Bill Cammack » tech

Videoblogging & Vanity

Bill Cammack — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 06:41:32 +0000

My friend Matt asked me a question the other day, regarding videoblogging and vanity. [Click Here to read the Google+ conversation.]

His question reminded me of the line you have to walk.. assuming that you want to be involved in social media at all.. between being too souped up over yourself and not souped up enough… “Souped Up” being a slang term for thinking that you’re a great person.

Basically, the question comes down to “Who cares what *YOU* have to say? o_O”, which is followed by who cares who cares what I have to say, which leads you down the spiral of vanity.

If I don’t care what you think to begin with, I’m going to output as much media as I want, and I’m going to proclaim my own greatness as much as I want, because I’m not taking your opinion into account at all, because it doesn’t matter.

However.. If your opinion doesn’t matter, then there’s no reason that I would waste my time creating content for you about topics that I already know about. :)

It’s not helping *ME* to write blogs and make videos.. It’s helping YOU, because I already know all this stuff. I already know why you got dumped after sex. It’s obvious to me, and it’s not obvious to you. I could do better things for myself with my time, other than writing something down or making a video that helps YOU live your life better.

So, even though there are lots of people that only videoblog so they can see themselves on the big screen:

YouTube Link => http://youtu.be/lSRZ4HJka3g

If videoblogging were about vanity for me, I wouldn’t create any content at all, because I wouldn’t be interested AT ALL in *YOUR* education or entertainment.

At the same time.. There has to be a certain amount of vanity or “soupedupness” involved in videoblogging, or else you wouldn’t create any content because YOU don’t believe that ANYONE ELSE would care or get anything out of what you have to share with them.

You have to think that something about you is interesting or at least different, where you’re offering the viewer something that they wouldn’t have normally experienced in their daily lives.

That is.. Unless you videoblog for YOURSELF, and not for other people at all.

So there’s a line that videobloggers hover around, between thinking too much of yourself and thinking too little of yourself.

Many people are stifled and don’t create any content at all because they don’t believe they have anything good to offer the world. That’s unfortunate, because everyone’s taste is different. *YOU* don’t get to dictate what *I* find worthwhile. o_O All you get to do is create content and float it out there, and then it’s up to the viewer to watch/read it or not, and then to get whatever they get out of it.

A lot of people are thrown off by not getting feedback. This is why you have all these clowns instructing people to “comment, rate, and subscribe” to their YouTube videos.

If people want to do any of those things, they will. You don’t have to INVITE them to do it. You don’t have to INSTRUCT them to do it.

Your value in videoblogging needs to be that you’re sharing something with whomever elects to consume it (or that you just like to hear yourself talk). If you get feedback, good for you. If someone learns something or is entertained by it, good for them.

I think people considering videoblogging should create a list of pros and cons for themselves and their potential viewers.

If you’re worried that talking about yourself makes you look like you like to talk about yourself, weigh that against whatever value someone else might get from watching your video or reading your blog post.

Also, I think it’s valuable to attempt to step outside of yourself and consider how “you” would feel watching your own content.

The other day, I was on this Facebook group where we discuss music mixing, which is a part of the online community surrounding Dave Pensado’s “Pensado’s Place”, and I mentioned something that I thought everyone knew about, and I got several “What technique are you talking about?” responses.

This allowed me to remember that I’ve been learning music mixing for approximately a year and a half now, whereas some people that follow my media are just starting out. So I made a video for them:

YouTube Link => http://youtu.be/vB7a-fdA9a4

Now, People could clamor about “Oh, There goes Bill Cammack, showing off with another one of his self-aggrandizing posts!!! :/”

merriam-webster.com/dictionary/aggrandize
transitive verb
1: to make great or greater : increase, enlarge
2: to make appear great or greater : praise highly
3: to enhance the power, wealth, position, or reputation of

— ag·gran·dize·ment noun
— ag·gran·diz·er noun

Origin of AGGRANDIZE

French agrandiss-, stem of agrandir, from a- (from Latin ad-) + grandir to increase, from Latin grandire, from grandis great
First Known Use: 1634

Related to AGGRANDIZE

Synonyms: exalt, canonize, deify, dignify, elevate, ennoble, enshrine, ensky, enthrone, glorify, magnify

Which is all well and good, since I don’t care what you think, but the point is that regardless of how great I think I am, someone might watch that video and learn something USEFUL TO THEM that will help them mix better and improve themselves.. And that’s the bottom line, ‘Cause Stone Cold said so.

So I think the questions regarding Vanity and Videoblogging need to be “What is your message?” and “Are you getting your message across?”.

If you elect not to create content because you don’t want to seem vain, you’re simultaneously cheating whomever might get something out of what you would have created.

If you create something simply FOR your own vanity, you might not focus enough on value to the consumer for your video to be worth anything EXCEPT your own self-aggrandizement.

If you consider yourself, your passionate consumers, and the online community at large, you’ll most likely be able to strike a balance between coming off like you’re souped up and seeming like a generous contributor to current pop culture, entertainment, trend-setting, taste-making, thought leadership & entertainment.
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CNN Presents “Black In America: Silicon Valley”

Bill Cammack — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 23:03:28 +0000

CNN aired “Black In America: Silicon Valley” last night. It was actually more interesting than I thought it would be. I would have done the show differently, but I’m me and CNN’s producers aren’t.

Disclosure: I’ll watch *ANYTHING* with Angela Benton in it! >:P~~~

Yum, Yum, Yum, and a Liverwurst A La Mode!!! >:D

So I was gonna watch this show regardless of what happened in it.

I had no idea what the NewME Accelerator was before just now.

I knew Angela had gone to California for some reason, and that Wayne Sutton was there also, but I didn’t know what they were doing.

I wasn’t watching the show tonight, because my DVR was catching it, but I got a text about 15 minutes after the show started, from my aunt, asking me, basically, why *I* wasn’t in this particular CNN show. :D

oh.. Disclosure #2: I’m also partial to Soledad O’Brien, because a homeboy of mine said he used to date her when he was at Harvard, but you know how dudes tend to exaggerate their interactions with females, so that’s an unconfirmed report. ;)

Anyway… This show was about people that are involved in founding startups.

Startup Culture

I’m “Internet Famous” (#6 of 154,000,000 Google results for “Bill”), (#2 of 1,440,000 Google results for “Cammack”), but that’s not what I do.

I’m a video editor and a content creator.

I edit television shows, corporate videos, web and personal content for my clients.

I also do my own videos and co-star in my friends’ videos:

YouTube Link => youtube.com/watch?v=wTHn5oFPmi8

That’s ENTIRELY DIFFERENT from what startup-people do.

With a startup, you think you have a good idea, you think you can technically implement it and make it into a website or an app, you think you can get people to recognize the value in using it, you think you can build a base of passionate users, and then you think you can get someone to give you money to go farther in your project than you could have on your own, or you think that someone will buy your company from you and roll it into their current set of offerings.

That’s a lot of thinking, hoping, and praying involved with that process, and I’m not interested. :D

If I had wanted to do a startup, I would have done it already, and it would have been successful.

Friends of mine founded blip.tv:

and Makerbot Industries:

and Tumblr:

and Rocketboom

Photo Credit: Francisco Daum

and I’m friends with investors like Jeff Pulver:

So, if I had wanted to do that, I could have done it, and I can still do it, but I’m not interested in it, because I’ve seen how DEDICATED my friends have had to have been in order to be successful, and how much of their actual lives they’ve had to sacrifice, and that’s not my idea of a good time.

I get in, do my work, output my video, invoice my clients, and then CHILLLLLLLL, and that’s the way I like it. >:D

Working on a startup starts *AFTER* you finish doing whatever else you do to get money, because it’s a huge gamble… An incredible gamble that depends on a lot of things working the way you think they will.. Some of which are under your control and many of which are not, such as when an internet bubble bursts or when an economy goes down the drain, or some other team beats you to market with a similar product and soaks up your projected user base that you were going to use to demonstrate demand for your site or app.

On a slightly-related note, that’s one of the reasons why women have such a hard time dating in Manhattan, NYC. The guys here are busy. We have things to do. We don’t have time to frivolously throw away, sharing gelato with you at some bistro. :)

Your window of opportunity to spend time with us is severely limited, because we always have more that we want to accomplish, and unless you work in the same field as we do, or you’re working on the same startup as us, you’re not going to see us much.

If dudes wanted to live the leisurely, waste-time life, they would have stayed in Kansas instead of moving to NYC to try to grind it out and make it happen.

Black In America: Silicon Valley

First of all.. Congratulations and Props to all the founders and participants for heading out to California to take part in NewME Accelerator and going for what they know! :D

So, The first thing that happens is Angela says “For whatever reason, African Americans [edit] tend to be consumers of technology and not really creators of technology”.

IME (In My Experience), this is true. There’s a difference between UTILIZING technology and creating something that other people use.

Similarly, there’s a difference between posting videos on a website and CREATING VIDEOS that you post on a website, like Jay Smooth does, for instance:

YouTube Link => youtu.be/7_z0TUN_DwQ

As a member of the content creation community, this was one of the shortcomings of CNN’s show. They never explained what it means or what it requires to think up and attempt to implement a startup, and then attempt to gain traction, get it funded and get it sold.

It was literally impossible to go into the actual intricacies of this field in an hour-long show, which is actually only 44 minutes of show time plus commercials.

Not only that, but CNN didn’t go into *HOW* they prepared in between their “pop quiz” pitch and their actual pitch at the end of the 9 weeks.

They didn’t show *ANY* of the process that takes you from doing a wack pitch to a good one. This show needed to be at least two hours long, and probably three, to do it properly.

As someone who knows startup founders and knows the amount of work that they put in, every single day, to make their projects successful, I was entirely set up and then short-changed by the show.

The way they started it, I thought we were going to experience the process. We didn’t. There was a lot of good information, and it was entertaining, but it was the equivalent of saying “Bill is going to mix a record now”, and then you hear the mixed record. What happened in between? o_O

On top of that, CNN never showed what a pitch actually is.

Basically, a pitch is a terse explanation of why people would use your product, how they would benefit from it, and, in this case, how you intend to provide ROI (Return On Investment) to your investors.

This is a completely different skill from a) coming up with a product idea, b) being technically able to create an actual application, c) being able to recruit a team to work with you if necessary, and d) networking and publicizing your app.

For instance.. My pitch, which I never use in actual conversation, is “Bill Cammack helps you create quality video & audio effortlessly. Working with Bill ensures quality control and on-time delivery of your presentation,
freeing you up to do other things with your time.”

What that means in English is that (amongst other things) I’m a video editor, and the reason you should give me money to spend MY time on YOUR project is that I’m better than you, I’m faster than you, I know what actual quality is in video presentations, so you’re purchasing quality control, as well as not having to waste your own time that you could have spent getting money doing what YOU do well, in the process of creating an inferior product in a much longer time period.

Of course, things are different for me, because I don’t pitch to companies. Companies pitch their projects to me. My job is to point out my stellar track record and the companies and networks I’ve worked for that all require top-notch work.

There’s no such thing as 99% of a television show. You get ‘er done, or you fail.

I can’t afford to fail, so I go in loaded for bear and make it happen.

No Wack Demos

Navarrow Wright told the group “No Wack Demos on demo day”, which amounts to “You’re going to be ON-POINT by the time you have to give your presentation that counts”.

I thought this part was important because people don’t tend to realize that there are people better than them at what they do or what they’re trying to do, and that they can receive valuable information from those people, including “Your presentation sucked, and here’s why”.

There’s no point in wasting your time reinventing the wheel, when you can just get the goods from someone that knows more than you and then move forward, look good, present well, and be successful.

It’s like with mixing music. I personally don’t believe in people being able to do their own “mastering”, which is some kind of finishing process that people do.

DIY Mastering doesn’t make any sense, because it’s the same person listening to the track on the same amplifier and speakers in the same room, so what’s different? o_O Nothing. If you want a track mastered, you send it to A MASTERING ENGINEER that has better equipment than you have, a better room than you have, and better sensibilities than you have when it comes to finalizing records.

I felt like their session(s) with Navarrow did exactly that. It gave them a window into what they SHOULD have been aiming at, from someone that knows the drill and can accurately inform them how far along they’ve progressed, or not.

Arrington, Conway, Kapor & Meritocracy

They aired a preview of “Black In America: Silicon Valley” several days ago, and some people were crying about what Mike Arrington had to say on the program.

I had been looking forward to hearing whatever controversial statements he made, but there weren’t any. As far as I can tell, he was accurately recounting his personal experiences in his field and location.

That’s like if I were to say that 80% to 90% (anywhere from 4 out of 5 to 9 out of 10) of the people that have hired me as a freelance video editor are white, you don’t get to cry about that because, not that I care enough to count clients, but that would be my honest guesstimation of historical reality.

I’m not demeaning black businesspeople by saying they make up either 1/5 or 1/10 of the people that have put money in my pocket. It’s just, AFAIK, a fact.

I also agree with what Ron Conway said, which is that it’s not necessarily what you know, but instead, it’s who you know.

You can have as many Facebook and Twitter and Google+ followers as you like, but if none of them are relevant to your professional field, you actually have approximately zero influence when you create a “call to action”.

If you have good ideas, but don’t know anybody that will forward you to someone that can actually help you get to the next level, you’re either going to be stuck on the ground floor or moving very slowly, as you’ll only be able to do as much work as you can afford to do around your regular work schedule, instead of being able to devote all your working hours to your startup because you received some funding that will sustain you and possibly a couple other coworkers until you get the product working well enough for a beta test, build your community and go for the big bucks.

Mitch Kapor said “The part that is meritocratic is great, but there’s a big part of it that isn’t”. I would agree with that, however, that statement applies to the United States in general. People hire who they like and want to spend time with and want to see succeed, so long as those people have the base amount of skillz to actually get the job done in the first place.

If nobody wants to look at you, nobody’s going to hire you.
If nobody wants to tell you “Good Morning” when you walk onto their job site (assuming it’s an on-site gig), nobody’s going to hire you.
If nobody has any “checks and balances” references for you, such as 500+ Linkedin Connections, nobody’s going to hire you.

Yes.. These things could be a function of some kind of racial or ethnic bias. They could also be a function of, let’s call it a “social bias”, because regardless of what your heritage is, you don’t know anybody who investors or potential clients trust to vouch for you or vet you as someone worth doing business with.

Unfortunately, we can’t change people’s skin color and get a do-over so we can see how much better or worse their lives and careers would be, so all that’s left to do is be the best you can be and get what you get from your own hard work and diligence.. Not only in learning to program, but also in authentic networking that results in your being connected to the right people that can and WILL put you in touch with the right people when you need it.

Otherwise Known As “Having Friends In High Places.” >:D

Hire A Front For Your Company

So, next up, Professor Vivek Wadhwa dropped some REAL SCIENCE on the NewME Accelerator team, which I can tell from looking at their faces during the reaction shots.

They only aired a couple of his statements, but I can tell he said a whole bunch of stuff that CNN didn’t have time to air (again, because this should have been a 3-hour show instead of a 1-hour show).

Part of what he said was “Get a white guy to be your front man”. This was advice that had been given to him at the time he was doing HIS thing, and he was informing the NewME team about this technique.

Of course, that’s not going to work for me because I have my own props.

My name and face are branded all over creation, so I don’t get to send anyone else out to network for me or get me business under the guise that they’re the ones doing the video editing, because who the *** are THEY? :D haha I’ll get LESS WORK instead of MORE if I send anyone but myself as my personal representative.

However.. Like I said above.. Internet startups are mainly ideas and programming. It’s recognizing an underserved market and filling that void. The hands-on part is behind the scenes. It doesn’t matter who you send as the representative of the company. Dude’s job could merely be figurehead/front-man, and the money you’re paying him will be worth all the extra opportunities you get to pitch investors and clients if things work out the way you suspect.

In fact, I would advocate this style for anyone that has a WACK PRESENTATION, whether they’re white, black, Asian, Hispanic, whatever.

If you look busted, or you mumble when you try to speak English, or even though you know how to program, you sound like an idiot when you try to articulate your thoughts, or you have serious issues with public speaking, it’s really in your best interests to hire someone better looking, more articulate, and more confident in public than you are to be the spokesperson for your company.

Fortunately, I’m genetically predisposed to being gregarious, which is why I have 3,000 Facebook Friends, 3,000 Twitter Followers 4,000 Google+ Followers, etc, and I do my own networking as well as connecting other people that I determine should know each other for business or personal reasons.

Nobody’s better at being me than I am. >:D

Relationship Issues

I was glad to see a dude from my school alum.MIT.edu/www/BillCammack on the show, and I was also glad that he and his girlfriend created a site/app about dating, being that there’s just about NOTHING I enjoy talking about more than women! >:D

However.. And I realize that CNN may have edited this to look a certain way to craft a storyline, but if you’re dating a chick, her safety is ON YOU and her transportation is ON YOU! :D

For a few months while I was at school, I had an official girlfriend, like people actually knew we were together.

During that time, if I needed to export her from my dorm room in West Campus, *I* had to walk her ass all the way to Mass Ave so she could get the bus back to her school.

It’s all in the game. It’s part of the deal. If there are 8 people living in a 3-bedroom, small-ass-house, and your girlfriend isn’t invited to make it 9 people, how you interact with her is ON YOU.

Word to Herb. That’s what Skype is for. iChat. Do something! :D

On top of that, Angela left 3 daughters back at her crib. Wayne left one son at his crib. I saw some other video of at least one other person having a wife and child, so they’re not likely to be too sympathetic to “My girlfriend has to take the bus” when their loved ones don’t even have that option.

It was cute that CNN brought up the “white girlfriend” storyline and then cut up a bunch of sound bites, so we really have NO IDEA, WHATSOEVER what anybody thought about dude’s girlfriend’s skin color, but, again, it barely, barely, BARELY skimmed the surface and short-changed us AGAIN as far as something that might have been interesting and relevant about this situation and could have sparked important conversation.

Seriously.. CNN left so much material on the cutting room floor that it’s just embarrassing.

Hopefully, they won’t recycle the tapes they used and they’ll do a WAYYYYY extended version of this program (which I doubt), but my suggestion to Angela and friends is to get your hands on the raw footage before they delete it, because there are at least 3 more documentaries y’all can make from this.

Anyway.. The point is that he’s the only one that came with a co-founder. Everyone else in the house was a standalone. That’s automatically going to put you at a disadvantage, because half of your team wasn’t invited to the house.

It’s going to be on you to figure out how to make that situation work for you.

Everybody there was scrambling to make a good demo in the time they had in the house. Nobody has extra time to take care of someone else’s business.

For next season, secure a sponsor like Ford, so there’s at least one car dedicated to the house, so if someone brings extra team members, he or she can make moves without inconveniencing other NewME members.

Walking While Black

So, Wayne was walking down the street between a cafe and the NewME house when he was apparently stopped for WWB.

I would have enjoyed seeing the actual footage, but either CNN decided not to air it or they didn’t have a camera crew with Wayne when the incident occurred.

Arrington had already said that it’s a white and Asian world out there. In situations like that, WWB is going to happen one time, so local cops can put an eye on you, check your ID and check your demeanor.

After that, it should never happen to you again, because the rest of the team should be informed that you’re in the area and liable to be walking around in the middle of the night.

In fact, this goes back to what I was saying about getting a Ford sponsorship, so NewME members don’t have to be walking all over creation.

If it happens to you more than once, *THEN* it’s a potential harassment problem.

I know this sounds dumb, but life isn’t fair. Deal with it.

In fact, it’s not even really a police issue, it’s a guy thing.

When you’re used to an environment being a certain way, and then it changes (in this case, going from having essentially ZERO minorities around to having several, who don’t appear to own cars), you’re going to want some information about the new person/people.

I went to a bar on Long Island one time with a “well-tanned” friend of mine, and we had been hanging out for for a while, when this guy with a fancy Italian nickname walks over and introduces himself to me.

I shook his hand, and eventually, he got around to asking me what we were doing there.

I looked him in the eye and told him we were there to drink some brews and check out some chicks.

He nodded, and then I asked him if that was a problem. He said it wasn’t, so the three of us hung out until he walked back over to his 7-8 local homeboys and told them what he had found out.

My friend and I chilled, without incident, until the bar closed down. Meanwhile, the dudes that had sent their envoy over had proceeded to get in a fight with another crew of 5-6 white dudes, right there on the dance floor of the bar, which was rather entertaining. :D

The point being.. If someone’s concerned that you’ve entered “their space”, it’s actually BETTER FOR YOU that they step to you and decide for sure whether they have a beef with you or not, than it is for them NOT to approach you and then if you eventually have to interact with them, they’re working off of entirely unfounded and incorrect conclusions that they made up about you in their own minds.

Go For Yours

Even though CNN devoted all of like 25 seconds to it, I think that Anthony Frasier‘s storyline was the most currently relevant and compelling narrative amongst the NewME members.

The only way out from under the current American economic crisis for a lot of people is going to be reeducation.. PREFERABLY in a field that doesn’t leave you relying upon local people and companies for job and career opportunities.

If your job is to put doors on cars and they move the plant to another country to maximize profits, you’re not getting another car-door-putting-on job. You have to learn a new skill.. ASAP.

I really like Anthony‘s response to “How can I buy my mother a house?”, and wish him the best of luck with his startup, playd.it, which is described as “Foursquare for gamers. See what your friends are playing on everything from Xbox to mobile. Discover new games and rate the ones you already played.”

This is “Hustle” or “Grind”, even though currently-popular music would have you believe that both of those words have negative, illegal connotations.

Without this type of work ethic, people waste their time instead of improving themselves, learning a new skill, networking, or publicizing their products.

You have to have a goal.. Something to look forward to.. Something you want, like buying your mother a house, and then you have to use the fuel you receive from that to propel you forward into potential greatness.

Whether you succeed or not, at the end of the day, you know you did all you could to create the future you wanted for yourself, instead of slacking, brooding, lamenting, and dreaming about what might have been if you would have applied yourself.

It’s Easy To Talk. It’s Hard To do.

Regardless of CNN trying to tell a 3-hour story in 1 hour, I’m glad they did this installation of “Black In America” about a sector of the society that isn’t typically focused on.

Hopefully, as several of the NewME members stated in the final block, people who “look like them” will get the idea that THEY can do the same things in life if they apply themselves.

Programming isn’t the point. Moving to California isn’t the point. Being an internet-famous blogger or social media personality isn’t the point.

The Point is that all of these startups began with an idea and progressed into implementation.. The Point is that you don’t have to accept the 1-5 ways that society claims you can make money or gain fame or pull chicks or whatever your goal in life is.

Sit down. Lay down. Stand around. Think about what’s missing for you or for someone else. Think about whether you can fill that need. Think about whether it’s economically feasible for you to attempt to fill that need. If it isn’t, sell the idea to someone else, or recruit other people that already have the equipment and skillz you need to pull it off, and offer them some kind of ROI for getting involved with your idea.

It doesn’t even have to be elaborate. You might be really good at using clippers to cut hair and shape up lines. ok, fine.. You look all fresh ‘n fly when you go to the club, but how about lining up a few customers at $10 each, then investing $80 in a shiny, new set of clippers & trimmers, making your money back immediately, and then letting all the rest of it be profit? o_O

Maybe you didn’t even KNOW that there are people that will give you money in return for a percentage of ownership of your company if they believe in your idea.

Maybe you didn’t even consider attempting to get investors and sponsors and passionate consumers and family members to assist you in realizing your goals and dreams.

So I think the show made some important points, although, like I said, being someone that knows what it takes to do what we do on the internet, even to write a long-ass blog post like this one, I’m aware that CNN skimmed over A LOT of the technical aspects of what needed to be done over the weeks that the NewME team was in Silicon Valley.

I’m sure the production goal was to show social issues and not technical ones, but I think that if you’re going to attempt to tell a story detailing bias in a community, you have to describe and display the technical merits and prowess of the people that the bias is supposed to be against.

Like, I can’t just say that someone didn’t hire me to do a video for them because I’m not white.. I’d have to demonstrate that I’m better than the person they hired, and then demonstrate that the potential client KNEW I was better than the other person and still hired them instead of me.

CNN didn’t delve far enough into the individual members’ skillsets to potentially make the case of “This startup should have been funded, but wasn’t, and it’s potentially because of a societal bias in this field”.

Anyway.. I enjoyed the presentation. It was good to see some social media people on the big screen. :)

Good Luck to them on their startups, and Good Luck to Angela on season 02 of the NewME Accelerator! :D

YouTube Link => youtu.be/UHceXqOMFrI

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Internet Blog-Influenced News Cycles

Bill Cammack — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 17:02:39 +0000

According to klout.com/BillCammack, I’m a “Broadcaster”.. To them, that means “You broadcast great content that spreads like wildfire. You are an essential information source in your industry. You have a large and diverse audience that values your content.”

I mention that because I’m glad they changed my category from “Pundit”. Pundits get on my last nerve. :D

I didn’t have anything against pundits before a few months ago when I started following the Republican debates to see whether they were going to field a viable team to potentially defeat President Obama in 2012.

The problem I have with them now isn’t really their fault, but they have to deal with a new development in television broadcasting which I call “Internet Blog-Influenced News Cycles”.

When Hillary Is President

Back in the day… The day was exactly February 09, 2007, in fact, which I know because I posted this link => http://billcammack.com/2007/02/09/reelsolidtv-episode-39-when-hillary-is-president/, I recognized that this was going to be an issue for television stations.

At that time, my long-time friend and business associate Joseph Ruiz and I were videotaping events for politicians.

Also, at that time, I had never even heard of Barack Obama, which is why the post and the video are entitled “WHEN Hillary is President”! :D

Blip.TV Link => blip.tv/file/146156

I was filming with my MiniDV camera, but I saw several camerapeople with large cameras with stickers for television stations on the side.

I remember thinking to myself, I’m going to have this video live way before they are, because *MY* network is already in place, and waiting for media from me to go live.

The stations the camerapeople were shooting for only had news at 12 lunchtime and 6pm, and Hillary spoke around 10:30am. This meant that by the time I encoded my video, tagged and uploaded it, it would be going live around 2pm, whereas the camerapeople wouldn’t even be back to their offices before 12pm with the tapes, AND THEN they were going to have to give the tapes to producers, who were going to have to watch the whole thing for content and then write copy about it and decide which sound bites to use, AND THEN the producers were going to have to hand the tapes off to editors to make into the final product (which I know because that’s what I did for Bloomberg Television and Court TV for years), AND THEN it was going to be another hour before that video would be ready for air, AND THEN they were only going to play a few seconds’ worth of the video because they had so many other things to talk about during their 30 minutes (22 minutes, actually, when you subtract the time for commercials) of television news between 6pm and 6:30, and that’s exactly what happened.

My video went live around 2pm that day. I was watching the news at 12 on the stations that had sent cameras… nothing… When they finally announced the event at 6pm, they used probably about 7 seconds worth of footage, or the amount of time that Ronnie and Mike got to fight on Jersey Shore before the 300-pound bouncers that are always standing barely off-camera jumped in, and then they moved on.

Meanwhile, I showed the entire speech from beginning to end because I had had my camera rolling the entire time, and I have *ZERO* time constraints because I am my own internet network.

2011 – Rise Of The Pundits

Fast-Forward to 2011, and the television news has been fully affected by social media powerhouses like Facebook and Twitter.

They know that if they don’t report things immediately, they’re going to be LATE in the news cycle.

This calls for an entirely different approach from when people used to have to wait for 12pm, 6pm, and 11pm to roll around so we could find out what was going on in the world.

If something important happens at 1pm, 6pm is too late to report it as if it’s news.

This is also why a bunch of newspapers fell off, BTW. The time it takes to figure out the story, get it approved by executive producers, put it in print form, print the copies, and move the physical papers to the locations where people can buy them means that you’re AUTOMATICALLY going to be out-of-date way before your newspaper hits the stands.

The papers that didn’t migrate to an internet-based delivery format lost out.. BIG TIME!

This is why we’ve now experienced the rise of the pundits.

According to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pundit_(expert):

A pundit is someone who offers to mass media his or her opinion or commentary on a particular subject area (most typically political analysis, the social sciences or sport) on which they are knowledgeable. The term has been increasingly applied to popular media personalities.[1] In certain cases, it may be used in a derogatory manner as well, as the political equivalent of “ideologue.”

Pundits are necessary because they’re expected to speak *BEFORE* facts are revealed instead of *AFTER* facts are revealed. o_O

This is simultaneously what makes them so annoying to me.

I agree with the first part of the definition: “Someone who offers to mass media his or her opinion or commentary”, but I disagree with the second part: “on which they are knowledgeable”.

Because you know something about politics doesn’t mean you know *ANYTHING* about a particular political situation.

For instance.. I know about music mixing. If you show me a video and then say “The mixer used Waves’ Renaissance Compressor instead of Waves’ PuigChild compressor.. Why did s/he do that? o_O” I’m going to tell you that you get two different sounds by using the two different compressors on a track, AND that RComp is transparent (to my hearing), while PuigChild colors the sound (makes it sound different than it originally did).

However.. If you were to play a song for me and then ask me the dumb-ass question “Do you think the mixer used RComp or PuigChild on this track? o_O”, I have no choice but to tell you a bunch of garbage, because I. DON’T. KNOW!

Either the track sounded the same before the compressor went on, in which case, I’d guess RComp, *OR* it sounded different before the compressor went on, in which case, I’d guess PuigChild, and that *ASSUMES* that the person asking me had some sort of advance knowledge that it HAD to be one of the two that was used.

What Do You THINK?

This is why pundits are so annoying.

The news cycle is now immediate. I find out things from Twitter and Facebook way faster than I do from television, even if I leave a news channel running live all day.

This is because if a bridge falls down or a plane lands in some water, Citizen Journalists don’t have to wait to decide whether they care about an event or not, and they don’t have to wait for EPs (Executive Producers) to approve their media. They just send it.

Granted, and to the credit of Mass Media, there’s way more fact-checking that goes on before they output their content all late and after-the-fact.

The new immediacy of the news cycle, which has been created by internet connectivity and Citizen Journalism, has made pundits necessary to fill the space between when a television station finds out about something and when they can actually report something substantial about it.

Meanwhile, it’s all garbage.

As soon as the Herman Cain, feel-a-chick-up-in-a-car allegations were dropped, all of a sudden, we were subjected to infinite opinions about Sexual Harassment and whether he did it or not.

Not only did we have to hear this ONCE, but CONSISTENTLY and PERSISTENTLY, until he finally had a press conference to deny the allegations.

Meanwhile, none of these people know jack-**** about jack-**** because they weren’t there (if she has ever been in a car with Cain at all), and they don’t know what happened, so they need to STFU.

BLAH BLAH BLAH Should he bow out of the race? o_O

BLAH BLAH BLAH Are women going to come out of the woodwork, accusing him of harassment? o_O

BLAH BLAH BLAH Is he going to lose a lot of support in the next poll? o_O

Meanwhile.. When the actual fact rolls around, he’s still at the top of the charts with Romney, and when he says the allegations are unfounded, he practically receives a standing ovation at the Republican Debate, so all this punditry was just a big waste of time, wasn’t it?

C’Mon, Sunn :/

To make matters worse, the television stations feel the need to discuss these things consistently, throughout their broadcast day, in order to appear “on top of the news”.

I wish there were a “How do you know that?” or “What facts are you basing your opinion on?” button that we could press and get these people to STFU when they’re just running their mouths about things they don’t know anything about.

In fact, their opinions don’t matter, and except for actual experts in certain things like health matters and monetary policy, there’s only a slight percentage chance that anything they say will turn out to be accurate at all.

The only reason the experts are accurate is because they’re giving their opinions based on a series of actual situations that panned out a certain way in the past.

What can you say for sure in the Cain situation?.. Nothing.

Their statements are diametrically opposed. Either he’s lying or she’s lying. There’s no statistical evidence supporting either guess. Sometimes guys are telling the truth in Sexual Harassment situations, and sometimes gals are. Sometimes, they both are, but they interpreted the situation differently or remember it differently, especially if alcohol is involved.

All you can do, honestly, is report the facts (or lack thereof) and then move on.

Since this isn’t acceptable entertainment, a whole bunch of know-nothings are booked to talk yang on television, for essentially ZERO educational value.

To make matters worse.. Depending on which station you tune in to, you get a totally different spin on the exact same content.

One channel says “Please don’t frack our water, so we can light it on fire and get sick from drinking it”, and then the next channel says “**** your health! :D .. We don’t want government telling us we can’t pollute your water”.

One channel says “The only way to stimulate the economy is to put more money in the hands of ‘Job Creators’ by not raising taxes against them and simplifying the tax code so they have confidence that the game’s not going to change on them next year after they hire a bunch of people” and the next channel says “We need to go into more debt and tax people more so we can put Americans to work right now”.

Meanwhile, nothing actually gets done, and people continue to starve and lose their homes, with no end in sight.

What I’m wondering is that if these pundits are supposed to be so knowledgeable about their specific areas of concentration, how come they’re not arriving at the exact same conclusions and providing viable and irrefutable solutions to this current American crisis? o_O
–
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Google Plus Circles – How To Use Them

Bill Cammack — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 14:37:34 +0000

Google Plus Circles are basically what I’ve been waiting for for quite a long time, now.

Here’s the video from Google that basically explains what they are:

Youtube Link => [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocPeAdpe_A8]

That’s all well & good, and it gives you a basic understanding of what you can do with circles, but if you’re “Internet Famous” or even just a power-user of social media sites, you’re going to need a better plan than “I CAN SHARE MY PARTY PHOTOS WITH MY COLLEGE FRIENDS!!! :D LULZ LOL FTW F2F IRL!!! :D”

You’re actually going to need to employ a 3-pronged attack if you’re going to build successful circles. “My College Friends” will quickly become a useless category to you if you have a whole lot of college friends.

This is because your college friends are all INDIVIDUALS and don’t have the same interests and don’t share the same quality of content and aren’t interested in the same topics. o_O

Wait.. Let me back up a little…

People Skillz

The reason I’m talking about this is because I’m popular In Real Life (otherwise known as “IRL”). Most people on the internet are not.

In fact, before Twitter, most people that you see with a lot of followers never had anyone listen to anything they had to say ever in life, which is why the service is so popular. You get to feel like thousands of people are listening to what you have to say. You feel popular. You feel interesting.

Meanwhile, I’ve been managing groups of followers since my earliest recorded memories, around Kindergarten (5 years old, in the United States of America).

As far as internet stats, I currently have 2,879 Facebook Friends and 3,127 Twitter Followers if you’d like to check it.

And here’s what the readership to my website, BillCammack.com looked like two years ago, in July, 2009:

So, Anyway…

Almost two weeks ago, before I received an invite to Google+ from my friend Jeffrey Taylor, I had never heard of it.

I had never heard of it and I wasn’t even checkin’ for Google as far as social stuff after Wave was WACK and Buzz was WACK, I had pretty much had it with their attempts at social.

Fast-Forward 12 days after receiving my invite, and 970 people have added me to their circles (though the lagging stats on my profile page says that only 692 people have me in their circles), or maybe that has something to do with whether people are broadcasting who’s in their circles or not. \o/

Circle Strategy

I started out using circles the way the video tells you to.. Grouping people by level of acquaintance or things you appear to have in common.

It became obvious, relatively quickly, that this wasn’t the way to go.

I hopped on Google+’s “Hangout” feature (no-cost group video chat for up to ten people) and had a brainstorming session with my friend Baratunde.

Baratunde’s an actual comedian. He’s an entertainer. I have fans, but he has *FANS*. I wanted to know what he was planning to deal with “circles”. He spoke on his thoughts about circles in this public Google+ post, entitled “Will Google Plus let me hang out with Halle Berry?”.

One of the things we discussed in that conversation was that circles needed to be concentric, not mutually exclusive.

For example.. I might go to a blip.tv party, and there could easily be 60-80 people that I personally know in the same room.

That doesn’t mean that we all share the same level of friendship, as Facebook would have us believe.

That doesn’t mean we all share the same depth of conversation, interaction or intimacy with each other.

That blip party isn’t a bunch of separate, mutually-exclusive parties.

It’s one large party which contains many, many sets of varying levels of relationships which intermingle with each other during the evening.

Similarly.. When you’re interacting online, you’re not dealing with mutually-exclusive groups.

Some of your friends from college are still your friends now.

Some of your IRL friends are also your coworkers.

Some of your coworkers are your girlfriends. >:D

Some of your girlfriends also like hiking or web design or debating dating situations.

If you group people the way you’re told to, you’re gonna get screwed, because you’re mixing people with differing qualities of content creation.

You’re going to end up with too much noise and not enough signal, and then you’re going to have to write blog posts about how your wife bounced from Google+ because she couldn’t take it anymore.

So.. The first thing you have to know in order to do it properly, is that you need to set up two different hierarchies of circles:

Listening Circles
Sharing Circles

I have people that I’m actual IRL friends with and I enjoy clinking brews with them at the bar and I totally enjoy their company in person, but the internet content they post is absolute DRIVEL! :D

dictionary.reference.com/browse/drivel – 2: childish, silly, or meaningless talk or thinking; nonsense; twaddle.

It’s complete garbage. I’m not trying to hear that. In fact.. I’m not even trying to have to scroll past that while I’m looking through interesting, relevant material.

If I made a circle called “Good Friends Of Mine”, it would be populated with garbage.

Fortunately, Google+ enables us to *IMMEDIATELY* promote and demote people in pretty much less than two seconds.

As soon as you see something that disturbs your reading experience, you hover over their name and get “Add to circles”, then hover over that and either demote them or remove them from your circles entirely. No muss, No fuss! >:D

After almost two weeks of dealing with content quality interruptions, I realized that the way to go is grouping people by the quality of their content… IIIIIIII HAVE A DREEEEEEAM… THAT ONE DAYYYY…

Listening Circles

So that’s your first set.. Your hierarchy of Listening Circles, grouped in order by quality of content.

What this allows you to do is cascade down levels of relevance.

First, you click on your circle that includes people that you always want to hear from.

This circle is valuable because Google+ moves very quickly, like Twitter does. If you don’t have a circle where you can find things posted hours ago or even days ago from the people you REALLY want to keep up with, you’ll never be able to find them if they’re mixed in with a bunch of other people’s content.

Once you’re up-to-date with the important posts, click on the circle of people that always have something relevant, intelligent, intelligently humorous, insightful or important to say.

This is where you’re going to experience your first round of demotions. :) SOMEBODY in this list is going to disappoint you with drivel and get demoted to a lesser ring.

Next, check the circle with people that post good material, but it’s leaning towards leisure-time reading.

This is where you’re going to experience your first round of promotions. Some people are going to surprise you with insight or relevance, and you’re going to want them to be in a higher-priority circle next time you do this. :)

After that, you have the circle with the cat-picture-posting people… The circle with the people that came from Tumblr & Twitter and don’t know to do anything other than incessantly post drivel every hour on the hour… The circle with the people that never, ever, EVER have anything to say for themselves that doesn’t have to do with Social Media, Search Engine Optimization, or shilling for their company or brand… The circle with people that you don’t know anything about, but you’re willing to give them a chance to make it into a relevant circle…..

If you want to do Pot Luck, you click on “Stream” in your sidebar, and you can see material in chronological order from everybody in all of your circles.

Sharing Circles

Second.. You need sharing circles.

“My College Friends” don’t all care about the music you’re working on or your business connections or actually *ANY* one particular topic you might feel like posting about on the internet.

You have to develop lists, groups, sets, circles, whatever, of Passionate Consumers of whatever your blog topic was.

If you post about social media, add the people that +1 or contribute thoughts to that thread to your Social Media Sharing Circle. Same thing if you post about dating or video production or whatever else you normally like to discuss online.

What you end up with is people in overlapping circles which work efficiently in the same way that your IRL interactions with people work. You hear what you want to hear from people when you want to hear it, and you tell (to a degree) people about what they’re likely to want to hear about.

If you have something you want to generically broadcast to everyone, you can elect to share it to either “Extended Circles” (a complicated version of “Friends of Friends” in Facebook-Speak) or “Public” (a complicated version of the main timeline, if you’re used to Twitter).

The one problem I have right now with “Public” is that there’s no way to restrict comments on your post to people that you’ve vetted. You can do that on Facebook by making your post visible to “Everyone”, but having your privacy settings restrict comments to people that you’re actually connected to.

Of course, you can block people for making inane comments in your thread, but I’m more of a Prevention person than a Cure person, Nah Meen? >:D

Hangout Circles

The third set of circles you’re going to need, well, if you’re the type of person to take advantage of group video chatting, that is.. is Hangout Circles.

A Google+ Hangout is a video chat between anywhere from 2 – 10 people.

well… unless you do it like Facebook press conferences and have 10 people bum rush the show on the same video camera.. then, I guess, hypothetically, A Google+ video chat fits up to 100 people. :P

But seriously, folks…

Group Video Chatting is definitely the move, but the quality level depends on the people that you get to join the chat.

When you create it, you have the option of sharing the invitation with individuals or circles (or extended circles or “public”).

If you don’t curate your hangout circles, you’re going to end up with pot luck, which may or may not go well for you.

On top of that, if you have thousands of followers, there are only 10 slots to begin with. It doesn’t make sense to invite 900 people to something like that.

What you need to do is either get your set of 10 people together ahead of time, perhaps using a Facebook Event, since Google+ doesn’t have Events yet, or at least get a core of people together where you know you’re going to have a good conversation once you invite more of your circles to the hangout.

There are way more issues with hangouts that I’ll talk about in another post, but essentially, to me, hangouts are the killer app to Google+.

The only reason I haven’t logged more hangout hours already is that I’ve been focused on figuring out circles.

Long Story Short… (too late)

Google+ is still in a closed format they call a Limited Field Trial, but you should be able to join up at plus.google.com/up/start/ pretty soon.

Most of what I said isn’t going to be useful to you if you know like 49 people, total. :)

In fact, most people didn’t bother to read this far, and they really don’t need to.

The people that need to read this are those of us that experience diminishing returns from social media sites because they eventually become popular.

Foursquare was very useful before it became a fad to be connected to people on that particular LBS (location-based service). As soon as the civilians found out about it and were able to add people they already followed on Twitter and Facebook, we had to make a choice between being sociable and using the service for its intended purpose.

Google+ Circles are a good way to deal with posting private and public content from the same account.. Private, meaning sent to people you specifically want to get that communication, not Private as in “Let me send this chick a picture of tha dilznick and get fired from my job.”

I think a lot of people are going to bounce from the service because they’ll feel like it’s Twitter with the 140 character restriction removed.

That’s pretty much what Jaiku was, back in the day.

Google+ is a new game, altogether. It’s an incredible time sink because there’s so much information (though, granted, a lot of it’s reduntant reposting) that you receive from so many people, and then you can actually follow the conversations connected to that content.

It’s not going to be for everybody. Trolls will probably have no presence on G+ at all, especially since their accounts are linked to their government names, like profiles.google.com/BillCammack and they’re not going to be able to hide behind fancy screen names and try to act disrespectfully.

Lurkers will be there, silent in the background, as usual. Google+ is the opportunity for ACTUAL thought leaders and aggressive debaters to shine.

The time is NOW! >:D Skynet has been activated. The online and offline worlds have been brought one critical step closer to each other. If you have your listening circles and sharing circles set up properly, you’ll thrive in this environment.

If not, you’ll suffer through a flood of minutiae and drivel from cat-picture and animated .GIF posters and decide that Google+ isn’t worth anything to you socially.

For cyborgs like The Kid, Google+ is gonna be big! :D hehe I’ll see you at the top, or I’ll see you at the bottom.

Welcome to Gladiator School! >:D

Facebook “Upgrade” Sucks Again, As Usual

Bill Cammack — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 10:00:46 +0000

Facebook “upgraded” our personal profile pages last night.

If you’ve been on Facebook for more than a year, you know why the word upgrade is in quotes. The changes they make are consistent with a computer figuring out probabilities and not with a gregarious human being saying “Changing XYZ would be an UPGRADE to my facebook experience”.

That’s Not How I Speak

I graduated with my degree in Management Information Systems from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology http://alum.mit.edu/www/billcammack/). Peep the hardware:

There are lots of people that don’t know this.

They don’t know because I don’t tell them.

I don’t begin conversations with “Hi.. I’m Bill Cammack, and I’m an Emmy Award-Winning video editor and MIT graduate”. I mean… Who DOES that? :/

How OBNOXIOUS would that be if every time you went to speak to someone, they rattled off a list of information that you never asked them about?

Apparently, whomever’s idea it was to redesign the Facebook profile pages wouldn’t mind, because that’s what happens now, every time you click on a profile.

New Layout

I was curious to find out what the new page layout was about, so I clicked on the button to “upgrade”, not imagining that there was NO. *******. ROLLBACK. FUNCTION!!! :D JEEZ! smh

So now, anyone that goes to my page is greeted with information that a) I never would have told them if we had met each other IRL, and b) probably has NOTHING TO DO with the reason why they came to my page in the first place.

This information was fine in the sidebar. If I went to someone’s page and was interested in what they were talking about, I glanced to the left and had whatever EXTRANEOUS INFORMATION about them that a) they wanted to share, and b) I wanted to know, at my fingertips.

Now.. Every time I go to to someone’s page, I’m greeted with what school they attended, where they live, where they’re originally from… This would make sense if it were ONLY on their “info” page, but it’s on their wall as well. It’s like WHO CARES? \o/ WHERE’S THE CONTENT I CAME HERE FOR?

To add insult to injury, a filmstrip of images that you’re tagged in has been planted directly under the information you wouldn’t have shared in the first place and above where your actual wall content begins.

Whether or not you give a flying **** who this person hangs out with, you’re reminded each time you visit their page, unless they’re one of those people who blocks their FB pictures from friends being able to view them (or, at least, blocks *YOU* from being able to see their pics! :D).

Sidebars

The formerly-useful left sidebar has now been replaced with a parade of your friends. That’s it. No more links to other websites of yours. No more sidebar widgets. It’s like a dating site. They list “In A Relationship With”, “Friends” and “Family”. Why is that sidebar content? Who cares? If you care whether someone’s dating anyone, you click on INFO and find out. It’s a waste of real estate.

In the sidebar on the right side, you see mutual friends that you have in common. Once again, this is functional from Facebook’s viewpoint, so that people can find more people to connect to and create more traffic for them and more pageviews, leading to serving more advertisements.

For the user, this serves no purpose at all.

The rest of that sidebar is populated with advertisements, like it used to be.

I’m guessing that Facebook made the sidebars useless so they can emulate a Tumblr style of all relevant information residing in one vertical column. This makes sense for their mobile efforts. I’m sure that whichever robot calculated this configuration arrived at an efficient design.

Unfortunately, as usual with Facebook “upgrades”, functionality for the user has been REMOVED instead of being ENHANCED. It’s practically a conspiracy! :D haha I wouldn’t be surprised if after the next couple of “UPGRADES”, Facebook announced premium accounts where you could get back all the functionality they’ve been stripping away if you PAY THEM MONTHLY! :/

Bill Cammack » tech

Videoblogging & Vanity

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