Video Comparison Shoot Out

I’m a great fan of blip.tv for all your video needs. Blip offers a great deal of functionality and features for very little expense. One of the strongest features is that Blip gives you a great deal of control over the quality of the final embedded video.

It creates flash versions of your uploaded format at a similar bitrate to the original file. This means you can create a flash embedded version of your file at exactly the standard, size and quality you want.

PC World magazine have created a video comparison of various video sites such as Youtube, Revver and Brightcove. They’ve uploaded a test file to these sites and compared the embedded flash version the sites create.

It’s slightly flawed because they’ve compared a Quicktime version from blip.tv against flash versions from the competitors. Nonetheless it’s still interesting if you keep that in mind.

The list of other great advantages of Blip is too long to go into when there is Christmas Shopping to do and my Best of 2007 CD to make. More harping on about blip.tv again in the New Year.

Evolution of the Tube

A display at the newly opened London Transport Museum showing how the tube has grown and developed over the years. Unless you live in South London of course. Of particular interest was all the information about Metro-land, which was a term I'd never really heard of. I also learned that the Victoria Line was a recent invention, built only in the 60s.

You can receive this and other interesting video bits and bobs on your ipod/phone by subscribing through iTunes.

Put video on every window you can find

I came across a very interesting new York Times article on how the internet is turning the traditional TV world upside down.

Lots of Little Screens: TV Is Changing Shape

The main point which grabbed my attention…

“One closely watched approach is the new online series “Quarterlife,” by Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, who produced “My So-Called Life.” Episodes first appear on MySpace TV, then are available the next day on Quarterlife.com, and a week later on YouTube, Facebook and Imeem. There is talk that they may even appear later on network TV — but as the last window, rather than the first.”

Stop and think about that for a second. And another second. Yes it’s interesting that a distribution hierarchy is emerging, with the huge number of options available, that was probably inevitable. It certainly makes sense, having the content appearing on the originating site first followed by Facebook, Youtube etc.

But the really fascinating point is these producers are considering putting TV at the bottom of that hierarchy. And if you compare the lumbering giant that is bandwidth restricted schedule-driven TV broadcasting, to the nimble agile world of the internet, where viewers can get what you want when you want it - well it makes perfect sense.

The hierarchy will differ depending on the 'programme'. It's hard to imagine a world where Midsomer Murders or events like Strictly Come Dancing appear first on the web. But for a lot of other content, where else would you put your video first? That's where your primary audience is.

Telly writers think we’re all geeks

I love it when writers of mass media refer to new technologies on their programmes. These embarrassing attempts usually happen when they feel they have to keep the programme current or of the time. Sadly these excursions into the real world are almost always highly embarrassing, mainly illustrating how far most TV writers are behind the rest of us technopeople - the folks who use the internet, ipods and gasp, mobile phones.

British Soaps are usually fairly good at it, dropping in a telltale beep beep accompanied by someone fumbling in a pocket for a mobile. Then comes the inevitable very still and overly long extreme close up of a four year old phone showing a text message. Where they tend to really fall down is that usually the message is in awful text speak with lots of GR8, CU 2Nite action. It doesn’t matter who sends the text, whether they are fourteen or forty, that’s how the technopeople talk when using Short Message Service technology.

The Archers radio soap (now available as a podcast) does this a lot as well, but someone I’m more forgiving of this, maybe I'm just more forgiving of The Archers in general. Several years ago there were the Ambridge website storylines, which still crop up now an again. 'We’re avin a plowin competition and we’d like to put a story up on the website'. It's endearing, but we all know that putting anything on that site is pointless, it must get minimal traffic.

Just recently an older couple (Phil and Jill I think) are going on a trip to Hong Kong and their granddaughter Pip has been setting up an email address for them. At one point a blog was mentioned but thankfully the idea was poo pooed.

Which brings us round to a recent attempt on CSI. It’s all going fairly well, nice and brief screen shots of Twitter, hey we’re cool with Twitter, IM, blogging, we don’t need to make a big deal about this. But then woops, the writers slip up and reveal what they really think of us technopeople. See if you can spot it:



Yip, 'they don't expect privacy, they value openness'. Pause. I'm not sure where to even begin with this. I do like the other chap's response though.

The writers then run out of words and make a schoolboy error, throwing in the word ‘virtual’. Nobody uses that word anymore, not even my Aunt Hilda who just got email and broadband. And nobody would ever ever use it in the phrase “looks like a virtual love triangle to me.”

Yip telly writers thing we’re all geeks, although we do value openness.

Guess Where?

Well it's pretty easy to guess I know.

Horniman Jellyfish

Click to Play

Some jellyfish swimming around at the Horniman museum in South East London. Just trialing the blip.tv cross posting.

Facebook Pages - Now RSS enabled

As mentioned previously the new Facebook pages seemed initially a little, well crap. They allowed you to create a profile and put a poor quality header at the top and that was about it.

I have to admit though they've come on leaps and bounds by making an RSS application (Simply RSS) available. This allows the page creator to pull in lots of content from their main site or anywhere else they choose and start making it available through Facebook. Now that starts to get interesting.

I've added in RSS feeds to Camping Spots on Facebook and as expected, feeding in some content makes a huge difference.


Of all the Facebook Sponsored Pages I've seen it's worth taking a look at the New York Times version with a variety of feeds, quizzes and content available.

Facebook Pages - just a bit crap?

Just over a week ago Facebook launched Facebook Pages and Facebook Ads which allow organisations to create their own profiles which Facebook users can become fans of. The ads then allow you to promote your Fan page (or other external website) by creating and paying for Facebook ads.

There was definitely a need for something like these fan pages. Organisations, commercial or otherwise, have been creating fake profiles to generate interest around their products for a while. I have heard of several profiles being closed down recently because theye represented businesses. Organisations could always create a group but these are fairly limited in what apps you can add to the group profile, making a very limited experience.


I’ve just created a Fan page for Camping Spots and so far it’s been a frustrating experience. The image options for adding your company logo are very poor and the range of applications you can add to the profile is bizarre. You’re fine if you want to add a ‘Which celeb am I most like’ application, but if you want to feed content into the page using RSS then you quickly come unstuck. Whether this is a purposeful Facebook move to stop them recreating the Yellow Pages or just an oversight, I’m not sure.

While Facebook Fan Pages are a bit crap, Facebook Ads most certainly are not. These allow any Joe Bloggs to tap into the Facebook advertising market, promoting fan pages or external URLs.

They allow very terrifyingly specific targeting of ads - want only liberal UK students living in Nottingham who are fans of the Star Wars Movies to see your ads, no problem!


And the crunch - they let you specify what budget you want to spend per day on advertising.

Which is all a bit scary.

Are you odd?

A 'friend' of mine has just sent me this link in regard to looking for possible vacancies. According to BBC News, a new Star Trek movie is being made and the production are looking for people with a "unique" appearance.

Specifically:

* extremely large heads and foreheads
* wide or close-set eyes
* over or undersized ears and/or nose
* facial deformities
* pronounced cheekbones
* ultra perfect or ultra plain-looking people

Application forms can be picked up at your local job centre.

Thanks Ros.

Gun for hire

Well the good ship Interesource has sailed, collided at full speed with a financial iceberg and is currently plummeting towards the bottom of the Ocean of Administration. It was an amazing 6 months and everyone at IR was great and the clients we had were fantastic. I've certainly learned an awful lot since leaving the Big Black Cauldron.

So now I am looking for new and exciting challenges. I have years of interactive experience, piles of video content creation knowledge and now know a thing or two about the whole social and marketing world.

So if that matches the knowledge or experience you are looking for, please get in touch.

My contact details are:
Nairn Robertson
07779081179
nairnski [at] gmail [dot] com (trying to avoid the nasty spam bots)

Get a copy of Nairn's CV (pdf)