Seesmic

Internet coelacanths like @documentally remember a different era. We remember internet video communities in the early days of Seesmic and Qik. Seesmic was a video instant messaging platform. We could either post disconnected videos about anything, or we could reply to each other and have converssations. KDFA had “Le Bar est ouvert”, Documentally had the English language equivalent. We had conversations on a daily basis.

Every week, if I remember the frequency correctly we had Seesmix, a summary of the top videos either from that day or that week. The conversation was strong. We had the “London” group, we had the Francofous/French group and more.

It is the turn of the Washington Post to discuss whether people are happier after leaving social media. As with every other article I have skimmed on the topic it discusses addiction and more without discussing the reason for which social media might be bad for one’s mental health. 

Remember that social networks, discussion groups, and collaborating with people in different rooms, countries, timezones is normal, and has been for decades. What makes social media different from other social networks is that social media is algorithm and profit driven, rather than community centric. 

In the past if you wanted to be a video editor you also needed to be a camera operator, and to be a camera operator you needed to be a video editor. By knowing both skills you shot good material because you knew how hard bad material was to use. As a result of this videos were worth watching with all of our attention.

In recent years, there has been a move towards multimedia editing, where you don’t expect people to watch the video while sitting in front of a TV. You expect them to be looking at a mobile phone while commuting, or scrolling through a social media feed. Job offers reflect this. You often see jobs that required perfect spelling and grammar, Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Effects. The need for an editor to be a camera operator is gone. We have gone from videos being made by camera operators and video editors who love their medium, to graphists, who overlay graphics over video. They’re making slideshows, rather than video content.

It’s raining hard today and I’m still contemplating a walk in the rain. It should allow for some different photographs than usual. If I go to the motorway then I can photograph the vortices of wind behind trucks dragging up water from the road.

If I go for my daily walk when it’s raining as hard as it is today I think It might make sense to wear shorts although I have no good option for my feet. My shoes would probably get soaked.

I have had a meetup.com account since I was using yahoo as my primary e-mail provider. For years my account was dormant because activities that I were interested in were either in another country or at a time when I could not participate. Recently I have found that activities are at times when I can participate. As a result of this I am building a new network of people to climb with.

Disclaimer: These are thoughts, rather than a well structured post. Ridley Scott wants your user generated videos for a film “A Day on Earth” and whilst people are hyping this idea as something new the concept is an old one. Dziga Vertov had an idea that he would capture Life Unawares. Eventually he would end up with an experiment in six reels called “The Man with the Movie camera”. It’s aim was to show Soviet Russia as it was. It was an experiment in editing and in story telling. Skipping ahead you also have the Cinéma Verité movement, where the camera and micro trottoir would go out into the street to interview people and find out their opinions on a variety of topics. I would be more specific but I haven’t watched the film in a long time. What I do remember is the Eclair camera with “crystal” sync sound. Technological innovation freed the camera operator and sound man to continue experimenting. Today everyone has a video camera. Everyone has one on their phone as well as their photo camera. Life is constantly being documented in video form. 24hrs of video are uploaded a minute to youtube. video recording is an everyday part of life. I’m sure we will see a great diversity of moments, some births, some sailing, some rock climbing, some sporting event and more.I haven’t taken a look at how long they want the finished result to be. Seesmicers have had fun with this idea already. We had hat days, we had other events, we would go out with the cameras and film. With Qik too we did this. There is nothing new about the process. There is only a far greater ease to share the material internationally and collaborate. As a side note we still remember Pangea day, another event with the same line of thought, but where people presented finished products rather than moments.

Remember the video version of seesmic, the one that spawned.the francofous? Things changed for two reasons. Bandwidth issues and ressources. Flash would suck down the laptop battery within a few minutes. It meant that you could.only Seesmic from a fixed position. With html5 that problem will dissapear. What I look forward to is an HTML 5 optimized version. It could result in a greater number of users on less powerful machines. I hope we see a growth in users and a more international set of users. I hope they also add more features at the same time. Let us see whether Seesmic take advantage of this opportunity.

Something I would love to see on Seesmic, and which would encourage me to use it more is a “transcribe this” button for when I record certain videos. The logic is simple. Sometimes we discuss things that we would like to see discussed but not everyone wants to listen to us explain our idea. That’s why it would be a nice feature. As an add on you could then add that video to your blog, with a transcript for quick and practical reference.

Loic Le Meur yesterday released Twhirl to anyone willing to give their name and e-mail address. As a result I am using the latest version of twhirl and it finally offers the ability to record straight from twhirl. That means you can record video straight from twhirl. No more web interface. Of course some credit should go to Critter and Seesmicair. His project became a reality.

Loic - Dec 1, 2008

merci pour les pics!