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I’m not a fan of still photography, particularly in “olden times”, when most photographs were posed for. I don’t like modern posed photos either (he says, noticing the posed shot of himself on his website), but that’s fine, as we have other methods for documenting history.
Looking at old “posed for” photographs, I can’t even start to visualise what life must have been like. The body poses are all put on, as are the faces, all those happy smiling faces. I find it hard to believe that everyone was happy in the early 20th century. It’s like watching professional models in an advertisement for Versace or Coca Cola, everyone’s happy, everyone’s beautiful… and everyone’s jacked up on speed and Cocaine, which they well could have been back in the 1800s when it was all legal, and the most famous poems in history were all drug induced. I’m starting to ramble…
Anyway, I’ve done photography rants to death already, so I’m not going to do that again. But I am going to point out that this is one of the reasons why videoblogging is so cool. A lot of it is real people in real situations, not acting, not putting on anything, just doing the real stuff they do, and being passionate about it.
In 100 years, our successors will look back at the massive amount of real media documenting real people, and although it won’t be like being here, it will be pretty damn exciting being able to view audiovisual representations of hundreds of years in the past. Imagine if we could see crystal clear (digital) quality video of Napoleon, King Henry VIII, that peasant guy from London who shovels shit off the cobblestones each week, or even a videoblog from a convict sent to Australia in the late 1700s.
This video is a snapshot of real people wasting real time.
There’s a great site called www.vlogmap.org, which uses Google Earth to plot the location of videobloggers around the world.
Every few weeks I check up on how many people are vlogging in NSW, the state in which I live. According to vlogmap, there are now eight, four in Sydney, and four outside of Sydney.
However, clicking on each, its soon clear that of the eight, one is an aggregation site and only three ( Rantings of Joan, Video Phil and myself) have content which could be called videoblogging.
It comes back again to old media’s message that audience is king. People want to be publicised, to reach a larger audience, and I’m assuming that adding a pin to vlogmap.org will help do that, regardless whether they’re actually videoblogging.
In big media, audience is the product, and these companies exist to sell eyeballs to advertisers. They use programmed content (like television shows) to attract the audience, but they don’t care what is shown, so long as the eyeballs are there and can be sold. Remember, big media isn’t about the content, its about eyeballs.
70 odd years of TV have ingrained this into us so much, that people still think audience is king, especially bloggers and videobloggers who get a sniff of popularity. Its a slippery slope into being excommunicated from a community, and not being talented enough to go and sleep with big media.
We’re all just amateur video makers. So keep making art your own way, and don’t lose your perspective.
Note: This video is at 640×240 resolution, so if you’re using Ant or a similar client, then drag/save the video to your desktop, and open it in native QuickTime. Otherwise you probably won’t be able to read the text. I’m told they’re working on it. 🙂
This is the first of what might be a series of videos about storytelling. I say might be, because it took 5 hours to make, my third longest to make so far.
Some people are natural storytellers, and some aren’t. Neither typically have any conscious idea what makes a good story, and how much a well constructed story can hold attention. In fact storytelling is a big fad at the moment in the corporate world, but I’ve yet to see any really good theoretical stuff from storytelling for business consultants. Anyway…
Hopefully I’ve also redeemed myself with Chris, from when I didn’t include him in my Video Killed the Radio Star video from earlier this year. Chris is a great story teller, and along with Josh and Ian, are masters of the Setup, as you’ll soon see.
Not the storytelling video, but a piece on art and story.
This is also the first video that isn’t included in the feed as blog text and an enclosure. When I started videoblogging, 117 videos ago, a lot of friends didn’t have readers that supported enclosures, so I embedded them as HTML in the text as well. By now they should be using Ant or some enclosure capatable reader.
You gotta love home movies. Guess where I’ve been and you haven’t, now watch the long and boring video of it, now say how lucky I am for being there, now go home.
One of the annoying things about changing URLs, is that my Google ranking effectively starts again from scratch. I had a LOT of incoming links on my old site, and while these are mostly redirected to the new site, Google doesn’t count the redirected links in ranking the new site. And considering I don’t actually write text blog posts that much any more, its mostly video, its not like I’m going to get a chance to get my old ranking back.
An example is a restaurant in Canberra called Milk and Honey. I was writing a critique of Telstra’s new shitty Sensis search engine, and a friend of mine tried looking for the restaurant and came up with nothing. Suddenly I was the number 1 hit in Google for Milk and Honey, I kept getting feedback asking for the address. So I added their address to the blog post, and got even more hits. I ended up being an advertisement for Milk and Honey, which is fine, considering its a great restaurant and people just weren’t able to find it.
But since changing domains, I no longer have the number 1 position, and I’m not even in the first 300 (I gave up paging through the results).
On a lot of posts I’m still getting the visitors, because sites are linked to the old site which redirects, but the visitors aren’t being converted to Google search result rankings. Bitch.
The only solution seems to be to write new text posts, and make them interesting enough for people to link to them. Basically, write off fours years of work, and start from scratch. Nice. I’m so looking forward to doing research for the sake of Google rankings. Maybe this is their master plan, to make us all slaves to rankings?