Been catching up with Jay and Ryanne who are over from the states in Melbourne. They have come to hang out with Adrian Miles. So, there has been lots of video talk with some inspiring future visions surfacing on the fringes of conversations. There has been kangaroo mobs, a lecture in intergrated media amongst other catch ups.

Jay Dedman and Ryanne Hodson packed a bit into their workshop session as part of the Videodefunct and Showinabox: Hitting vlogging with a hammer workshop at montevideo in Amsterdam. The showinabox community are frustrated with the way a blog content management system handles video. The video clips posted chronologically cause a big part of this frustration as it makes it difficult to find and access video that are not featured as the latest post. In other words the vlogger may what the user to view clips that have been posted some time ago. They are also wanting more aesthetic control, where as media producers they should be able to alter how there video looks and is published online. The idea in addition to this is to provide simple open source tools that follow the YouTube model of accessibility and ease of use. Showinthebox is a response to these objectives where a number of tools are brought together into a type of package, a box.

To get their point across about being able to archive and locate videos in a more open-ended manner on a vlog, they showed a number of examples that people are working on, in response to this issue. Each of these examples demonstrate varying approaches towards customising the index page interface.

Lost in Light 8mm film project. The number of categories demonstrates in part the process of archiving on a conventional vlog. A file Directory has been added to provide alternative access to the posted clips.

Swanjana Life in India On this vlog the conventional sidebar attributes have been dropped, the interface simplified with a video thumbnails at the bottom that lead to a video archive page. The vPIP plugin is being used to provide a range of online video formats for download. These are featured at the bottom of each poster. (as a side note it was interesting to learn that mefeedia created an early plugin now defunct, to create video archive pages on vlogs.)

Shadow World uses a chronology blog drop down archive.

Columbia Migration Project This vlog has had an HTML makeover. People are the key focus and they have been represented on the index page in simple videowall type layout.

Jay then moved to the blip.tv showplayer. The showplayer is like a self-contained video display window that has thumbnails down the side as a list of videos. What is displayed and searched can be customised to a certain degree. But the feature has limitations in terms of making associations across clips and breaking the self-contained nature. The showplayer Jay argued breaks away from blog functionality. i.e comments; permalinks etc and action scripts are an issue. Using this a key focus the vPIP community are interested in maintaining, utilising and developing this blog functionality.

Moving back to showinthebox, vPIP they stated is one of the few players that offers all the online video formats including open source with the facility to add HD formats. Looking for another way to make connections across clips beyond categories and dated archives there is the related videos feature on YouTube. This type of feature has been added to the Showinthebox index interface. An example is Ryan is Hungry. There is also a recent video strip on the bottom of the page. The related videos are created using a showinabox developed plugin by Charles Iliya Krempeaux called “VideoPress Related Videos”.

Ryanne then went through using vPIP. The process was very labour intensive in regards to setting up compression files for each online video format and then inputting a url address for each uploaded video file. But the plugin provides a lot of flexibility and room for choice.

Following using blog functionality the semanal.org project they are working on provides a function to video comment. The vlog uses comments as a way to post to the vlog. This recent project along with the other features being developed by the showinthebox community demonstrates re-working a vlog to suit video – while still keeping the features which make a blog a blog.

They also pointed out the http://havemoneywillvlog.com/ project where the vlog community are encouraged to raise funds to support each others vlog projects. This project reflects some of the P2P Foundation research into differing types of economies.

Finally, in talking with Ryanne afterwards I was fascinated with her http://revlog.blogspot.com/ revlog project. Here hours are put into selecting and posting chosen vlogs in a revlog as a form of personal vlog archive. A process I am familiar with in delicious only this applies to vlogs, using delicious RSS.

I have been organising a vlogging workshop/presentation at Montevideo in Amsterdam. A summary of the workshop came together today.

Videodefunct and Showinabox: Hitting vlogging with a hammer
date: Thursday Jan 17 from 12.00 – 17.00
place: Workspace in the Netherlands Media Art Institute, Keizersgracht 264 Amsterdam

A workshop presented in two parts that looks at knocking vlogging into shape and bashing it into oblivion. The videodefunct collective focus on poetic approaches towards the way video is presented and curated by inverting the blog interface. Showinthebox aim to improve vlogging accessibility and aesthetic control with a user-friendly toolkit. Both projects use the open source blogging application WordPress and question whether vlogs need to move beyond the constraints of blogs.

1200 – 1400 Videodefunct (Keith Deverell and Seth Keen)
1400 – 1600 Showinthebox (Jay Dedman & Ryanne Hodson)
1600 – 1700 Vlogging panel discussion

links

http://greyspace.com.au/blog/
http://keithdeverell.net
http://www.videodefunct.net/
http://www.videodefunct.net/pedestrian/player/
http://www.videodefunct.net/theInvertedPedestrian/
http://www.videodefunct.net/banter
http://www.videodefunct.net/theDrunkenTruth/

1000 stories is a project by Florian Thalhofer and Mark Simon.

These are vignettes of people in a type of environmental portraiture style. Florian in a vlog structure publishes candid interviews where he lets the people talk openly, along with short clips that he narrates their personal stories over the top of with subtitles in English and other written stories with supporting images. These posts viewed as a group begin to demonstrate his simple intention to provide his viewpoint on another country through a process of interaction with people with a video camera. The varying approaches used to capture these stories also begin to utilise the multi-format nature of a blog where there is a potential to document a subject in a number of ways using mixed-media.

The project description:

Starting in New York on October 1, Florian Thalhofer, a new-media artist and documentary filmmaker from Berlin, will travel all over the United States by motorcycle (generously provided by BMW), while U.S. filmmaker Mark Simon will travel throughout Germany by car. During their month-long journeys, each filmmaker will write about his experiences, collect stories, and conduct interviews, all of which will be posted daily at www1000stories.com – their video log.

Their route will be determined by interested folks in the U.S. and in Germany who reply to their “Americans wanted”/ “Germans wanted” ad on the web. Readers are invited to get in touch via www1000stories.com to suggest itineraries and potential interview candidates and to comment on the project.

Defining what a ‘videoblog’ is comes close to defining what constitutes ‘new media’. Both mean different things to different people within varying contexts. In this instance, the definition of video meets the definition of blog. But, there does not seem to be the same confusion around the definition of blogging. Video in this equation after all has many contexts and uses from formats to practices. For example, Tom Sherman discusses in ‘Video 2005: Three texts on video’ the continuing misconception of video and film practices. I also wonder if the compulsion to clarify videoblogging is about the form being in the process of maturity and in many ways subservient to blogging. Meanwhile, the videobloggers continue the debate around the definition of videoblogs within the videoblogging community. Richard BF in ‘The definition of videoblogging as a genre’ with a follow up by Michael Verdi ‘What is a videoblog?’. Along with another recent perspective from Adrian Miles, ‘Being on the Television’.

T-Vlog …is a participatory tv-platform – a direct link between viewer and transmission. Videos uploaded here are transmitted on Copenhagen local-tv station tv-tv. You too can become a t-vlogger!

The Art of the Overhead The way that Microsoft’s PowerPoint application owes its concept to the Overhead is a schoolbook example of remediation. Yet, is it possible to re-capture this “old” media through artistic interpretation in order create something neither simply “new” nor nostalgic, but a medium for telling meaningful stories today?

There is some interesting initiatives going on in and around Malmo University (Sweden) in Media and Communication.

Networked Digital Storytelling is a course that critically explores the artistic possibilities of new networked media such as videoblogs, social media, mashups and locative media. Participants in the course use these technologies in a series of workshops built around the theme of mediating and telling stories about the city.

The videodefunct project has been selected into NewMediaFest 2007. The list of selected works are available to view on the Java Museum site. Details of a+b=ba?. The proposed question:

whether blogs and/or blogging can be tools for creating a new type of net based art.

Anna from engage media who was helping andy out at the still/open workshop put me onto show-in-the-box.

WordPress is a fantastic blogging tool and we’ve been using it to run videoblogs for a few years now. Over time we’ve begun to develop and use some tools that make WordPress better suited for video. Show In A Box was created to bring these all together and create the ultimate videoblogging platform.

There is some discussion happening on the videoblogging mail list on independent video production including this initiative, SpinExpress.

“It’s never been a better time to be an independent video producer – the space is wide open. So we built SpinXpress to make collaboration easy so you can raise the quality of your production while maintaining your independence.”

The website includes a link to a videoblog.