Lifehacker's Five Best Video Sharing Sites

Lifehacker's Five Best Video Sharing Sites


The comments on this site are exceptionally helpful for figuring out which works best for your purposes, and there are alternate suggestions as well.  Viddler sounds promising because of the lack of time restriction.

Glass Firefox Add-on - Write on top of the web!

I just came across this on ReadWriteWeb. It's a Firefox extension, soon on Chrome, that is currently in private beta. You can ask them for an invite on Twitter or email iwantin@writeonglass.com (which I just did!). Basically, it's bringing transparent Post-It notes/stickies for annotations to the web, exactly where you want them.

"One of the most interesting things that struck us was how unwebby the idea is. You don't interact with the page, just with your friends. This app seems like an especially good fit for the visual, stripped-down interface and immediate feedback on a device like the iPad. It's also well-suited to collaborations where multiple users need to talk about a project unambiguously."

Linkage here:
RWW - Write On Top of the Internet With New Firefox Add-On
Home page

Twitter

UPDATE: I just got an invite and have 8 more to give out if any of you want one.  I expect it's probably the same one for everyone, "welikeyoutoo".  

Assignment for 07/29/10

1. Read/skim through this NYTimes piece about privacy with regard to social media:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25privacy-t2.html?ref=magazine

2.Bring in video elements that you've shot with the intent of editing together into a short piece (30-90 seconds final duration). Should be more than one clip but no more than half a dozen. You'll actively work with that content in class on Thursday.

Notes from class

Here's our notes from last week's class (shout out to Ana and Meghan):

Producing for Multiple Media

Book -- heavy books, size=weight, tactile, interactive w/hands, smells, write them/annotate, collect them (take up space), pages, pictures, words, jacket (summarizing, marketing), protect, give/share, massmarket, academic, nonfiction, homemade | 2010: ebooks, DRM (digital rights management), braille

Music/Audio -- mp3, vinyl, tape, DRM, music videos

Video/TV -- tell a story, antenna (broadcast), cable boxes, satellite, VCRs, DVRs (increased volume, automatic), captioning, cc, descriptive captioning

The Web/sites -- computer/browser/connection, phones (can be frustrating), mobile version, bigger type, alt tags

"So in this day and age (2010), content 'wants' to be free of formatting constraints."

Social Media | Network: Friends, "friends", associates, post/share opinions, updated in general, hot issue, avenue for self-promotion, photos, video, blog, text, link

Different social media "platforms": linkedin vs twitter vs facebook vs myspace vs blackberry community vs. flickr vs. messageboards vs xbox live vs blogs

Account/membership

Privacy; Critical Mass

Cross-posting

Hashtag: #brookline

Basic workflow for content/video production:
• PLAN
• INPUT/CREATE
• PROCESS/EDIT
• OUTPUT
• SHARE/PROMOTE/TAG

SD/HD

16X9, 4X3 -- aspect ratio

720p 1080p 1080i

Here's some of the links we looked at:


http://www.flipboard.com/

http://scripting.com/stories/2010/07/22/aboutFlipboardAndReadingSu.html

http://www.acrylicapps.com/times/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a_KF7TYKVc&feature=channel

Typing your handwriting!

Convergence! Roger Ebert just re-tweeted about this.

You can program the way you write into your computer really easily, edit your handwriting, and then type with it.

Thai commercial

I came across a funny commercial that I thought our Thai classmates might enjoy.

Diaspora

This group is creating an alternative to Facebook. You can see the full site here.

Diaspora: Personally Controlled, Do-It-All, Distributed Open-Source Social Network from daniel grippi on Vimeo.

Overhaul

We've all heard of people becoming famous off of youtube. A boy from my town, Bo Burnham, posted a few videos on youtube and voila, he is the youngest person to ever have a comedy special on Comedy Central. Youtube has offered millions of people a way to get their videos out to an audience never before possible. People have become famous for singing, telling jokes, looks...you name it, it has been done. Now, young girls are getting famous for hauling.

Its not as dirty as it may sound. A haul video is a homemade video posted on the web by people (usually teen girls) gushing and reviewing their new favorite products and purchases. Sounds innocent enough doesn't it? The Fowler sisters are two of the most famous haulers. Some of their posts have over one million hits. Each one of the sisters has almost half a million subscribers and total channel views are over twenty million! The Fowler Sisters tapped into something so much larger than they expected. So many brands fail to do this successfully and the Fowler sisters seemed to stumble into it by accident. Now, brands want in. They once recommended a Guess watch and it sold out online and in stores within days. They have become so well known they are being sponsored by Forever 21, one of their favorite stores. They have been contacted by 17 Magazine, Marie Clair and many other fashion magazines.

Where is the convergence? Well sometimes they take videos on their cell phones in the store showing what they have picked out, what they would accessorize it with and what shoes to wear with it. Sometimes they wait until they get home to take the video on a webcam and then post to youtube. Basically, technology is so available to everyone that it has become easy to make home videos to post anywhere on the web.

Here is one of their videos. They were also on Good Morning America and they are filming them making this haul. Don't watch too long, it might make you lose your lunch.

Assignment for 07/22/10

Update: Sorry, had this kicking around in drafts!

1. Read the following posts on Social Media
http://scobleizer.com/2007/02/16/what-is-social-media/
http://mashable.com/2008/11/18/social-media-defined/

2. Read the following examples dealing with building audiences:
Pages 5 - 12 of the PDF preview copy of Scott Kirsner’s book: “Fans, Friends & Followers”: http://www.scottkirsner.com/fff/FFF-preview-edition.pdf
http://mashable.com/2010/06/15/build-loyal-audience-youtube/

3. Bring in media making device – ideally video, but could be still image. Bring any cables for connecting to your local machine. We will create content in class next week -- bring any props or anything else that you need. I'll try to bring a backdrop.

Case Study: Old Spice

Okay -- if anyone is using this as an example of Convergence already, I will cede this to you. Else we will definitely talk about this in class tomorrow when we discuss building an audience and leveraging social media to that end.

How the Old Spice Videos Are Being Made

Convergence Strategy from Reality Show

Academy Fantasia is a reality show in Thailand. It is a singing contest, judged through popular votes. The purpose to finding the dreamers who want to be a superstars. Academy Fantasia is a franchise of La Academia, a popular reality show from Mexico. The contestant auditioned through nationwide and the judges will eliminate the contestants down to 12 finalist into Academy House. The contestants will study with trainer in voice, dance and acting class to practice the songs they will perform in each week.

The contestants live in the same house with hundreds of hidden cameras. Audiences can watch them 24 hours live on TV and online. The audiences can vote for their favorite contestants through cell phones and land phones. It costs three baht for each vote. The show usually airs 24 hours on True Vision 20 (digital) and 16 (analog) and the concerts will be broadcast live on True Music Channel (Digital:26 , Analog:30) and ModernNine TV (public channel 9) every Saturday night between 20:40-23:10 Thailand time.

Each week the contestants are assigned individual songs and sometimes group songs to perform on stage every Saturday until the last week of the show. After each performance the commentators will evaluate the performance. At the end of the concert, the contestant(s) who received the lowest percentage of audience votes will have to leave the show. The winners and the runner-ups will automatically receive record deals with True Fantasia record label.

Last season, Academy Fantasia 6, the audience got to experience with TrueAF 6 live 3D concert for the first time in Thailand and would be able to watch the live program on 3 TV channels.

The audience would be able to access content in various ways including watching, downloading, voting, chatting via platforms such as TV, mobile phones, and online access.


The online access, they have main website, Academy Fantasia, that fans can look up for the contestant's profile or updates activities in everyday. Also make Fan Site, such as AF Talk, AF Studio, Facebook for fans to communicate. Innovative services like online voting through Touch@Home and numerous application on iPhone 3G offer a complete experience and keep the excitement going because fans can stay updated and on top of everything.

Info : Wikipedia (Academy Fantasia), True Corporation

Sumsung innovative digital campaign

Samsung developed a unique partnership with the Schonbrunn Zoo in Vienna, to show consumers how easy and intuitive the new ST1000 camera is at uploading pictures to the internet via its innovative wireless capabilities, a feature shared across a number of Samsung’s digital cameras. Samsung equipped the zoo’s resident female Orangutan ‘Nonja’ with the ST1000 camera, and the images produced by Nonja were then uploaded through the camera’s wireless capabilities daily to a Facebook account and specially designed Microsite, receiving an overwhelming 200,000 hits from a worldwide audience of fans.

This unprecedented and ground breaking strategy proved that ST1000’s capabilities and easy-to-use features could even be operated by anyone, including an Orangutan, a message that was successfully communicated to an audience around the world. The campaign showcased the ST1000’s ability to capture and share photo memories wirelessly on the move, allowing users to truly connect with family and friends. Packed full of innovation and encased in a sleek compact frame, the camera’s wireless functionality enables users to send and post pictures in real time via applications like Facebook and provides an unrivalled experience in sharing content amongst loved ones. With the increasing need for camera users to share their images instantly with loved ones, a number of Samsung’s digital cameras provide wireless capabilities.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Nonja/190010092116

The 6th sense: a wearable gestural interface.

These are no breaking news, but I think is a very nice example of the convergence of the digital and the physical world.
The Media Lab at MIT has developed a wearable computer interface, they call it the 6th sense, and according to what it does, this name makes a lot of sense...
As Patti Maes, the director of the Fluid Interfaces Group at the Media Lab, and Pranav Mistry, the student behind the project, say, in the real world we get information through our five senses. But the access to all the digital information available online is limited to the screen of our digital devices.
The 6th sense seems to be able to bridge the gap, becoming a link between our digital devices and our interactions with the physical world... "bringing intangible, digital information out into the tangible world, and allowing us to interact with this information via natural hand gestures. ‘SixthSense’ frees information from its confines by seamlessly integrating it with reality, and thus making the entire world your computer" (wow! too pretentious? well, time will tell!)

The SixthSense prototype is comprised of a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera. The projector enables us to use any surface or object as an interface by projecting the information on them. And the camera recognizes and tracks user's hand gestures (by tracking the fingertips of the user) and physical objects using computer-vision based techniques.

In the video we can see Pranav Mistry taking pictures using his fingers and thumbs to create a picture frame that tells the camera to snap a photo, which would be saved to his mobile phone. He can then project the images onto a wall and begins to size them using similar gestures to those used in a touchable interface. And if he wants to access his email he just need to draw an @ and project his email onto any surface around him... All this is already pretty cool, since it brings the interface to the physical world and allows a more natural user interaction, but what I find really amazing is the way it would bring us information about physical objects that is available online. In the video, we can see how the device projects real time information of a flight onto the boarding pass; a video providing more information onto a newspaper... And their protoype costs only 350$

More about this (info and more videos)

Bringing pretty 3-D to TV

With the record-breaking popularity of Avatar 3-D this past winter season, the technology has made its comeback onto the television screens, this time without the retro red-blue glasses that we have so often associated with watching 3-D movies.  Sony, Samsung, and other media giants in content delivery have moved past high-definition technology and embraced the new trend of 3-D (whoo-hoo, new stuff to sell!), which utilizes more sophisticated technology than the old-school method of projecting red and blue/green stereoscopic images to produce fuzzy, mostly black-and-white 3-D images.  The newer technology we have become familiar with in theatres enables us to use polarized glasses to view rich, high-def color images, as each lens has a different polarization that allows only the specific set of images intended for each particular eye.  (I didn't really get it either until I saw the illustration below.  I still kind of don't.)

Image credit: Howstuffworks.com

However, most of the 3-D TVs on the market now use active shutter glasses (see image below), which receive radio or infrared signals from an emitter on the TV that tell the shutter in each lens to open or close in sync with the images projected on screen.  The images are fluid, because the shutters are occurring at a rate of 120 times per second.  Unfortunately, the glasses can be expensive, so good luck if you are planning on 3-D family movie night!  Some 3-D TVs don't require glasses at all, using the principle of a parallax barrier made of liquid crystal.  The barrier is made of tiny holes that allow only certain pixels to reach each respective eye.  The problem with this method is that the full 3-D effect cannot be achieved from all viewing angles around the TV.  A benefit is that you can turn off the feature and revert back to 2-D anytime on these TV sets.

Image credit: Physorg.com

Cable and satellite networks are embracing the technology, starting first with sports.  ESPN recently made a huge push with 3-D broadcasts of World Cup matches. Sony PS3 owners can just update their firmware for the ability to decode the 3-D signals on their Blu-ray discs.   Adobe are also currently updating its Flash player with 3-D capabilities and are preparing to reveal a version this fall.

A note for cheapies: if you can't yet afford a 3-D TV, Vuzix sells glasses that project 3-D images right inside them (convergence!) by plugging them into a media player capable of handling the 3-D signals.  At only $170-250 a pop!

The University of Nottingham's Visual Learning Lab has recently conducted a case study which incorperates the Thunder^TM system in a learning environment. This technology was originally developed for use in industry, and was devised in order to interact with many pieces of visual information simultaneously. It consists of multiple projection screens controlled through a central tablet pc. The touch screen interface of the tablet is also replicated on the large screens, resulting in a free flowing interaction with the visual information that is conducive to group projects. These group projects took the form of two phases. In the first phase, students were divided into small groups and were then asked to define abstract concepts such as "liberal democracy" through the use of typed notes or hand drawn images. In the second phase, these images were transfered to the larger screens, and the instructor facilitated a discussion of the common themes found throughout.

The outcome of this methodology was that students spent more time thinking about the concepts and responding to their peers and less time taking notes.

Image courtesy of University of Nottingham image bank

communication tools list

From class:
Communication tools

Forums
Talking/speaking
Pen and paper (written)
CB radios (citizens band)
Email
Phone
Letter in a bottle
Texting
Party Lines
Webcam
Facebook
Twitter
Handgestures (sign language)
Walkie Talkie
Videochat / skype
Google Docs (collaborative authorship)
Blog
Wikis
Commenting (YouTube)
IM
meetup.com
Second Life (virtual communities)
Chat roulette
Foursquare
Email/chat/messenger
Geotagging (???) Geocaching

Assignment for 07/15/10

Research and report on an example of media convergence that we didn't talk about in class. Post your example as an original post (not a comment) on the class blog. Use the label 'convergenceexample'

Please add an image if possible!

Be prepared to present your example in class. Wow me!

Readings for 07/15/10

Meaty, slightly dated piece by Henry Jenkins formerly of MIT
http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/converge.html

Case study example of approach by Danish Newspaper
http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reportsitem.aspx?id=100281

Convergence with regard to "breaking news"
http://condemnedtorocknroll.wordpress.com/2009/06/28/michael-jackson-media-convergence-and-the-decline-of-the-global-superstar/

Class Syllabus

In the interest of being "green", you can access the class syllabus (in Word format) here.