What a tease
Posted on February 3, 2007
My first thought: What a great idea
LATimes.com has the most popular YouTube videos to go with the YouTube/Viacom dispute story. How fun!
I was all ready to watch them, but after clicking on the play button several times to no avail, I realized this is a PHOTO GALLERY, and these are only screen-grabs of the videos on YouTube.
Deep sigh. What a disappointment. Why do this when it’s so easy to embed the video player on the html page?
Note: The headlines are linked, so you CAN see the videos over at YouTube. AND I realized that I pretty much did something similar in the hip-hop multimedia I created this week, using the iPod player as a graphic. (It so much easier to critique others’ work!) I may go back and amend the multimedia project — and will keep in mind how frustrating and misleading this can be.
Back to the top videos, I particularly like this one (hee hee!):
Two decades of Super Bowl ads
Posted on February 3, 2007
I recently was wondering where all the interactive graphics are hiding, but I found this one about Super Bowl ads on NYTimes.com today.
Quite nice. And quite interactive.
Reader-submitted video
Posted on February 3, 2007
On the heels of YouTube, I think newspaper Web sites will experiment with user-submitted video more this year, and I see some great examples on/associated with newspaper Web sites such as Random This on KnoxNews.com and Bakotube by Bakotopia.com.
Readers have the equipment (plenty of cell phone cameras, camcorders, P&S cameras out there), and now they have easy access to editing software through sites such as Jumpcut.com and Eyespot.com, according to this Reuters story (I found via Lost Remote) on Yahoo!
If we let readers put these videos on our sites, we need to pay attention to these sites.
So I took a closer look at Jumpcut.com. It’s a Yahoo! product. A publishing company giving readers the tools to edit. Hm. Interesting idea … Making a video looks so easy to do. Get this, though: You can view a video, and in the lower-right corner, click on the “remix” button and then re-edit that very video.
And that’s the point. It’s not just an editing site. It’s a community sharing site.
Ohhh.
Eyespot.com does essentially the same thing. Here’s what they say in their “about” section:
“We want our users to be able to share everything. Under every public video here at eyespot, there is a save link. Click it, and add that video to your account. Now you can use that video in your mixes. Find the videos you like, and mash them together! Think up a theme for your Mix and use the search to find videos that fit the theme. Save them and Mix away.
If you use a video that was created by someone else in your mix, we think that’s great. We give the originator credit in the form of ‘attribution’ or text frames at the end of your mix giving them credit for their contribution to your work.”
(Yahoo!’s product may add a credit tag, but it doesn’t specifically say if they do or not in their “about” section.)
Even so, people are importing copyright material. I see an opportunity for even infringement, as Lucas Grindley talks about here. These companies better line up their lawyers, too.
By the way, I find this quote from that Reuters story particularly interesting (especially given the recent discussions on camera quality):
“A lot of the video is raw, edgy, badly lit and, considering the more than 100 million daily views, that’s just how the viewers want it. ‘It goes straight to the point, telling a story. And in a way that is more comic than dramatic,’ said Nicolas Charbonnier, a 24-year-old Danish video-blogger.”
A ‘Super’ podcast
Posted on February 3, 2007
Bear (ha!) with me for some shameless self-promotion, but I am quite proud of the latest episode of HeraldTribune.com’s Word on the Street podcast.
H-T reporter Latisha R. Gray records a show every-other week about reader reactions to hot topics. I help her edit and produce the audio story. She did an excellent job on this one, in which she talks to people about their Super Bowl predictions.
Go Bears!
Hip-hop guide
Posted on February 2, 2007
This project kept me busy at the end of this week.
Sarasota has an older population, so the reporter, Steve Echeverria Jr., and print designers, Tony Elkins and Michelle Greene, and I had some fun with introducing hip-hop culture to our readers.
My wish list for this project:
> More time; being last in the production line makes for quite a bit of unnecessary stress.
> Audio clips to embed on our site; if I had more time I would have gathered the audio and put them in the page rather than linking out to another site.
> A way to embed the YouTube videos in Flash (not just HTML) so the clips could be integrated with the package. As far as I can tell, this can’t be done.
> More audio/video clips so each entry has a sample.
Feedback is welcome and appreciated.
Well said
Posted on February 2, 2007
From Matt Waite’s post: Print reporters, homeless people and video
“What caught my attention is that a homeless woman — who lives in a tent on the side of the road and has more worries than I can comprehend — can take a point-and-shoot camera and with no training, put together a short, compelling video clip and publish it for the world to see. How many college educated, regular-paycheck-getting reporters in your newsroom can do the same?”
Well said. Thanks for the perspective, Matt.
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