Seth Keen

Seesmic is a recent sharing platform that has been developed around using online video for commenting. Background on wikipedia including the person behind this venture. It has been seen as a version of twitter video and is directed towards webcams. A flash interface is being used with a MySQL database.

From the engage media newsletter: The open video alliance wiki and principles.

http://osvideo.constantvzw.org/ – open source video blog

Open Source Video is a project of Constant, a Brussels based organisation for Arts and Media. This weblog is a collective testsite for producing and distributing open source video. Here we keep traces of experiments with software for sharing and editing video, and report on what we found to be effective hardware, good linux distributions and helpful configurations. Also: tips and hints on where to find manuals, practical info on using software etc. This blog contains posts on annotating, tracing, collectively editing and sharing video online. We are interested in finding ways to make archived video material accessible, to make it searchible and keep video archives alive by allowing the content to be re-interpreted.

emphermal media - Internet Attractions: online video and user-generated ephemera

Conference and call for papers:

The first workshop in the series focuses on user-generated ephemera, in particular the proliferation of online video. The emerging digital
media environment has created new opportunities for user-generated content to achieve broad distribution and so create a public of users.
This has been typified, and enabled, by recent phenomena such as YouTube. The fleeting and competing nature of user-generated content
has placed particular emphasis on the role of media performance – what can be understood broadly as a display of communicative competence for assessment by an audience. The workshop will examine the status and significance of user-generated ephemera (in particular online video)
and the kinds of performance inscribed herein.

http://www.beyondtext.ac.uk/

The Beyond Text strategic programme…identified visual communication, sensory perception, orality and material culture as key concerns for 21st century scholarship and the wider community.

A post fast film on the Cause Global: Social Media for Social Change sent to me by MB.

Some of the biggest global dramas of recent times—the crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Burma, the China earthquake, suicide bombers in Israel, the hanging of Sadaam Hussein—all were filmed on cell phones, snippets of strife seen and shared by people all over the world, thanks to digital video.

But there also is creativity in these ephemeral, on-the-fly images of our accelerated times—and a new artistic medium for both filmmakers and social advocates…

Call for papers for Video Vortex 4 in Split, Croatia – 22-23 May, 2009.

Please send in a 500-word abstract and a short bio to Dan Oki (danoki [at] xs4all.nl) before February 5, 2009.

New themes are:
Telepresence and Web Aesthetics
Social Cinema
Architecture and Moving Image
Video Sharing
Technology and politics of the moving image
Literature and video online narrative

In the XMedia lab Nick Di Martino from The American Fim Institute (AFI) was first to demonstrate his wares, which included presenting a number of projects that are about to be released. He was quick to point out that “online video is exploding”.

Research funds seemed to be directed at very elaborate complex online video players. These players are attempting to integrate as many aspects of social media as possible into the interface. Another key issues is attracting users/viewers by optimising searching. Martino like many others in the conference stated that it is not worth trying to compete with meta-platforms like YouTube. The idea they argue is to distribute your content as far and wide as possible and look for follow-up or return traffic, along with channel partnerships with bigger platforms.

Martino demonstrated beta versions of the following AFI projects:

AFI Screen nation

An issue for the AFI is working out how to integrate User Generated Content (UGC) with high-end production content and overall it is about balancing “scale, usability, uniqueness, ubiquity…” In this player UCG content is clearly delineated from professional production material. Later in the conference others spoke about creating an even approach to both forms of content where both are integrated and given the same sort of respect and hierarchy.

This player had elaborate ‘tag feed’ drop downs and a ‘tag manager’ that enabled users to add and manage their own tags. There was also a video cloud (a video egg) that used image thumbnails in a type of tag cloud structure. A ‘molecule’ feature worked like a VJ type application where molecules are connected in a hypertext type structure. These are portable like a widget and can be transferred to mobile hardware. Down the side was a community feed which acted as a forum for users.

A note worth thinking about in relation to thinking about chapters and tagging is planning linear content in advance so that it can be fragmented and classified.

AFI Digital Content Lab
Filmocracy – PBS

Nic mentioned a semantic web type approach: Freebase about:

Freebase, created by Metaweb Technologies, is an open database of the world’s information. It’s built by the community and for the community – free for anyone to query, contribute to, build applications on top of, or integrate into their websites.

Already, Freebase covers millions of topics in hundreds of categories. Drawing from large open data sets like Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, and the SEC archives, it contains structured information on many popular topics, including movies, music, people and locations – all reconciled and freely available via an open API.

One perspective from the mediamatic website titled Select and Combine, The Rise of Database Narratives

Database narrative refers to narratives whose structure exposes or thematizes the dual processes of selection and combination that lie at the heart of all stories, Kinder explains, particular data – characters, images, sounds, events – are selected from a series of databases or paradigms, which are then combined to generate specific tales.

The BBC Innovation Labs 2007 covers amongst other things some valid questions on online documentary production. Note ‘UGC’ is an acronym for User-Generated Content.

Cross Platform Documentary: The growth of social media services had led to an explosion of new and innovative ways of realising and delivering documentary online. How can films be made, presented, shared, augmented, annotated, located, classified and discovered using these new tools? What impact does this have on the craft of documentary and what models should be explored in the future? How can we discover what constitutes documentary in the digital space? Does it have to be ‘snackable’? Can it be modular and episodic? Is it possible to be an auteur and simultaneouslly incorporate UGC content?

There has been some discussion in the Guardian online on publishing video art on the Internet, in the article ‘Moving images stay in the dark – Why are video artists so reluctant to show their work on the internet?’ It is interesting to see that reputable institution like the Museum of Modern Art in New York has created a video channel on YouTube to publish video art trailers. Yet as the article points out there is not a lot of video art collections showing up online, instead most of the video art on YouTube is captured and posted by people attending exhibitions (via mobiles etc.) Although it is interesting to see what is happening with tank.tv in the UK via www.lux.org.uk and the luxonline project.

Back to the earlier Guardian article which discusses things like size restriction (working in the miniature), quality and of course the ability for the viewer to scroll back and forth. In terms of YouTube having frame size, file type and therefore compression quality control of your video uploads this does not leave much room for individual aesthetic input from the artist. I see this as setting publishing standards, a referral to old media like TV broadcasting. A video sharing site like blip.tv at least lets you chose some file types, determine frame size and choose a creative commons license. Also there is some key differences in the terms of use in regards to copyright and intellectual property. But this type of flexiability could be taken a lot further. I discuss the notion of standards in more detail here on my blog. The idea that apple also like YouTube aims to gain some form of control over the way content is distributed often in a manner that Nicholas Carr points out as being unsympathetic towards what the Internet offers as a networked environment.

The question here is whether artists, (like YouTube or even Apple with video podcasts) should be thinking of the Internet as a place to reproduce video in a single-channel form (or in the way that it was originally designed for off the web, i.e live etc.)? This approach is emblematic of most television, cinema or even a lot of video art. Perhaps it is more about how video may be repurposed within this environment. I notice on the MOMA YouTube channel that the closest they can come to this, is a lame form of trailer, again a direct referral to cinema.

In this other Guardian article ‘Bringing video art online’ video art as a commodity, along with copyright issues is seen as restricting factors. Although, the writer points out that painting and sculpture has got past this barrier quite some time ago.