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

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