv * Marc Hustvedt – Editor-in-Chief, Tubefilter News * Brett Wilson – Co-founder and CEO, TubeMogul

Bill & Flo

A while back, my friend Flo typed either “Frenemies” or “Frienemies” to me in a conversation and I was like “um.. What’s that?”. Once she explained it to me, as a combination of the words Friend and Enemy, I was like :/

As corny as the term is, it really DOES accurately describe the relationship that many people have with other people. According to Wikipedia:

“Frenemy” (sometimes spelled “frienemy”) is a portmanteau of “friend” and “enemy” which can refer to either an enemy disguised as a friend or to a partner who is simultaneously a competitor.[1] The latter can describe personal, geopolitical, and commercial relationships both among individuals and groups or institutions. The word may have appeared in print as early as 1953.[2]

Before I got involved with Social Media, most people that I knew don’t have time or energy for this type of relationship. They also weren’t interested in it. We were on the same team or we weren’t. We felt positively, neutrally or negatively about each other or we don’t know or care that each other exists.

There are, apparently, some people that either enjoy living this kind of life or find it to be necessary because of what they do to get money. Read the rest of this entry »