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Through technology such as that available on Facebook, video sharing has become quite a bit easier. Whereas on a website like youtube where you share video footage with the world on Facebook you select who you share your videos with. There are three settings, share with everyone on your network, including all friends, share with everyone who is tagged in the videos and their friends, or simply restrict it to your friends. I particularly like the option to share between your friends and the friends of tagged friends because it’s so flexible. we don’t have the same friends so it’s a good method by which to distribute videos, best of all it’s free. Another feature that’s interesting is key frames. You can cycle through up to ten screenshots of your video and find the frame you feel is best suited to illustrate the video. It’s as easy to select a frame as to when you’re sharing a website with your network. I have run into a number of limitations. The video must be under ten minutes in duration and 200 megabytes in size. Keep in mind that the video will be converted to the FLV format which can be read on almost all browsers. I’ve uploaded seven videos already and so far the interface has behaved well. I managed to upload a 50+ megabyte video but due to its length being too long the software complained. I also tried to upload an iPod format video and it complained as well so that’s something I think they should work on. It’s not going to replace the broadcast machine interface I’ve installed on my website but it’s a good method by which to share amateur videos between friends and for those who would like to do it professionally to showcase some of their better work. Two additional video options are uploading by mobile phone and recording from your webcam. The recording from webcam is a feature that’s interesting if you’re in a public place with your laptop and you’re uploading video of specific events. I’ll try uploading video from the mobile phone at a future date. As I see it this is yet another strong feature that has been added to Facebook and unlike the fortune cookies, I like software and others this is something that helps promote the imagined and real communities I discussed in a recent essay. (That essay will be uploaded once it’s been moderated properly). I’m going to take some time to convert and upload quite a few more videos to Facebook over the coming weeks and months.

Today I went to film some friends playing a gig by the lakeside in Nyon and it was a great occasion. The sun was shining, the air temperature was good and many people that I had not seen in many years were present. The shoot involved two cameras. One was at the back as a safety shot whilst I got the fun camera at the front. There was one electric guitar, one acoustic, and one bass. There was also a drum kit and a synthesizer.  The music was good but I forgot my hearing protection so I had a slight ringing by the end of the event… all in a day’s work. I managed to get the whole concert filmed without getting tired which is great. I’ve been using the camera I used for the past 7 years so it’s normal I’m so comfortable with it. I watched the footage and I’m happy with it. It’s good, a nice variety of shots, switches at the right moment from the key instrument to the next. Bart Simpson was sitting on the drum kit and then got to dance with a girl who was meant to sing, the only problem is the sound engineer didn’t make her mic loud enough. It’s normal since they didn’t take enough time to prepare everything before having the gig go live. I’ve captured all the video footage and it’s ready to be compressed and uploaded to Facebook. I’ve actually annoyed them and got a “You recently uploaded a video to Facebook, and it could not be processed because it was too long.” message. hehe, that’s normal for me. I’m uploading those videos to the video section of my website and they’ll be available on the RSS feed within the next few days. I need to count about two hours of processing per video clip unfortunately. With the Macbookpro I’m waiting for it should be faster. Today was in some respects a perfect day and I’d like more of them to be like this.

Today I passed an order through the online apple store and within a number of weeks I should get one of the top of the range machines and I’m really looking forward to it. The Ram isn’t maxed out but that’s because I’m going to upgrade that from an other distributor from whom I can get it cheaper. I’m also getting final cut studio 2 and that should be a great convenience for learning how to use all the software I need for professional purposes. I’m impatient for it now but it’s going to take time to come so I have to be patient… need to find something to distract me for a period. I’ve had an editing system at home which started with Adobe premiere 4.5 and the miro dc30+ and a hi8 camera, upgraded to a PC7 camera for a trip to Tanzania in 2000. That’s when I was editing on the DHR 1000 editing deck where I learned a great deal about tape to tape editing. From there I upgraded to Premiere 5.0, 5.1 and on before giving up on Windows editing. In 2003-4 I upgraded to the Ibook with FCP which worked far better than anticipated. Now I’m waiting for my most recent editing system. Over the years I’ve seen a great change in equipment and the price. As I was at school working on Hi8 it took several years before I was able to edit the footage I had shot. Editing systems could cost thirty thousand swiss francs per BetaSP decks. Now it’s gone down in price and people get a nice home setup. I’m looking forward to it.

There is such a large contrast between life in London and the village where I grew up in Switzerland. In one place you can walk for kilometers before getting to the shops whilst in the other going down the street is enough. In one place there is a 24hr a day life going on outside your window and in the other you hear children playing and you hear the birds tweeting whilst water flows in a river next door. It’s amusing to sit in a house in Switzerland rather than a flat in London because of how much space there is. The entrance hall is as big as London bedrooms. The kitchen is as wide as the house I’m living in in London. There are basements in Switzerland whereas in London those are rare. You find that the people wake up far earlier in switzerland and are so tired by the evening that they loose the motivation to go out. In London you can start the day at 9 or 10am and leave later. By 10pm you should be quiet in Switzerland whilst in London noise starts at 1am and sleep is not attainable till about 3am but this depends on what you’ve been doing before attempting to sleep. You’d pay 14CHF to go back and forth to Geneva whilst in London you’d pay around that price and have access to over a hundred stations for at least one day. That’s quite a contrast. There aren’t as many people. In Switzerland minorities are small enough not to be noticed whilst in London they’re large enough to take large swashes of London over. Go around North West london and you’ll understand what I mean. I can walk from one country to another from where I’m sitting. If it’s foggy I can go up several hundred meters and arrive above the cloud layer and see the Mt Blanc and blue sky. I can also go for an hour’s walk and walk through a few villages. In London I’d have to drop by a number of parks, three of which are conveniently on the tube line I live along. Food shopping is more fun in Switzerland because I’m brought up on this food rather than that found in England. It’s fun to get fresh pasta with meat in the tortelloni rather than vegetables for example. It’s nice to have arrabiata sauce. It’s nice to find European food, whether French, Italian or other. It’s nice to have international news, news that focuses around UN organisations since the TSR is in the same town as the broadcaster. Another thing that changes is driving. A few months ago two close friends of mine and I decided to meet at a drive in McDonald’s and we were all in different cars and this struck me as odd, as though we were in America. Driving is an integral part of life in Switzerland for those who live in the countryside rather than towns like Geneva. It means that we’re comfortable behind the wheel and think nothing of driving back and forth from Nyon to Geneva several times a day. It does get tiring and boring after a while, especially with four or five road radars trying to catch and fine you. We know where all the radars are but this does not take away the nuisance that they are.  When there’s a lot of traffic it doesn’t matter but if it’s 3am and you’ve been with friends the whole night all you want to do is open up the throttle and race down the motorway and get home to sleep. Instead you’re coasting at 120km/h. It’s frustrating. To add to this over the years I’ve learned that Genevans hardly ever leave the city. It’s always up to the rural people to make the effort and that’s often frustrated me. As a driver you need to put up with congestion, increased fuel costs and parking fees. It’s also time consuming. When there’s no traffic it takes 20 minutes to get to Geneva, when there’s traffic then the time doubles. Once you get to Geneva people will want to drink whilst you’re having ice teas. They’ll have glass after glass whilst you’re no longer on the same wavelength. After a while it gets extraordinarily tiring. That’s why my dislike of the city of Geneva grew worse and worse. Nyon is a small town set in a beautiful surrounding. You can cycle, you can sail, you can pedal on a pedalo, you can swim in a swimming pool with the Mt Blanc within sight and the CGN boats passing by. It’s a really nice town. It’s close and has good transport connections with Geneva. It’s got everything you’d expect to do in Geneva but without the hassle. I’ve hardly ever known Genevans to come to the town though. They think it’s too expensive and there’s nothing to do. That’s what I think of Geneva ;). That’s one reason I love London. Everyone has an oyster card and everyone moves around the city. If you meet with friends they travel some distance as well. They will catch the tube as will you to meet in one place or other. You have such a wide selection of things to do. Go to Covent Garden and you’ve got the street performers, go by the Tate Modern and you’ve got the guy with the birds, go by the Film theatre and you have the street painter doing famous painters. Find an arch on the Thames walk and classical artists are performing as a quartet, as operatic singers and more. Go to other parts of London and you’ve got a huge selection of international foods. It’s got so much to offer and once you get to know the city you can easily walk from one place to another. (just got a phone call… to be continued….)

Tonight was a tech-filled night. I finally had the possibility of downloading and testing out Joost and I enjoyed the experience. Joost Joost is a peer to peer video sharing website that is based on the concept of channels but unlike other channels, each video is available on demand. What this means is that if you go to the Redbull channel, for example, you can watch a series of documentaries about various Redbull events whether parapente, aerobatics, or other. Another advantage is that its full screen with two forms of messaging. The first of these is the ability to use either Gmail or jabber to talk with friends you’ve known for years and the second is with the channel chat. At the time when i tried the channel chat there were only five people so the experience was not that special. As more users join this will improve. It’s better than youtube because this is quality content on demand. I decided that I’d flick through the music channels before ending on a documentary about divers going down to a deep wreck whilst a freediver would attempt to beat her record. The image was high quality and the video streamed properly almost the entire time. With more users, experience can only get better. Finally, the commercials, 4 per hour were only one commercial long which is not that bad, just providing a short toilet break. **Wii ** I really enjoyed playing with the WII playing a few of the games. From a friend’s bedroom I played tennis, bowling, boxed with him (and this was highly exertional so it’s a good work out) before being a world war II ace trying to protect Dunkirk but not succeeding due to my lack of familiarity with the controls. Both of these technologies are fun and I want to play far more when I get the opportunity.

I’m still playing with trendio and I’ve had a nice increase over the past week with the stock value. It’s not monetary but I have finally started to make some “profit”. It’s gone up by 16 percent in a week.

I need to keep it increasing more so I need to keep watching to see which are the best words to get.

Finally I’m home to a pc, linux and mac environment and I’m running joost. It’s not bad. At the moment it’s just filler content but nonetheless it’s interesting to see it work and interact with it. For a few days I can offer invites to anyone that wants one. Just put a comment and I’ll get back to you.

Andrew Keen’s new book, The Cult of the Amateur is the latest addition to the Newsnight book club. In it, the author expresses his concern for the profligacy of online amateurism, spawned by the digital revolution. This, he feels, has had a destructive impact on our culture, economy, and values. Web 2.0 is a state of play by which anyone generating content can share it with an audience of hundreds of thousands or even millions depending on its mass appeal. As a result, the quality of media content that certain generations are taking in has gone down. Whilst the occasional work on youtube may be good there are hundreds of thousands of clips that are absolute crap. They’re long takes with no editing, just letting things happen. One of these such videos is of a pack of buffalo by a stream. A pride of lions captures the young before a crocodile attempts to get its share of the kill. Unfortunately, it fails and the lions finally think their meal is ready. They didn’t plan on the herd coming back. The clip ends with the young buffalo rejoining its herd once more and the predators are still hungry. What is annoying about these two clips are the duration and the window size. An editor would do his best to find the key moments. In taking the key moments and making a one minute subject the audience would have gained far more. It would also have saved us time. In HD I’m sure it’d be beautiful but as a small window on a browser, it’s disappointing. That’s the issue with online material. Everyone believes that they can do what they want when they want and then share it with the world. One of the last twitters I received is from Ijustine which read “Just got yelled at for wearing ‘a webcam’” because she’s decided to do the same as Justin from justin.tv. What’s the point of this. I understand the appeal of something like twitter but the live streaming of video seems to be taking it too far. Why are so many people flooding the world wide web with such extraneous content? I don’t want to watch Ijustine sitting at her computer at 3 am as she’s doing as I type this. Where is the media literacy training that should come with this new generation of web users? Who is to decide what is socially acceptable or not. Is it acceptable to strap a camera to your head and film everything that is going on around you or is that a breach of confidence? Is it worthwhile? Who’s going to make sense of this new media landscape. Current TV is supposed to be one of the new waves of user-generated content but does it achieve this. How can you boast about creating a user-generated channel when it’s scrambled so that only through payment can you watch the channel. It’s contradictory. There is a group of podcasters who do a good job of creating web content. The TWIT podcasts are one of these, Mobuzz TV is another to a lesser degree. NPR’s On The media is fascinating. These are examples of how technology can be used to provide high-quality content for a lesser price. In summary, technology has made it easy for anyone with an idea for a program to distribute it widely over the world wide web. Most of it is absolutely terrible and no one would be interested in the content whilst other elements are brilliant. Whilst everyone is seeing this as a new form of communication there is a lot of material that will never appeal to a mass audience. We must simply wait for a new model to emerge whereby the flood of crap will decrease greatly. I’m looking forward to the end of this transition period

it’s vacation time are words that were uttered at the end of a long night in crete back in 2000. They were uttered by an older guy who was with a group of us as we watched the sun rise. Those words always stuck in my mind.

On Wednesday I’m flying back to Switzerland although it’s a one way ticket. During that time I could work on re-editing some old footage and uploading it since people are finally welcoming it with open browser windows.

Checking through my pockets this morning I found that £30 are still there in cash. That’s quite surprising when you take into account that last night’s mission was to drink the bar dry. Obviously I did not contribute to this as greatly as was initially anticipated. It was another night of relative madness. It was a night that involved getting to the bar around four or five in the afternoon and chatting to many people and listening to many others. It was a night where people trickled in until it closed at 3 am. During this time sambuca shots were drunk, people partied and others argued. The fire was the final part of the night. At this point, I was in bed for the second time that morning sleeping my way into today. They got the police to come to the fire and one person was even taken by car around the building and released. This was simply to scare everyone into behaving themselves. It was probably amusing to see all the conspiratorial drunks spreading rumours and insults at this point. The wake-up call was quite original today, a fire alarm. The last halls fire alarm I will ever hear and I can honestly say it’s not going to be missed in any way shape or form. To all those whom I partied with over the past three years, it’s been both a pleasure and an honour. See you around.