Before I totally forget to men­tion it. YouTube announced last Friday that they will be enact­ing a rev­enue shar­ing pro­gram. That’s help­ful in terms of reach­ing the com­mu­nity. What didn’t seem like the best idea was doing this at a Swiss Con­fer­ence instead of in a video on YouTube. To my knowl­edge, noth­ing has been offi­cial posted there yet (at least no men­tion in the offi­cial YouTube blog, even though they made a post on Jan 27th, the day the news hit).

I’m inter­ested to see how the fol­low­ing com­ment, excerpted from the arti­cle above, will fly within the community:

Hurley said that when YouTube started, he and the site’s other co-​founders ??? Steve Chen and Jawed Karim ??? felt revenue-​sharing would build a com­mu­nity of users moti­vated by making money, rather than their love of videos.

But that as the site has grown, they have come to see finan­cial remu­ner­a­tion as a way of improv­ing content.

The YouTube & Live­V­ideo intrigue con­tin­ues. I spent a good chunk of Sat­ur­day night moving through videos asso­ci­ated with it. Cur­rently, there are nearly 400 video posts that have been made as part of the dis­cus­sion Renetto began. To put that in per­spec­tive, at an aver­age length of five min­utes a piece, they cur­rently total over 33 hours of poten­tial footage to review. And the number of responses is rapidly increasing.

I’m not quite ready to fully break things down. I have flagged a number of threads that have emerged.

• Com­mu­nity
  Every­thing gets back to the poster’s notions of com­mu­nity. Renetto’s orig­i­nal post accused people of being trai­tors to “YouTube.” Many respon­ders have iden­ti­fied a major dis­tinc­tion between YouTube the com­pany and the com­mu­nity at YouTube. Few see a spe­cific alle­giance to YouTube. Most feel an alle­giance to each others.
• Con­tent Own­er­ship
  This is tied directly to the notion of com­mu­nity, and to the recent media blitz on social com­put­ing. Take for exam­ple the crown­ing quote from the 2006 Time Person of the Year issue:

  FOR seiz­ing the reins of the global media, for found­ing and fram­ing the new dig­i­tal democ­racy, for work­ing for noth­ing and beat­ing the pros at their own game, TIME’s Person of the Year for 2006 is you.???
  Lev Gross­man,
  TIME Mag­a­zine, Decem­ber 25, 2006

  The YouTube (and Live­V­ideo) posters state over and over again that Time was talk­ing about them and not YouTube. While they acknowl­edge that YouTube pro­vided a novel solu­tion, most posters feel anyone could have done that (and will do so in the future). For posters, the real value came not from the tech­nol­ogy, but the con­tent they cre­ated. In thier nar­ra­tive, they were the ones that made YouTube famous. In fact, the gen­eral feel­ing is that YouTube rode to riches on the backs of its posters.

• YouTube is not part of the YouTube Com­mu­nity
  Add one and two together and you get this. While YouTube posters acknowl­edge that they are being pro­vided with a free ser­vice, they feel that doesn’t make them beholden to the site. Posters also don’t feel the YouTube man­age­ment (who they refer to to by their first name: Chad, Steve, and Jawed) cares about the com­mu­nity. Many posters indi­cated that a com­mu­nity requires two way con­ver­sa­tion, and that com­mu­ni­ca­tion to YouTube Man­age­ment is always one way: posters voice their con­cerns, but the con­cerns are never lis­tened to. Some noted the irony that YouTube cre­ated a video com­mu­ni­ca­tion system and then refused to use that tool to engage their own com­mu­nity. This per­ceived lack of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, cou­pled with the notion that YouTube got rich through the efforts of the posters, has led to a lot of the ten­sion (most com­pli­ment Live­V­ideo for it’s rapid response to issues).
• Google, Money, and Infra­struc­ture
  This one is par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing. So the YouTube com­mu­nity feel’s that com­mu­nity is a two way street. One man­i­fes­ta­tion of that is com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Man­age­ment isn’t talk­ing to them. A second man­i­fes­ta­tion is in infra­struc­ture. If YouTube fixed the prob­lems that the com­mu­nity has with the tech­nol­ogy, then things would be better. But they don’t see that as the case. This is only exac­er­bated by the influx of Google dol­lars. In the com­mu­ni­ties eyes, if 1.6 bil­lion has been invested in YouTube, the least they can do is sta­bi­lize the system. Fur­ther, con­sid­er­ing Google is syn­ony­mous with inno­va­tion, the com­mu­nity ques­tions why every­thing wasn’t fixed overnight.¹

Well, that’s a start at it. There’s a lot more going on and more to come.

I’ll close with an inter­est­ing phrase that’s been pop­ping up as well Plas­tic Fame, when “one believes they are inter­net celebrity because they have a large sub­scriber base.” This par­tic­u­lar def­i­n­i­tion is pulled fromRocco’s House: Plas­tic Fame Syn­dromeWhile this post was made prior to Renetto’s ini­tial rant, it was often ref­er­enced in response posts like the fol­low­ing one: Fayecast #4: Plas­tic Fame Syn­drome²

As far as I can tell, I’ve tracked the ear­li­est use of the phrase “plastic fame” to this v-blog post­ing, made in response to another YouTube member’s announce­ment she was leav­ing the com­mu­nity.

As to where “Plastic Fame” came from, the best I can come up with is the neo-​punk group AFI’s song Paper Air­planes (makeshift wings):

As waves of plas­tic fame
Go out of fash­ion,
You’re going out for­ever unknown.
These waves of plas­tic fame are drying up
And I smile because you’re dying to become for­ever unknown.

With­out a doubt, this con­cept of Plas­tic Fame bub­bles beneath all of these dis­cus­sions. Within the next few days I’m going to take a shot at tack­ling that.

Ref­er­ences:
Bernius, M. (2007) a war of video com­mu­ni­ties – part 1 – his­tory, http://​www.​wak​ing-​dream.​com/blog
Gross­man, L. (2006) “TIME???s Person of the Year: You.??? TIME Mag­a­zine, 12/25/2006.

¹ – What’s inter­est­ing to note is the sim­i­lar­ity to some of the US’s cur­rent issues in Iraq. One of the things ana­lysts have noted is that many Iraqi’s assumed that since the US was a tech­no­log­i­cal and mil­i­tary super­power they should have been imme­di­ately able to sta­bi­lize the infra­struc­ture — i.e. “if you can put an man on the moon, you should be able to make the lights stay on in Baghdad.”

² – I’d prefer to show the videos here (the ratio­nal for which will be dis­cussing in a future post). Unfor­tu­nately, Word­press doesn’t want to play “nice” with the <embed> com­mand and Live­V­ideo. So until the video post­ing plug-​in is updated for that, I’ll have to wait and post links.

As I’m not ready with the next part of my analy­sis of the YouTube/LiveVideo tempest-​in-​a-​teapot, I’m shar­ing some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent: my com­mute to RIT. Winter has come to Rochester. Today it was 11 degrees (Fahren­heit) out when I left the house. Over the last few days we’ve been get­ting a lot of snow. I’m not quite sure what pos­sessed me, but I decided to (care­fully) doc­u­ment my drive to work. So from time to time I would rest my dig­i­tal camera on the steer­ing wheel and take a photo.

As an exper­i­ment, I’ve taken all of these pic­tures, placed them on flickr and geo­t­agged them. The result, you can track my com­mute. The loca­tion of the photos are pretty much dead on. In fact, the act of plac­ing them was really inter­est­ing in and of itself. Doing so caused me to relate to my pic­ture, my com­mute, and the loca­tions I pass by in a very dif­fer­ent way.

What’s your com­mute look like?

Here’s the first pic­ture, 12 more follow after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

YouTube.com versus Live​V​ideo.com

The story of sim­i­lar ser­vices vying for the same audi­ence isn’t any­thing new. What makes this an inter­est­ing thread to watch is that as the con­tenders here are both social com­put­ing sites, part of the audi­ence they are com­pet­ing for are also their pri­mary con­tent cre­ators. The result is a war not just of com­pa­nies, but rather of self made “celebrities.”

I stum­bled across this during my cit­i­zen jour­nal­ist research on YouTube and it sucked me in. The break­down goes some­thing like this:

• 2006? – Live​V​ideo.com comes online
  For the life of me I can’t find a date for this. But I know it hap­pens some­time before October.
• Oct 9, 2006 Google Acquires YouTube
  The google link­age is will come up numer­ous times in the argu­ments that follow.
• Oct 25, 2006 – Smosh launches a Live­V­ideo chan­nel
  Smosh, a pair of 19 years olds, were one of the YouTube’s better known suc­cesses. The ratio­nal behind their move, and the re-​branding of their videos as “Powered by Live​V​ideo.com” will even­tu­ally be called into question.
• Nov 2006 – ~Jan 1, 2007 – rel­a­tive quietv
• ~Jan 1 – 20, 2007 – Flurry of activ­ity – Inves­ti­ga­tion and Migra­tion
  During this period a number of YouTube mem­bers post videos review­ing the Live­V­ideo ser­vice. Some announce, via YouTube, that they are set­ting up duel accounts. A number of promi­nent YouTube com­mu­nity mem­bers¹ migrate to Live­V­ideo entirely.
• Jan 20, 2007 -Renetto v-blogs “Trai­tors or Not.. Smosh, Geriatric1927, Boh3m3, DIG­I­TIL­sOuL?“
  Paul Renetto, a well known YouTube v-blogger, attacks Smosh and others YouTube mem­bers who have estab­lished Live­V­ideo accounts. He alledges that a number of them were paid by Live­V­ideo to jump ship and refers to them as traitors.
• Jan 20 – 23, 2007 – Explo­sive Response
  Youtube an Live­V­ideo explode with feed­back. On YouTube the video gen­er­ates 170 response videos. At Live­V­ideo there are at least 77 responses posted.
• Jan 23, 2007 -Renetto fol­lows up with “Are you all being duped by a “Corporate Mar­ket­ing Scam”?“
  Renetto responds to the con­tro­versy his first post gen­er­ated. By his account, the major­ity of feed­back he got was neg­a­tive. Three major points come out of this video:

  1. In Octo­ber, he was approached by Live­V­ideo to migrate. He claims that Live­V­ideo offered to pay him to make the move.
  2. YouTube has paid Renetto, and other mem­bers, at least twice for videos. Once for the YouTube Christ­mas Video, and again for the New Years Eve video.
  3. He was appraochedby a talent agency who claimed that YouTube will be launch­ing some form of rev­enue shar­ing pro­gram. This agency offered to rep­re­sent him in artist nego­ti­a­tions with YouTube.

Since that time there has been a bit of back and forth post­ings. Renetto’s second post has gen­er­ated at least 58 YouTube video responses so far. More responses are coming on Live­V­ideo. In the mean­time, com­mu­nity mem­bers on both sites are post­ing videos ratio­nal­iz­ing their deci­sions to stay, go, and in some cases remain neu­tral on these issues.

Ok, with all of that set up, tomor­row (or soon there after) I’m going to dive into the metaprag­mat­ics of this exchange as a there’s a lot of “culture” hap­pen­ing as I type.

¹ – The list of users will even­tu­ally make it up here.

In answer to the ques­tion “why all this musing on cam­paign videos?”, if all goes as planned, I start my PhD stud­ies in the fall. Pro­vided I go the anthro route, I’ll be look­ing at cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism and Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. Inter­net video broadly, and YouTube specif­i­cally, play an impor­tant role in that mix.

Hon­estly, the more I begin to explore YouTube, the more com­pli­cated things get. It’s a mish mash. And the threads that are emerg­ing from it are so varied I’m not quite sure where to start. All of it com­pli­cates this ques­tion of what exactly a cit­i­zen jour­nal­ist is. There’s a lot of cit­i­zen com­men­ta­tors and folks who post clips from news net­works. And activists.

I’m just not quite sure about “journalists.”

On Sat­ur­day, Hillary Clin­ton became the latest demo­c­rat to use an Inter­net video to announce their pres­i­den­tial inten­tions. There are a couple inter­est­ing points about her video. One is how well timed to “news rhythms” it was. By releas­ing on a Sat­ur­day morn­ing, her camp effec­tively ensured it would just make Sunday news­pa­pers, many of which go to press early that after­noon. The net result there was that the video was the first thing dis­cussed both in papers and on the Sunday news pro­grams (trump­ing the Obama video released ear­lier in the week).

Another things to note is the cin­e­matic qual­ity of the video — by that I mean how it employs the tools and con­ven­tions of movie making. Where the Obama video was a sta­tion­ary, single take, the Clin­ton video fea­tures at least three cuts and the camera is con­stantly moving (arguably to the point of distraction).

The Clin­ton camp also choose to host the video them­selves, at HillaryClin​ton.com. Unlike the Edwards and Obama videos, Inter­net users cannot aggre­gate the Clin­ton video through embed­ded links. Instead, Clinton’s team’s choice to pro­vide a high res­o­lu­tion Quick­time ver­sion of the video for down­load seems a bit of a strange choice.

The ben­e­fit to her competitor’s dis­tri­b­u­tion choices was that they allowed anyone to pub­lish their videos through the use of the <embed> tag. There was no need to worry about the over­head of asking every­one to host a 55 mb or assum­ing that most blog­gers have the tech­ni­cal skill to place that file on their web­site. More impor­tantly, with the aggre­ga­tion model, every­one is refer­ring back to a single, master video. Which means that if Edwards or Obama chose to update the con­tent, those changes would imme­di­ately be reflected across all sites.

The result of Clinton’s dis­tri­b­u­tion choice can be seen in two ways on YouTube. First, The Hillary Clin­ton For Pres­i­dent Com­mit­tee, a grass­roots orga­ni­za­tion sup­port­ing Clinton’s run, encour­aged people to link their blogs to a YouTube video of CNN’s replay of Clinton’s video instead of the orig­i­nal arti­fact. The second is that people are already mashing-​up the orig­i­nal high def source video the Clin­ton camp pro­vided to make anti-​Hillary videos.

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On a side note, I think my favorite YouTube Obama v. Clin­ton video is this one. It’s simple and goofy — a person called up both of the candidate’s web­sites and played the videos against each other.

Ref­er­ence:

Bernius, M. (2007) a tale of two candidate???s video dis­tri­b­u­tion strategies

There’s a major upgrade to word­press out. I just got it installed and things seem to be run­ning pretty quickly. On the down­side, there are a couple bugs with the visual editor. What’s great is it has an autosave fea­ture. Ear­lier today I lost a half an hours worth of writing.

Coming tomor­row, every­thing will­ing, I’m hoping to break down H. Clinton’s volley into web video and also touch on YouTube’s response to Fox New’s week­end report on Obama and the Midrassa.