After talking to a friend about possible collaborations in the near future I decided not to invest too much money on a new camera so I bought the Sony HDR-SR12. It’s a small easy to carry video camera that records in AVCHD at a resolution of 1920 by 1080i. The hard drive is 120 gigs for a total recording time of over 30hrs depending on what you want to shoot. I chose the highest quality setting and I still get 1780 minutes of recording time, more than enough for a day’s shooting.
is an automated service that grabs videos from RSS feeds and converts them to 3gpp for easy download to the N95 and other mobile phones running the s60 OS. There are a number of default shows including MobuzzTV, Zefrank, National Geographic, DiggNation, Rocketboom and a number of other well known shows. In the right hand column you have another four methods of accessing content, searching, browsing according to keywords, highest rated or what’s new.
I’m active on more social networks than I have time to go through in a day and that’s where Socialthing comes in. It allows me to follow news from facebook, twitter, pownce, tumblr, flickr, vimeo and livejournal. What I like about this site is how easy it is to see everything that goes on. Whereas friendfeed is nothing more than a few lines of text this version of a social feed aggregator is the visual aspect.
The Francofous are a good group of people and last night we spent a few hours playing with Yahoo Live and skype. Skype provided the audio whilst yahoo live provided the video platform. Yahoo live is limited in the way we can watch and follow video so I created a simple video wall. The principle is simple. i get all the videos embedded into one page and we can watch everyone chat with everyone else.
RandellFever - Feb 0, 2008
Hey Richard - I have been on a couple of times to test it out. I like the interface design. It looks like an interesting tool for a group of people who have a specific purpose for meeting, but for random conversation I greatly prefer Seesmic.
Yeah I agree with Randell, I gave it a test run last night at my cycling social network and I think that kind of specific use is where it will prove useful.
Yahoo live is an interesting live video conferencing tool still in it’s early days. It allows you to stream video live from your webcam and watch up to four other streams at the same time. There’s a chatroom and you can see all the participants at once and select which ones you want in vision and which you’d prefer out of vision. There are a few bugs at the moment. I haven’t found sound that easy to deal with, especially since there’s a five to ten second delay.
Today whilst surfing through the webapps I found one that’s great for what I do, share video content via the web. I found Vtap, a video sharing website that allows you to search through, select and stream videos straight through to your iphone or Ipod touch without either converting it to an ipod compatible format or using the youtube website.
For certain videos it gave me a feedreader rather than playing the videos but for those that are already indexed it works well.
Too many video podcasts are badly produced and that is why David Pogue’s most recent episode was enjoyable to watch. He has a distinctive style. Whilst most video podcasters are content simply using a fixed camera at a desk he takes the time to create entertaining demonstrations of how the tech he is discussing is interesting.
In one episode he talked about how phones for children were great for some things but let down by others.
I have spent a few hours this morning and part of this afternoon digitising videos from a few years ago and it’s a time warp. I have one or two fashion shows on tape. I have at least ten theatre pieces. I have two or three field weeks and I have the 2000 graduation trip to Crete on tape. Those are moments that are not just static, in an album. They are alive.
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.