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.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzXKsWVZlTI)[/youtube]

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.waking-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.

(more…)

YouTube.com versus LiveVideo.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? - LiveVideo.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 LiveVideo.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 HillaryClinton.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.

---

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.

Just a quickie… I tried out the Kodak Easyshare V705’s panorama tool. Man, my former employer really nailed this one. I’ve been very impressed with the camera - both in terms of lens technology and the user interface itself. It’s great to see Kodak continuing to live up to its boo-yah, non grab-ass vision outlined earlier this year:

[youtube]Sz6XjXu-oT8[/youtube]

That’s about it. I’m currently closing a karma circle and writing a letter of recommendation for an excellent student who is hoping to get a summer internship at the NY Metropolitan Museum of Art.

By announcing of the formation of his Presidential Exploratory Committee yesterday, Senator Barack Obama (D-Il.) took the first official step towards a run for the presidency . I’m not going to address the politics of this. Instead, I will focus on his media distribution mechanism. The announcement was made through a video hosted on Obama’s website. Or, to be more exact, the video was hosted by web video company Brightcove and aggregated to barackObama.com.

Obama isn’t the first candidate of the ‘08 race to use the web as a video distribution medium. In December, John Edwards announced his candidacy in his YouTube Tomorrow Begins Today video. On the surface there are numerous similarities between the YouTube and Brightcove sites. Both stream video, allow direct linking to videos, and also enable the video content to be embeded in 3rd party web pages (though I can’t seem to get it to work with Wordpress). They allowed the candidates an easy method to distribute their message and ensure that the video can be aggregated to various sites.
But, as we look closer, the similarities quickly end. Brightcove primarily hosts professionally generated content, created by established media outlets like Dow Jones, Newsweek, and various TV networks. While the website invites content submitted by video bloggers, a quick scan didn’t find much “citizen” content.

YouTube is the opposite: user generated dwarfs profession content (not to mention that much of the professional content has been captured and, illegally, posted by members of the viewing audience). Community participation is at the core of YouTube model, and it creates a very different sharing space than Brightcove. YouTube allows viewers to leave public comments on videos. While Obama’s page only contains the video announcement, Edward’s annoucement is accompanied by a discussion of more than 88 postings, pro and con, from people who have watched the video. That is only the beginning.

Both sites feature links to related content from their pages. Obama’s announcement on Brightcove only references other videos that his campaign has posted. That is in stark contrast to the page which contains Edwards’ announcement. Following the YouTube model, a wide range of user generated content associated with John Edwards is linked on the page, including these three videos:

• RE: Tomorrow Begins Today - Brian Russell (yesh.com) and Ruby Sinreich (lotusmedia.org), two activist Bloggers speak in support of Edwards campaign. There are a number of other pro-Edwards postings.
• Response to John Edwards - A woman in New York State attacks the Universal Health Care proposal Edwards made as part of his Tomorrow Begins Today speech.
• John Edwards 2008? - A self identified Democrat from North Carolina (Edward’s Home State) who proclaims Edwards “unelectable.”

These examples highlight an interesting problem for candidates: while YouTube offers tools to manage posting comments, you cannot control what content your page links to. In going to “where the people are,” you leave yourself open to direct commentary from the people. Counter-commentary may be located directly beside your stumping. Contrast this to Brightcove’s promise of control, an interface that does not link directly to intertextual documents. Additionally, even when you find commentary on Brightcove, it is coming from established sources. While you might get criticized it is coming from the media, rather than the people you are trying to reach.

Note that these implications can be projected onto the videos themselves. Some have called attention to Edwards’ decision to speak extemporaneously, on location in New Orleans versus Obama’s use of a controlled backdrop and a prepared speech and teleprompter — organic contact with the people versus control over environment and message.

Ultimately, the candidates may find that hopes for controlling their distribution is a pipe dream. In less than 24 hours, more than 17 “bootlegged” versions of the Obama video have surfaced on You Tube. Almost all of them have, individually, received more viewings than the original video at Brightcove. And, a search for “Barack Obama Announcement” also includes a link to a Right Wing radio show host offering counter commentary.

RIT isn’t the first school that springs to mind when someone says “beautiful campus.” In fact, I’ve heard it described as “neo-grotesque” and the person who said that wasn’t being tongue-in-cheek. Yet, in the wake of the storm, a glistening layer of ice provided a new perspective on our “brick city.”

This was the view from my office window earlier today as snows continued to fall. That’s the Liberal Arts building in the background.

RITchie, the school’s mascot, covered in snow and ice.

Near the College of Imaging Arts and Sciences, there is a little garden. It’s always been a favorite spot of mine on campus. If you visit my flickr account you can see this little house from a number of angles.

To wax philosophic for a moment, seeing the campus this way made me think about my task as a teacher. It’s to get students to see the mundane - in this case media that they’ve been immersed in from day 1 - from a new perspective, in order to gain a new appreciation for it and develop a critical eye. I still am trying to get a handle on ways to accomplish this.