Voodle #9

#9 from Nairn Robertson on Vimeo.

Crackington Haven beach on a fresh November morn.

Picking Cotton, picking Presidents

An interesting correlation can be seen in the maps below. The top map shows the recent presedetial election results at a county level (the darker the colour the greater the majority) - blue represents the goodies and red the baddies. The second map shows cotton production in 1860, just before the civil war. Cotton harvest and production was of course dependent on African-American slaves.

An interesting comparison give the 148 years between the data used for the two maps.



Find out more on the original post

Newspapers no longer in the paper business - video

Interview with Michael Rosenblum by Jemima Kiss at the Society of Editors conference in Bristol.

"Newspapers today are in information and journalism business, they're not in the paper business. The biggest weakness in the newspaper is the paper part of it."

I think Michael Rosenblum is spot on. The fact that this video has been posted via Youtube rather than the Guardian's video platform is case in point.

Voodle #8

#8 from Nairn Robertson on Vimeo.

Bristol Zoo on a cold wet day. Luckily we were inside.

Deep linking is critical - new idea from YouTube

With increasing amounts of long form video content available on the web, it's going to be increasingly important for publishers to provide mechanisms for segmenting or deep linking into videos.

People have always chunked programmes into segments, perhaps favourite bits or funny scenes or lines. These have been manually segmented and uploaded since the day YouTube launched. Here's an example and excuse to watch the famous McGyver coffin jet ski escape scene:



With more long form content, the ability to segment online or on the fly is key. Clips are easier to consume because of their brevity, they're usually the most memorable bits and they're more likely to have some kind of viral impact.

Hulu (of course) have a great system where if I email or embed a video then I can select an in and out point, allowing me to choose a specific segment. It's simple and easy and it passes the Mrs Robertson test, could my mum do it?

Youtube have announced two measures to allow similar sub-clipping. The first is not very user friendly, it involves adding a timecode to the end of the URL to create a deep link. It does work, although my mum wouldn't like it, and it's a little clunky when the page loads. Here's the moment the coffin turns into a jet ski (1 minute and 1 second into the clip): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTWEh2mcdsg#t=1m01s

The second method is far more interesting. In the comments field of YouTube (where you'll find the the swearing and hatred,) if you enter a timecode in the right format, a link is automatically created to that moment in the video.


See it in action on the Mcyver clip and try it yourself.

This allows users to discuss the content in context - this is not a feature I've seen elsewhere. With the amount of commenting on YouTube this could be quite a strong feature and one I think we'll see becoming available on other sites.

Meanwhile in other news, speculation on Hulu making an appearance in the UK and a funny and clever revisiting of the original Wassup TV advert.

#7

#7 from Nairn Robertson on Vimeo.

Shot at Westonbirt Arboretum, Gloucestershire, which comprises some 18,000 trees and shrubs and was established in 1829.

London Commuting Visualisations

I've been aware of the mySociety work for while, mainly through theyworkforyou.com which was used for some aspects of Protect The Human. I recently discovered their mapping project which visualises commuting times for different forms of transport. These visualisations are fascinating and could prove incredibly useful in managing the transport networks that we all use in our daily lives.

click image for full version
This map shows travel times to the Department of Transport in Pimlico using public transport. It's the detail which I love, showing islands appearing around transport nodes and hubs such as train stations or main bus routes.


Wimbledon while reasonably far out is very well connected through Victoria Station, whereas for getting to Pimlico, SE London is hopeless. Of course were the map to be centred on London Bridge where most SE London transport deposits the daily hoardes, then the map would look very different.

There is a dynamic version with sliders half way down this page, centred again on Pimlico.

A similar map shows Edinburgh, comparing public transport versus car commuting times. The light coloured areas represent where public transport is quicker than driving. While city public transport bodies must have this kind of information (I hope to God they do) it's amazing to see this data visualised so clearly.


This last map came as a bit of a shock. As a cyclist who braves the capital regularly, I'm well aware of how quick two wheels can be, but I was surprised at the extent to which this as true. The clear areas on this map represent where cycling is faster than public transport if you work at the Department of Transport. For most of London cycling is clearly faster! The black area in Pimlico is confusing, any ideas?


Of course what we all want is to enter our own postcode and visualise how how our lives are affected by travel times and networks. Hopefully one day that system wil be developed. If you're interested you can commission mysociety to create a custom map for you.

For anyone interested in sustainable transport and car free areas, www.carfree.org.uk and www.carfree.com are good places to start.

Cool new routemaster design - video

One of the entries in the Routemaster bus competition for London.

I've only seen still images for the other designs but this video really brings this particular design to life. I really like the look of this video (although it could do with more/any sound), not to mention the actual design of the bus - I love the idea of people facing each other on London buses. Although it does seem to have the longest wheel-base of any bus I've ever seen - corners and cyclists beware. I really love the big destination sign next to the front door.

Interesting pics - Me on Tumblr

I've recently started posting stuff to Tumblr. I find a lot interesting things which catch my eye but don't make it onto this blog. Either they aren't relevant, I don't have the time or as is most likely, I have no real opinion on.

So I've been posting these things - usually they're visual rather than wordy. So far they seem to be about design, architecture, music, photographs or history. You can find these at: http://nairnski.tumblr.com/

If like me you prefer the RSS way of life then you can find the feed here: http://nairnski.tumblr.com/rss

Here are a few recent submissions:

J is for Jawa (via tweedlebop)

1912. "German port call. U.S. battleship in Hampton Roads to greet German squadron." Harris & Ewing Collection glass negative. (via The Kaiser Comes Calling: 1912 | Shorpy :: History in HD)

Kung Fu Panda - The Art of the Title Sequence

Timelapse - Durdle Door from pigeon on Vimeo.

Motley Fool video launches

Earlier this year I found myself working, through the good folks at Made by Many, at the headquarters of fool.co.uk, the financial advice and comparison website.

Motley Fool had been running audio podcasts successfuly for many months and wanted to progress into moving pictures. They key problem we faced was that their sector does not particularly lend itself to interesting moving pictures. You'll see this point exactly when the news (especially Newsnight) starts chucking graphics at this very problem during financial stories. Furthermore, the team available was small and did not have the resource to spend all week filming interesting cutaways to help the video along.


I assisted by running a couple of workshops with their team, looking at what the competition was producing, simple video formats that could be used and some storyboarding and scriptwriting sessions. I also provided general production and integration advice and some hands on editing advice to the team. We then produced a couple of pilots to see how the ideas panned out. The pilot process was fun as we wrestled with trying to make pensions and bonds visually interesting. Eventually we arrived at a few key rules:

- Motley Fool has many writers who are experts in their field - they're valuable so make use of them.

- finance affects us all and people on the street have opinions and stories to tell - make use of them.

- don't try and replicate a news service.

And so the content as it now stands focuses more on people and opinion than we originally envisaged. Also we decided that content should be created when stories would lend itself to moving pictures, rather than trying to force non-visual stories into moving pictures just to suit a schedule.

So now using the magic of blip.tv, Motley Fool's video is up and running and looking pretty good, even if I say so myself. It's well shot and edited, interesting and relevant, which is impressive considering it's about finance. Well done to Andy, Emma, Szu Ping, Donna, Ed, Laura and everyone else involved.

Watch On The Money on fool.co.uk or subscribe.

Guardian video experience - that's a fail

I once visited the BBC's Kingswood Warren complex to speak to someone about grey screen technology. It was like green screen (or blue screen) but cooler, I can't remember how or why it was cooler, but it must have been if Kingswood were involved.

Kingswood is supposedly closing, so I was interested to watch a filmed interview from August on the Guardian site with Andy Bower, the BBC head of broadcast research and innovation. The interview content was interesting enough (mainly because of the cutaways) but sadly the overall experience was a real let down.


Firstly, what's with this framing that was used throughout the entire interview footage? I suspect the interviewer may have been sent out on her own, set the camera up and then jumped into shot to carry out the interview.


We've all been in situations where we've had to set up kit quickly, used unfamiliar kit or simply had to do things on the cheap - so I'm sympathetic. But really the Guardian should not be sending people out filming until they know some of the basics of framing a shot. If you spend any money on creating video content, please spend it on getting a camera operator - as experienced as you can afford.

Having watched the video, I looked at the 'Latest videos' content on the right hand side of the player. Having watched something about TV innovation, they're suggesting I then watch an advert with Timmy Mallet or an advert for Channel Five? Of the five videos suggested, three were for TV adverts and two were for Five idents or ads. There were quite a few videos in the Guardian Video section that I would like to have watched, had they been suggested to me.

I'm not usually so harsh, but following recent glorious experiences with Hulu, then I think we should all be striving for better experiences.

1. Know how to frame a shot and hold the camera steady on a tripod.

2. Be very careful with suggested or latest video links. If you don't have enough content to make the experience worthwhile, don't try and fake it. If the system can't suggest very relevant content, then at least make sure it suggests a good variety or cross-section of content.

#6

This is really too long for a voodle, but I really like it so why not. 24 hours later, just a bit higher up the ski run I was proposing!

The story of the YouTube killer

Wired has a very interesting article about Hulu with an interview with Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu. Jason explains how he came to be involved and how from March 2008 to August they created the 8th largest video site in the US.


There is a great quote in response to the viewing figures the web receives in comparison to TV, from Peter Chernin, president of News Corporation, Fox's corporate parent.

"So what?" Chernin says. "You can't protect old business models artificially." This is a truth the tech community knows well, but it's not what you expect to hear from a media baron like Chernin. What he and Zucker [chief of NBC Universal] have come to understand is that the media companies no longer have a choice: If they don't put their shows online, someone else will. "The best way to combat piracy is to make your content available," Zucker says. "We don't know for sure what the impact is going to be on our established businesses. But we want to make sure consumers know they don't need to steal our content. That's really what Hulu is about."

Read the whole story, it's an interesting read.

Why I trust Hulu (part 2)

In a previous Hulu post I waxed lyrically about the design and general loveliness of using Hulu.

That’s obviously important, but without quality content it’s just html, flash and some quite well done ads. The way Hulu deals with its wide range of content is very impressive and something we can all learn from. Essentially where the content originated from is given little importance. When you view an episode of Heroes there is no mention of which producer, channel or studio owns it. In Hululand it’s the content and the genre of the content which is important, not whether it’s a Fox, Warner Bros or Discovery channel programme.

This is a brave and I believe probably correct approach. The BBC could possibly have launched iPlayer without the channel associations, but they didn't and now it's very difficult to imagine them ever going. If you imagine BBC content on Hulu, there would be no mention of the channels, the stamp of quality would simply be ‘BBC’.


The breadth and amount of quality is impressive (probably greater than that on offer at any given time on the iPlayer). You can watch 37 episodes of Buck Rogers (including the fantastically titled ‘Planet of the Amazon Women’), 57 clips from the Onion News Network, 1152 clips from The Simpsons, 5 episodes and 65 clips of Heroes, and it looks as if all new episodes of The Daily Show will be available.


There are hundreds of full movies, from classics through to more recent releases, and many more movie clips. All for free. Critically, Hulu's content is high quality, profesional content and it's becoming clear this is where the advertisers want to be.

There is a Family channel on Hulu, but the content and the site as a whole are definitely aimed at adults. I imagine at some point this family channel will spin off and a child friendly version of Hulu will launch, possibly to try and compete with the power of Disney.

So what next for Hulu? Well content, advertising and territories are key for future success. Hulu’s in a strong position in terms of content, being backed by NBC and Fox, but there is content from many other providers. The competition is lagging, Joost is going browser based but critically, without the content it won't make the same impact.


YouTube is miles ahead of everyone in terms of video views and audience, but being mainly user generated content, it’s struggling to bring in the advertising bucks that it should be.

Here in the UK we can’t view any Hulu content, and it’s unlikely we’ll ever see hulu.co.uk launching. The main channels in the UK are heavily invested in either the iPlayer, or the future release of Kangaroo (hopefully). It’s unlikely that these channels will hand over content to Hulu, but hopefully project Kangaroo will learn a lot from Hulu and will launch with an impressive, clean, mature and uncluttered product next year. I might register Kangarulu.co.uk just in case.

Note: In the UK you can browse Hulu and get a sense of the breadth of the content, however you can't actually watch the video - unless you are sneaky, or you know someone sneaky.

Why I trust Hulu (part 1)

I’ve been aware of Hulu for sometime, the video joint venture between NBC and Fox, but never really understood the appeal. Hulu now ranks No. 8 among the Top 10 online video sites, which is impressive growth, especially considering that you can only watch the content inside the USA.

Somejiggery-pokery by someone more techie than me has meant that I’ve recently been able to view Hulu as if I was within the United States. What I’ve seen has been very impressive and I’m convinced Hulu is setting the bar by which all video sites should be measured.

Firstly the design of the site is clean, uncluttered and importantly trust-building. By that I mean it’s very professional looking, the images are sharp, high quality and well cropped. There are no banner ads or MPUs. In a world of cluttered crappy video sites, Hulu straight away is different. There are no flash video thumbnails, there are no gimmicks, no content rammed down your throat.


The interactions on the site are simple and logical, and for a site with a lot of content, you never feel overwhelmed. Hulu says ‘you can forget all those crappy video sites which chuck content together and hope it works, THIS is how you do it properly.’ This is an important message in the very cluttered and messy world of online video. Consider the recently relaunched Warner Bros thewb.com and you’ll see what viewers tend to get elsewhere.


The navigation is simple, divided into TV and Movie content, all viewable by popularity, alphabetically and by originator or studio or network. Recently created are channels, where you can view all the content by themes such as ‘Home and Garden'”. All consistent, all trust building.

The site really comes alive once you start watching the content. The video itself is beautiful, clear and of very high production quality - further from YouTube it could not be. The video has all been produced consistently, cuts are clean, the fades are consistent and the dynamic junctions with the adverts are the smoothest and most painless I’ve ever seen.


The player has all the usual features, with a couple of pleasing additions. When you share or embed content, you can select a specific clip or segment using in and out points. We’ve seen this before but of course it is well executed on Hulu. While watching a clip you can browse other content without interrupting the playing video, encouraging discovery and exploration.

The big step forward with the player is the way it deals with advertising.


A timeline shows when the ad breaks are and during the ad breaks there’s a countdown timer explaining ‘your video will start again in 5 seconds’. During an advert you can indicate whether you like or dislike this advert. It’s not clear the actual effect of this, but one would hope that it will lead to tailored ads. Adverts tend to come from the same advertiser throughout a programme, as if the programme is sponsored. This makes the whole experience feel much more cohesive than many other sites.

There are a lot of ads (less than watching the programme on US television though), but because Hulu is clear about when the ads are and how long they last for, as a viewer you really don’t mind. Hulu doesn’t commit the cardinal sin of showing me the same advert over and over again as I view different videos. When so often video advertising is a painful experience it’s refreshing to see it done well and bodes well for the future.

You can get this content for free in many places on the web. But doing so is generally illegal, takes ages and the quality is often poor. Why would you bother when you can go and visit www.hulu.com where it’s available for free, in beautiful quality and the cost is watching a few reasonably well crafted short ads?

Boing Boing picks up Protect the Human campaign

BoingBoing has picked up a cause being pushed now by Amnesty through the Protect The Human site which was launched last month. Troy Davis is scheduled to be executed in Georgia at 7pm local time on 23 September. He has been on death row for 17 years for a murder he maintains he did not commit.

One of the aims of Protect the Human was to give Amnesty UK a platform which allowed them to pick up on critical events and to react quickly, drawing attention to these types of causes.


From the number of comments about the issue on BoingBoing it's really amazing to see the site in action and working as intended. There is still a lot of honing and refining to do on Protect the Human, but it's all heading in the right direction.

Follow the conversation on Protect The Human, BoingBoing and join the other people helping to save a man’s life.

Keep up to date on Protect the Human and many other innovative projects (some of which are launching very soon)at Made by Many.

#5

My latest voodle. This is the MSC Napoli which went down off the Devon coast in January 2007. We're regular visitors to this stretch of coast, you can see in these Flickr pics how the ship's become smaller and smaller as chunks are blowtorched/blown off by the salvage teams.

Me & McCain

Me & McCain on 12seconds.tv

From 12seconds.tv - videos which are, yip you guessed it, 12 seconds long. I like the simplicity which you get when you only have a short time to work with.

Just how powerful is YouTube?

I've been doing some research recently into video syndication sites. I've spent some time poking around Tubemogul and they've got some interesting research papers on video distribution and codecs.

Of particular interest is the study Which Video Sites Deliver the Most Views?

YouTube is a clear winner, but the difference between YouTube and the competition is quite starling.


"While YouTube dominates the averages, sites other than YouTube still control a great deal of the audience out there. Adding up the site averages, a video producer could almost double their audience by also distributing to the additional sites listed."

Read the full paper.

London Calling

A few months ago we moved out of London to Bristol. To non-Londoners that might not seem a big deal but London is a hard place to settle in and having invested 8 years of my life there it was time to go. I've continued to work in the big smoke each week, mainly on Protect The Human, commuting each week and staying with a friend.

Having mentally made the break I could no longer Brompton. I'm not going to bore you with the details but the Brompton is fantastic and I can hardly imagine life without it now. I cycle to the train, fold it in up seconds and pop it alongside the suitcases. I reckon I've saved about £200 in two months and countless hours of travel time.

The Brompton is really nice to ride and as long as the tyres are pumped up hard I can keep up easily with most cyclists on London's streets. The fold mechanism is amazing and incredibly satisfying, here's a video showing how small it goes:



I have quite a few other essentials to help manage the commute, the most critical being a broadband dongle for the laptop. It's a 3 supplied dongle and works pretty well most of the time but is a bit variable depending on the phone signal. The image below shows everything the cycling train commuter needs for a couple of nights in London (the pic is annoted with notes if you visit the photo on Flickr).

Helping to Protect The Human

There has been a distinct lack of blogging action here for quite sometime now. Just over two months ago myself and my fiance packed all our London possessions and moved to Bristol. Since then I’ve been shuttling backwards and forwards working on a very exciting agile project for Made by Many and Amnesty International UK.


The timescales for the project were very tight and there were many obstacles along the way, but two weeks (we've been tinkering and fiddling since then) ago Amnesty UK’s new site www.protectthehuman.com went into public beta. The site aims to give a place for people to engage with Amnesty and Amnesty’s aims. The site is socially focused allowing users to view Amnesty video and image content and encouraging users to contribute their own views, opinions and content. Woven into the fabric of the site are proactive actions which are becoming increasingly important to Amnesty. Critically, standard activities such as commenting and rating are also considered and displayed as ‘actions’. This helps increase engagement with Amnesty and shows that small actions when taken by many people can have important effects.


My role in the projects started in the spring (before the rainy season) when I was engaged to carry out an impact assessment for the client in order to assess the impact such a service would have on the organisation. This led to me writing a Service Definition Document. This fairly hefty document was essentially a loose spec describing the areas of the site and how everything would hold together. This service definition document basically collated all the ideas for the service and translated these into a top level definition or spec.

Once the project was commissioned my role became more of a Producer. Throughout the life of the project I switched hats regularly covering project management, business analysis and to some degree interaction design.

The project management role involved working very closely with both Amnesty and technical partner and Ruby on Rails specialists New Bamboo. The design aspects proved particularly time consuming which left us with a large amount of template integration towards the latter stages of the process.


The business analysis role involved assisting Amnesty and Made by Many to translate their vision, aims and expectations into a service which could actually be built in the timescales allowed. The agile approach meant we did not define the entire site before we started developing but broke it down into feature areas such as ‘creating content’ or ‘groups’ and defined these as we progressed through the build. It's amazing to look back at features which we initially thought were critical but were superseded or became redundant as the project developed and evolved.

The project was highly agile, which meant that even if with the design difficulties we managed to the launch the project on time. I’m convinced that had this project been a traditional waterfall project we would probably still be weeks, if not months away from launch. Amnesty UK is a reasonably large organisation and the speed at which New Bamboo could develop forced decisions to be made in days rather than weeks. That’s not to say that we didn’t all learn a huge amount about how to run agile projects. I think agile puts a greater weight of responsibility onto the the individuals involved in the project, thankfully all those involved where highly skilled and produced great results. Well done to all those involved, in particular Max, Damien, Ismael, Paul and Rob from New Bamboo and Sara, David, Tom, Julia, Charlotte, Isaac and William from Made by Many.

Protect the Human is currently in public beta, and the site which is currently live is only the first release of what we hope will be a site which continues to develop and evolve new features and ideas.

What the heck is copyright?

I've been very bad at posting recently as I'm up to my eyeballs in a project. This made me smile while rushing headlong through the English countryside the other day.

Trainline.com usability: fail

My second attempt at buying a train ticket from the trainline today appears to have hit the buffers. I'm in the middle of the transaction, what do I do now? The same thing as the first attempt, wait an hour or so to see if a confirmation email comes through.

Definite fail.

Omniplan Breakthrough

I first used a Mac in 1992 in the Glasgow University Aeronautical Engineering Department computer suite. We used 'spreadsheets' and 'wordprocessor' programmes on a Mac that looked like this beauty.

But for the last 15 years or so I've been a PC user. I occasionally used macs for editing and encoding but that's about it.

Writing docs, spreadsheets, presentations, that was all done on PCs. Not that I love PCs especially, (I definitely despise Word) it's just that my working life involved offices and that usually means PCs.

Now however I'm using a MacBook Pro quite a lot and I do like it very much indeed. OmniPlan, the microsoft project equivalent, has been doing my nut in though. This is almost entirely because you have to schedule tasks by date AND hour, which seems crazy to me.

But I have found the way to turn off the crazy hour planning, and it's made such a difference that I had to share it. To turn off hourly scheduling go to the Inspector window, choose Project > Information, Granularity > Daily Scheduling.

Sit back and relax.

If you also hate Microsoft Word as much as I do, then my experiences with Google Docs and Pages have been much more satisfying.

Help Colin Canary Fly

Interesting Intro to Semantic Web

| View | Upload your own

Captures the essence of it quite well with these points:

- pages are not the centre of the web now, data and services are.
- 90% of Twitter activity happens through the API.

Lightwriting vid on Flickr

starwarsVstartrek
Originally uploaded by lichtfaktor

Some very cool lightwriting techniques from Lichtfactor. They must be very patient people indeed.

Confiscating longline in the Pacific

Confiscating longline in the Pacific
Originally uploaded by Greenpeace Esperanza

I've been following this great Flickr contributor from Greenpeace for a while now. The photos are taken by Greenpeace staff working on the Greenpeace Esperanza in the Pacific Ocean. The photos they post are infrequent depending on who seems to be on rotation, but show the crew, the work and the environment they spend their time in. They bring a real insight into the ship, the crew and Greenpeace, despite the Esperanza being on the other side of the world.

Its a great way of spreading the word of Greenpeace, and it does make it look very exciting!

This is their first Flickr video, nothing especially exciting but again, a great way of demonstrating why the Esperanza and Greenpeace are deep in the Pacific Ocean. If only they'd add in some location metadata and then we could see exactly where they are. That would be cool.

(posted from Flickr)

The Stuff of Life from Amnesty

I've been advising Amnesty International UK on some video matter recently. They wanted to get a newly commissioned video The Stuff of Life on the web so it could be easily distributed and embedded by activists across the web. The film imitates a glossy TV advert, and so the perception of production values was essential. The issue was getting it in as high a quality as possible, while allowing as many people as possible to watch it. The most important thing from my perspective was that the film played fully without buffering as I believe that had a terribly detrimental effect on the impact of the film.

The final file ended up at a bit rate of around 700 to 800 kbps, which was around 200kbps higher than I had originally expected. But as always with web video it's essential to try a test file and see. I'm on a standard BT broadband wireless connection and this file has played consistently well for me - the proof is in the pudding it seems.

Incidentally, the production company did a lot of testing with Blip.tv. I'd suggested Blip originally, as their player comes with lots of distribution benefits and good tracking which was important for AIUK. Following testing they felt that Blip performance varied considerably and files which would play fine one day buffered a lot the next. They also felt that the same file while performing well enough through another set up was not served as well by Blip. I can't verify this for myself, but it seems if a really glossy high production values are essential for you, Blip may not be the solution.

Watch the The Stuff of Life and spread the word.

Facebook Lexicon

Alexa is a great tool and I've seen it used many times to illustrate trends on the web - compare facebook.com against bbc.co.uk and it's hard to deny the impact of social media on the web landscape.


Facebook has a similar service called Lexicon, which allows you to looks at "the usage of words and phrases on profile, group and event Walls".

Here's a comparison of the number of times Obama, Clinton and McCain were mentioned showing a clear spike around Super Tuesday on February 5th.

Trying comparisons in Lexicon is interesting, there is a regular peak every week when comparing party tonight and hangover, with about a 12 hour lag between the two.

Insights into Facebook can be inferred - try searching for less event related terms like news and there seems to be a regular drop in traffic on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. Facebook seems to be a weekday site - no enormous surprise there.

Lexicon could also be extremely useful for marketeers who want to get a sense of buzz around a product. Comparing Xbox, Wii and PS3 together shows significant more interest in the Wii and an enormous buzz around the Christmas period.

Of course all this needs to be taken with a pinch of salt take into account the people who are creating these terms, their demographic, language and also geographic location - as a comparison of capital cities or a comparison of hello in different language demonstrates.

To make the circle complete, you can share your Lexicon comparison with friends or post it to your profile. There is a danger that this could create some horrible Facebook amplification feedback loop though, possibly leading to the end of the world. Or perhaps that's reserved for Facebook chat.

First movie on flickr

First movie on flickr
Originally uploaded by nairnski

My first movie posting to flickr. First attempt failed as it didn't seem to like H.264 but the second attempt encoded as an MPEG-4 seems to have worked fine.

I used a custom camera housing, some might call it a cardboard box with lots of tape wrapped round it, to film this. This was coming down an empty red run on the Fornet glacier. It was steeper than it looks!

Splashcast Trials

I'm just trying out a content publishing site called Splashcast.

"SplashCast makes it easy to create your own online TV channel, where you can stream your favorite videos, photos, music, and podcasts right on your web page or blog."

Here's my first attempt, pulling in images from my flickr account.



You can see splashcast in slightly more impressive action at hillaryspeaksforme.com

#4

Youtube up the quality

Your friend and mine Youtube has recently announced they're increasing the quality of their videos.



You can switch between the higher and lower quality versions either through your settings or on this demo on the rather clunky link below the video.

It's not quite perfected yet as the aspect ratio looks a bit off to me. Still, an increase on the quality of Youtube playback can only be a good thing.

More info on the Youtube Blog.

#3

One step closer to the future

BBC TV programmes put on iTunes
Great to see the BBC doing something in online video ahead of the competition, it's been a while! One step forward to the future that we're moving towards.

And here is a glimpse of that future at www.locatetv.com the first site I've seen which combines EPGs for online, television and DVDs. This allows you to search for a programme, find out when it's next on TV (you can specify your TV provider details) and also find out where it's available to view online.

The results returned are variable. 4OD content doesn't appear while iPlayer content does, and you certainly notice the broadcasters which aren't making their content available online - how long can they afford not to be doing this? Locate TV is far from a fully formed useful product that people will use. However it works, is intuitive and shows how television and online video could exist together in the future.

An interesting aspect is how they're also pushing Movies and actors. Hmm.

Give it a whirl:


PS: Latest on the Max Gogarty Saga.

BBC Entertainment blast from the past

While doing some flash investigation I found myself at thetobe.com Looking around Toby's portfolio I found this image from a long time ago.

This is a BBC Entertainment Broadband service I developed, produced and ran back in about 2002. So long ago I'd almost forgotten about it. I was working for Tom of the Dolan at the time and the project was overseen by New Media Towers by Sara Watkins.

The service attempted to aggregate broadband video content from around the Entertainment departments of the BBC. I seem to remember that it was only promoted through the ISPs which offered broadband access. It was a little before it's time, but we learned a lot about increasing production values from narrowband to broadband.

It was also the first time we ever made short form video content formats specifically to be consumed as video on the web. Previously it was always just some clips grabbed off a VHS and thrown onto a streaming server.

Here we actually had an dedicated editor working from digibetas, cutting down episodes of EastEnders from 28 minutes to 60 seconds for use here and on the Kingston Interactive platform.

The service may have only lasted 6 months or so but here we are 5 years later and now the EastEnders production team in Elstree are making short versions of their programmes for use on the web and who knows where else in the future. That feels nice.

Presenting not very visual content as video

I am currently wrestling with how to present some not very visual content as video.

You can cover almost any subject area through moving pictures, but doing it in a way that is entertaining enough to maintain the attention of your audience is a challenge.

If you get it right though you can transfer really quite intricate ideas clearly and in a much more interesting way than you could have done with text or images.

Whenever it seems too hard it's always good to come back to a set of some fantastic videos that present not very visual subject matter in a highly entertaining way.

Explain RSS to my mum using moving pictures, now there's a challenge...



For more 'Paperwork' videos by these guys visit leelefever on Youtube.

Microsoft: Hands off our Flickr

It seems Flickr users are not especially pleased with the possibility of their favourite photo sharing website being owned by Microsoft.They're a creative bunch and have created an great Flickr Pool entitled "Microsoft: Keep your evil grubby hands off of our Flickr" for their protestations. It's well worth five minutes of your time.

Cloverfield - spoiler warning...

We went to see Cloverfield at a surprisingly quiet Brixton Ritzy on Friday night. It's good and completely relentless - well worth seeing if you think you might like it.

I remember having a conversation with Dallas last July (ish) about a great trailer for a scary movie that nobody knew anything about. At the time it didn't seem to even have a name, except possibly 1-18-08.

At the same time there were various online treasure hunt type games which teased and tempted you through various puzzles. Although looking back I think the information that was revealed about the film had little to do with what I saw on Friday night. The main hype and excitement seemed to just come from the trailer which managed to look terrifying but revealed pretty much zero about the film. On top of this we knew that JJ Abrams was involved, and whether you like Lost (note the phrase HD streaming on this page!) or not, you know he has a track record.

Now the film has been released, I thought it was be interesting to see how much content people have been posting about Cloverfield. You obviously might come across some spoilers if you visit the links below.

Flickr: 1420 photos.



This is the first photo which seems to refer to the movie uploaded on July 18 2007. There are also quite a few photos from the production sets.

Youtube: 6840 videos. These seem to consist of mainly trailers and exclusive bits of content leaked and a few people doing reviews and ranting about the movie.



Facebook: You can join 19000 other people and become a fan of Cloverfield. Despite having such a huge number of fans, there are only 6 videos posted. There are over 1200 reviews and comments though, implying that people are not exactly rushing to Facebook to upload videos.

Blogs and elsewhere: There are a gazillion blog posts about Cloverfield, I think a more interesting analysis comes from Alexa and Technorati using both Cloverfield sites and 1-18-08 sites.


And from Technorati...

And if you have seen the movie and can take anymore, then you might be interested in following this link which possibly shows what happens after the lights came up... (or perhaps this is the sequel) http://www.1-18-08.com/

Beware the Google Maps

#2

Cool light display in London's Soho.

New Blip.tv episode pages

As you may know I'm a big fan and user of Blip.tv. It's a great free service and they make regular improvements and developments.

I tend to use Blip more as a video hosting and distribution service than as video destination in itself. Because they are so good at sending video content out into the web and to devices, I'm fairly sure that most of their video content is consumed in locations other blip.tv.

Possibly to try and draw more people to the site they are redeveloping their episode pages. It'll be interesting to see the outcome of this. It makes you realise that any large list of comments below a video player draws comparisons with everyone's favourite Youtube.

Former Spy Ethan Hunt Talks

You may have seen Ethan in the Mission Impossible docs, but here the man himself gives a fascinating insight into his life and his beliefs. Ethan believes in Scientoloigismy, which I’ve tended to be sceptical about. But come on everyone, stop being so scathing about Scientoloigismy. You’re either on board or not on board, which is it? Get those spectators either into the ballpark or out of the arena. We can unite cultures and bring happiness and peace! Yeah. [Insert obligatory shot of battle weary man saluting and punching the air here].

This video has been going up and down all over the internet faster than you can say, “have you got a lawyer?” Gawker.com are showing the video and have stated, “it's newsworthy; and we will not be removing it.” Good luck.

If you haven’t seen it you really must watch this, although to be fair it is edited to become more and more nonsensical the more you watch, becoming a series of phrases without context and the MI theme is a stroke of genius. Ethan is clearly quite odd. I wonder where he gets his black jumpers.

FYI - An SP is a Suppressive Person

2008 - Year of the Voodle

What on earth is a voodle? I came across this term recently, it seems to have been coined by a Danish Vlogger called Sam Renseiw who describes Voodles as representing "the exact opposite of the Western ideal of great beauty as something monumental, spectacular, and enduring with meaning.Voodling is mainly found at moments of inception or subsiding. Voodle is about the minor and the openly hidden, the tentative and the ephemeral..."

Well as you might expect, I'm going to take a simpler approach. My Voodles are going to be very short chunks of moving pictures which capture something that entertained me or simply caught my attention in some way. My trusty Canon Ixus will be my weapon of choice. Yes the quality is not great but because it fits handily in my pocket and follows me wherever I go it's perfect for this.

So here is Voodle #1, and apologies to Sam if my Voodles aren't what he hoped for when he came up with the term.