Beth's Blog: Nonprofits and Social Media

Oh Yeah, and I shoved a camera in his face

Photo by Kino-Eye in Flickr

If you want to get acceptable audio for video blogging on an inexpensive camera you need to control the noise/environment or get really close to your subject.  That's me interviewing Jonny Goldstein after he interviewed me.  I asked him about shooting techniques.   It's part of my series of video blogging famous video bloggers on technique (so far have interviewed or captured them in action -- Nick Booth, Steve Garfield, and Robert Scoble)

The guy watching us was public broadcasting producer.  He pulled out his cell phone and took some footage.  He offered to send it to me and I got him on camera giving me permission to use it.  He didn't have a card, but I gave him mine.  So I hope he sends it to me so I can finish editing.

The excellent photo was taken by David Tames who I had interviewed earlier.  In looking at all the photos in the stream from the conference, his photos are definitely some of the best.   His conference reflections are here.

The title of this post was inspired by this quote from JD Lasica in an article about personal broadcasting:

A camera, firewire and the ability to Webcast are all you need. Oh yeah, and don't forget that you have to like sticking a camera and microphone in people's faces.

I'm still thinking about the comment someone made in the Beyond YouTube Working Group about audio quality and how it makes them shudder that the user-generated content doesn't have good audio.  What does that mean?  Certainly not everyone can afford to purchase expensive equipment to ensure broadcast quality audio.  How can you get acceptable or decent sound quality but use inexpensive, accessible equipment?

Beyond Broadcast: Wrap Up

Flickr Photo by Geoffrey and used with permission

David Weinberger gave the wrap up at the end of the day.  An outline of what he said is here.   He made this point:

But, participatory culture is changing the nature and topology of ours. It's ours in a different way. We can create works with strangers, with anonymous crowds, and in all the other ways we're inventing. This is a very different sense of ours. And it's not just that we can build Wikipedia or Flickr streams. We also get to make these works matter to one another: That we can surface and pass around the video or the prose so that it becomes a shared cultural object also changes the nature of the ours.

He ad libbed this line:  "Holy shit, we built this thing to together!"    I would have done a remix of this photo with that line as a speech bubble using one of the flickr remix tools, but the best photo of Weinberger in flickr was not licensed with a Creative Commons by license, but all rights reserved.   That prevents strangers building something together.  I had to go the extra step to email Geoffrey and request permission to republish the photo with attribution.  He granted it.   

Geoffrey has an excellent collection of photos from the conference here

Beyond Broadcast: Suzanne Seggerman, Games for Change

Click to play

I ran into Suzanne Seggerman from GamesforChange at the reception at the end of the Beyond Broadcast Conference.  She was in the working group on Beyond Virtual Worlds To Intentional Communities.   I piggy backed onto an interview that Jonny Goldstein was doing and just grabbed this snippet about the gap between public perception and reality when it comes to using games for social change.   

I've got to find a camera that captures video onto a card and an external plug for a mic that doesn't cost a lot of money.  I've limited myself to the cheapest tools possible because most nonprofits don't have the resources of the local public broadcasting station.  What this means is that sometimes means that production values suffer or as some public broadcasters said yesterday in the Beyond YouTube Workshop about user-generated video content, "Yuck, awful audio quality."

Here's Jonny Goldstein's video of the entire interview.  He used a different camera/mic.  Note the difference in sound quality.

Beyond Broadcast: Beyond YouTube Working Group

Click to Play

David Tames gives us the summary from the working group on Beyond YouTube. More notes can be found here.

The afternoon was all smaller working groups and it was hard to choose.  So, I'm gathering notes/blog posts I didn't attend right here:

Beyond Games: Intentional Virtual Communities

Open Media Library: An Open Source Media Publishing Tool

Free Culture Timeline

John Palfrey at Beyond Broadcast

Text notes here and podcast of his remarks here.

Beyond Broadcast: Morning Sessions

I'm at Beyond Broadcast Conference today.  I got up early on a freezing cold Saturday morning to hear Henry Jenkins speak.  He delivered the key note address. (Here's audio)   I've only heard him while being logged into Second Life and I wanted to hear him live and in real time.    The wi-fi wasn't working so I took my notes on paper, but later it on it worked.   I'm not going to transcribe my notes now, but rather point to someone else's here.  I also took photos of his slides which are in flickr.    (Jenny Attiyeh also has an interview with him prior to the keynote.)

There's a lot here to digest and how it applies specifically to nonprofit space.   More about that later - right now I'm in rapid capture mode, not reflection.

The photo above is from the first panel that was on participatory culture.  Some more notes here and here. (audio here)  Arin Crumley from Four-Eyed Monsters participated remotely from LA.   What he had to say was most interesting to me.  Most compelling was his stats on the number of people who saw his film within the first 24 hours of distributing it via the Internet via the old model of lugging it around for 9 months to independent film festivals.   They were equal.   He also pointed to a mashup he created on his site with google maps that allowed them to see how many fans were in different geographic locations.  They could take that information to the theatre and demonstrate an audience.  More thoughts about this panel from Doc Searls (seated behind me) who points to Dave Winer.

Doc Searls asked those of us sitting next to him if this was George Washington in Harvard Square.