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A number of interesting topics were discussed yesterday in a video conference about collaborative videblogging and distributed production. Michael Verdi discusses some lessons he learned about shooting direct-to-file with the newer digital video cameras.? Michael and Ryanne Hodson are the authors of Secrets of Videoblogging and the creators of the famous Freevlog.org site. Michael recently joined the SpinXpress team at Outhink Media. Formats available: Quicktime (.mov), Flash Video (.flv) Tags: michaelverdi, freevlog, videoconference, vlogging, spinflow

Click the pic to view the vid. A brief musical interlude in our story. Or is it? Here is a small little piece that highlights all the fine folks who are participating in this wonderful collaboration. Of course, I'm way too lazy to edit this much video. So I programmed it. First, I used PHP to grab the text and images from Erik's site and then wrote a small composition in Quartz Composer to manipulate the data (as javascript arrays) into the exported movie you see. A quick trip to the Internet Archive for the lively Ole! spanish trance soundtrack, import into iMovie and viola! :) Question: What's the widest, collaborative web page in the world? See if you can find it and you will discover something really wonderful. How does it relate to Carp Caviar. Find the Bluesfear Worm and you will know. Formats available: Quicktime (.mov) Tags: carp caviar, spinflow, bottoom union, apperceptions, digital dojo

Click the pic to view the vid. Baja California is teaming with activity. From the beaches to the mountains, Baja is all beautiful desert, teaming with life and color. And people too, of course. From the Baja 1000 race teams to the small teams of people working together in Internet cafes and what are unmistakably nodes . As in the Node101 variety. There was also an Outhink team exploring both the Pacific and Sea of Cortez sides of the two Mexican states. Markus and Alicia drove down from Ojai to Loretto, where they met up with Dave, who flew in from San Jose, in (Alta) California, USA. From there, the Outhinkers drove back up through Mulege, San Ignacio, Guearro Negro, San Quintin and other points north back to Ensenada and then down again to San Fillipe. After a few days there, we all headed back by way of Mexicali. We scouted a number of interesting locations and captured a LOT of audio and video. Internet access in Baja is, shall we say, challanging at times. When you do find access, wi-fi may not be available and, it often seems, laptops are NOT always welcome. Lots of great lessons in distributed media production.Here's a little video mash-up of some of the many clips we captured and now need to archive. The music is called CooCoo CooCooRoo and was performed by Tito in the town of San Ignacio. Formats available: Quicktime (.mov) Tags: outhink, baja california, spinflow, spinxpress, spincast networks

Vlog News: In the newest, coolest news, I'm vlogging with Markus Sandy and Dave Toole @ SpinFlow. Guess this is a disclosure. SpinXpress supports The Faux Press' endeavors in every way imaginable. In return, I support them. It's a marriage of aesthetics. SpinFlow will have a debut soon. I'll let you know when they feel the site is ready to fly. Notes About Road Node 101. So much to say. First, some business. Node 101 contributed $300 toward Node 101 / Meet the Vlogger / Vlogger Meetup events expenses from what it earned producing Vloggercon. I've a responsibility to report how it was spent. $150 was spent on food for the Minnesota Vlogger Meetup. Video (including what we got for our money) here. Still await an invoice from Adam to ship to Schlomo for his records. While I told Adam that Node 101 would cover expenses up to $200 / event I hadn't really intended to spend this much on that one evening. Oops. That said, you'll see that Crow River Coffee made a pretty incredible spread for the 5 folks (not including the kids) that showed up. $150 was spent to feed folks at Off-the-grid Geek Camp. More Road Node 101 Media Ripples: Ryanne's take on Off-the-Grid Geek Camp at Robert's Montana hideout. Scoble here and here. On Road Node v. 2005 from Serra Shifflet. Kevin Buckstiegel's take on Road Node's Chi-town stop. David Meade tests cell phone auto posting through Blip during Road Node's Chi-town stop. _____ Tags: Faux Press Road Node 101

Dave Toole put together this cool screencast about how various people used SpinXpress to collaborate around the Towerpod launch at SxSW.

Click the pic to view the vid. Dave Toole put together this cool screencast about how various people used SpinXpress to collaborate around the launch of the Towerpod podcasting site at SxSW. Formats available: Quicktime (.mov) Tags: outhink, spinflow, spinxpress

Click the pic to view the vid. My good friend Dave Toole put together this cool screencast about how various people used SpinXpress to collaborate around the launch of the Towerpod podcasting site at SxSW. Formats available: Quicktime (.mov) Tags: outhink, spinflow, spinxpress

Anders Clerwall talks about inspiration and process.

Dave Toole Created this cool collaboration mash-up for the Node 101 presentation at the Metreon during MacWorld. I'm posting this, so leave Dave a comment on the SpinFlow site. Also, check out Dave's cool file sharing tool call SpinXpress. It's free! Exchange files securely and privately by just dragging and dropping files in your own Secure Personal InterNet (SPIN).

We had a great time at the Meet The Vloggers Dinner at the Thirsty Bear in San Francisco during MacWorld 2006.  I hate to say that I forgot this guy's name, but I remember he is on the Flock team.  We were chatting about projects and he brought up the MashPit event coming up on January 17th in the Bay Area.

Quicktime 1.9 MB 33 sec ** Here is a snippet of a series I'm doodling on about the creative process & the fine art of moving digital media, so had some fun making a simple looping screensaver in Flash. You can download the Projector files for your Mac or PC and launch them full screen for presentations or conferences or for desktop amusement. Hypnotise your friends. This one is about 5minutes, so you can use them while you are setting up. The music is by Manolo Camp: "In Search For" on Opsound. You can also use the MOS version (mit out sound, or without sound) and use whatever music you like. Preview Download I've also added them to my "Vlogger Spin Space" on SpinXpress. I'm quickly running out of storage space on my domain so it's perfect for me. ** The video clip is an experiment. You know how Flash has trouble exporting animations with embedded movie clips into Quictime? Well, I used Snapz Pro to just get the screencast of it. Funny workaround, but I like the vector version better. It's more crisp. More to come! I'm working on Digital Feng Shui. tags: movingdigitalmedia, creativeprocess, P2P, file-sharing, internet, spinflow, snapzpro, internet, multimedia, richmedia

Chemical Reactions Do you like to get high? Did you know that an Atlanta clinical study of 32 women is reported to have observed a five times increase in levels of dopamine production during collaboration? Kathy Sierra, who helps create passionate users, seems to knows about it. Yossi Verdi of Many2Many knows it for sure and I imagine that most of the 28 people who participated in Videoblogging Week 2005 can elaborate on the euphoric effects of collaboration too. spincasting peercasting rss peer2peer collaboration spinflow podcasting Ask Zadi Diaz. Ask Steve Garfield. Ask Renegade. Ask The Voiz. I asked Ryanne Hodson (see interview in SpinFlow News). I didn't have to ask Jay Dedman (see his post) and it came up naturally in conversation with Michael Meiser (see commentary). There are so many ways to collaborate and it is happening all around us. Many different kinds of interesting collaborations are taking place around video and I'd like to share just a little of what I've been able to find out on the Internet, in dark nets and in real space. May You Live In Interesting Times The past few weeks have seen a number of very interesting events in the world of collaborative video... First, we already reported a while back that a Josh Leo and Phil Hamilton had collaborated to create a great little spilt-screen video of the two of them playing music together, long distance. Phil is located near Boston and Josh is in Michigan. Then, Ryanne Hodson, a young video artist in NYC, posted a notice in the Yahoo Videoblogging Group declaring the grand opening of a video blog tribute to one of the major collaborative video events of the year: Videoblogging Week 2005, an international event, March 27th - April 2nd: 28 videobloggers, 7 days. Ryanne was recently profiled in SpinFlow for her collaborative work with Michael Verdi on the freevlog.org site. Freevlog is a place where you can find great video tutorials that will walk you through every step of creating a free video blog. They also have tutorials that guide you through publishing your videos to the net using web services like archive.org, flickr.com, mefeedia.com, ourmedia.org and feedburner.com. Recent site enhancements include new tutorials on video compression and a growing list of new vloggers . More great collaborative work. I asked Ryanne to elaborate on this incredible week of video collaboration. Ryanne can be quite terse and to the point, which is one of the things I like about her. But, in this case, she delighted me with wonderfully detailed and candid responses to my questions. Also, Alex Williams, who is managing director of Corante Events and manages their on and offline programming has been helping to bring people together for weekly video conferences to discuss a range of topics related to new media in general and video in particular. Click here, or on the pic to the right, to see a sample from today's conference in which Nathan Peters is discussing music and video collaboration. Alex is also organizing the hip Podcast Hotel collaboration where art and commerce meet coming up in Portland in September 6th and 7th. There's more. In San Francisco this past weekend, Rene Amini (aka, renegade), a digital artist and web designer specializing in art, entertainment, campaigns and e-learning is mixing together five second video clips that members of the Yahoo! Videoblogging Group have contributed. Renegade is also instrumental in initiating the Green Thing artmail/video project in which she sends out pieces of her magic video cloth and people integrate them into their works, usually as some form of green-screen effect. Then they pass the cloth on to another person, usually through the mail, adding creatively to the real world envelopes that carry these special pieces of fabric. Custom postage stamps and cancellation marks give clues to the path traveled by each piece of cloth. She recently announced that she entered the entire Green Thing project into Memefest 2005, which will announce the results on June 23rd. Not that's what I call collaboration and motivation! Renegade sent me one of those Green Things and so I'd better finish this article fast and get hopping on that. Shannon Noble combines the works of three other vloggers and uses them in his own experimental videos in order to enhance his edting skills. One of those people, Charlene (aka, scratch) is a documentary film editor in NYC by day, who makes small pieces by night including the Exquisite Corpse projects you can find on her sidebar. As if that were not enough, Eric Rice just up and challenged everyone to a week of music videoblogging using freely available music that is licensed for such use. Some entries are already starting to appear, including one from Ryanne already. And a last minute update: Today, an announcement was made that a member of Senator John Edwards staff had been working with Michael Verdi, Jay Dedman and others from the Rocketboom and ANT teams to help launch a video blog where people can submit questions in video format and then Edwards responds with videos of his own. This is just one of the many ways that people are using video to get together and discuss issues. Here is a link to the Rocketboom piece on this. Taking It To The Streets Another form of collaboration involves meet-ups and conferences. BlogHer will take place at the end of July in Santa Clara. Ryanne will be presenting along with well known podcaster Lisa Williams and others. Ryanne has recently started listing fellow vloggers on her site by gender and has shouted out to both genders to help fix the ratio. We hear you! I'm helping my wife Alicia get set up. Of course, we just follow the tutorials over at freevlog.org Ryanne ought to know about the benefits of working with those close to you and who you care about. Ryanne works closely with Jay Dedman on many video and teaching projects. Their real world chemistry comes through in their work together. Of course, one of the main forms of collaboration is teaching and when you talk about teaching video to the people, you have to talk about Jay. He's been helping people express themselves with on-line video and blogging long before many of us bought our first digital video camera. Soon after Ryanne's post, he made one on his own momentshowing.net blog about Videoblogging Week 2004 and pointed out the original aggregation site. While much smaller and perhaps in need of little link repair, it still stands as a great source of inspiration for us today. You can still find Jay and Steve Garfield's early videos there and journey back to a time (not so long ago) where there were only 4 vloggers (5 by the end of the week) who answered the call in 2004. Many companies are also stirring up the audio and video collaboration soup at digital media schools. Dave Toole and graphic designer Rich Pascual facilitated a hands-on collaborative event between digital audio students at the Ex'pression College for Digital Art in Emeryville, California. Dave and his crew have been busy introducing p2p media collaboration to teams of creative professionals. Check out some of the Ex'pression College student's collaborative and individual work in their DV gallery. Finally, we are in the process of creating a SpinFlow street team of audio and video students at schools and universities who will go out and help people learn to use collaborative tools to express themselves and remove barriers to creativity. Mixed-up Bastards Without a doubt, it's a re-mix, mash-up, collaborative world. Look up mash-up on Wikipedia and you'll be redirected to the Bastard pop music definition, which it defines as: Bastard pop is a musical genre which, in its purest form, consists of the combination (usually by digital means) of the music from one song with the acapella from another. Typically, the music and vocals belong to completely different genres. At their best, bastard pop songs strive for musical epiphanies that add up to considerably more than the sum of their parts. Another form of collaboration is derivation. Here people take existing audio and video from the Creative Commons . Again, Josh Leo comes to mind with his We Are The Media . In this case, those commons being found mainly in the Prelinger Collection of the Internet Archive. Here you can find all kinds of digital video and audio recordings that you can use in your own works. CCMixter is also a great site for audio loops and re-mixes. Building on top of what others have already done is one of my favorite forms of collaboration. I could write a separate article on just this topic alone. There are lot's of great mash-up videos worth watching. Something Wiki This Way Comes Think wiki! Wiki is not just software, it is a state of mind and culture where we re-mix each others work, each adding their own special contribution, with only the best of the best surviving through the re-writes and re-edits. Until you have really participated, it is hard to understand the full effect. The benefits of wiki are so obvious that it is hard to explain to people. The benefits of collaboration are even more subtle at times. Have you really used a wiki before? I don't mean have you tried one out and corrected a typo. I mean did you really use it. Have you felt what it's like to let go and watch others build on, re-work and refine your contributions? It can be a bit disconcerting at first, especially if you are a control freak. You need to be able to just let go. It's a wonderfully freeing feeling actually. Jon Udell has made a great video where you can watch the fascinating story of the evolution of the collaboratively built Wikipedia entry on the Umlaut in heavy Metal music. He took what others had built, collaboratively, and then made a screencast from the archived trail of their work and the thwarted attempts of vandals to stop them. Remember: it's hard to stop a truly collaborative force and there's no rest for the wiki. Ross Mayfield, president of Socialtext, a provider of commercial wiki services, has posted about how wiki's can be a boon to collaboration in TV production applications. Not TV, SpinCasting So how do you get in on all this great video and audio? This is Not TV. There's no station to tune in, but there are channels. For me, it's much more interactive and, dare I say, collaborative. First you need a good aggregator to pull in all the great media and serve it to you on a silver platter. For me and many many others that means FireANT, a free tool for Mac's and Pc's that pulls media from newsfeeds (i.e., blogs). Kind of like podcasting, only better - it handles both video and audio. Some really great video feeds come already set up when you install and more are being added to the on-line directories every day. My favorite place to look for new feeds is on del.icio.us under the antfeeds tag. (by the way, Renegade has a great video about del.icio.us and tags) But watch out! Don't expect too much video that's suited for kicking back on the couch. View a few of the vids from Videoblogging Week 2005 and you'll be itching to make some of your own. And that's collaboration too because you're inspired by others. Second, you need a way to work with your peers. Some people can set aside FTP space on a server where people can exchange the media they are working with. Some try setting up virtual private networks (VPN's), which are cool if they have the time. There are now even some on-line services that facilitate working in small private, work-groups. Even easier is setting up direct connections across the net using a peer-to-peer solution. With tools like that you don't need to create accounts, fuss with firewalls, set permissions or ask IT or your ISP for help. All barriers to creativity. A good collaboration tool will make it as simple as drag, drop and click in order to share and review the results of your collaborative efforts. Peered technologies, together with standard web services can be used to create ad-hoc, secure, private networks where people can collaborate on audio and video projects. Free collaboration and file sharing applications are now being used by leading creative professionals to exchange files quickly, easily and cheaply! Tools like this make it easy to form small groups where you can exchange files of any size and where you can gather, re-mix, review and publish. Anyone can publish to the web using standard protocols like HTTP, FTP and Bittorent or you can go long-tail and setup secure, private, invitation-only, media distribution channels using peered RSS. Basically anyone can now set up their own broadcast systems at very little cost. And how will you find what you want when every person, business or government organization has their own channel? Collaboration, of course. Your friends and colleauges will help you locate the best material, forming a trusted network. This is where tagging becomes really important. Hook up a newsfeed with media enclosures and you can then serve up media to anyone with a browser or an aggregator, direct from your desktop or web server. When you can do this with simple drop and drag operations, we call this SpinCasting , a form of media casting based on both public and private, secure, invitation-only small group networks (I'm working on a video tutorial and how-to article on this using SpinXpress as a follow-up to this article). In some ways, this is similar to peer casting . Digital Bicycle is a peer casting community built around Bram Cohen's Bittorent. Collaborative Ecosystems So where does all this lead? More collaborative video, of course. We are all in the process of creating an ecosystem for collaboration and video is a crucial element (as is audio). Michael Verdi iChatted me while I was writing this article this past weekend just because he had heard about some of the great things we want to do here at SpinFlow with getting people to learn to SpinCast videos. I have to include the snapshot of him as he signed off, full of questions and ideas. I love the smile on his face. In the FeedFest video conference today, Thomas G Henry remarked that video adds a powerful dimension to collaboration and interaction . I agree. As another example, I recently introduced myself to someone and offered up a character reference from a third party we both knew (trusted networks). They responded that they really did not need the reference as your videos speak volumes . I was thrilled to hear this. It's really is why I make them, so that I can share our story and vision in order to find the people I want to collaborate with. I used video in just this way to first get Ryanne Hodson's attention and interest her in what we are doing with Spinflow. Yet one more use of video to facilitate collaboration. Tivo Can't Help You Now To paraphrase Alfonso Bedoya, with tools like these you don't need no stinking Tivos. It won't help anyway, unless they now come with a few extra hours in the day; video professionals and amateurs alike probably get less sleep than most people. But how do people find time for all of this? Often, when so many people contribute to a great thing, it is difficult to reward everyone appropriately for their work and so, like many artists, they are left to pursue these collaborative efforts in their spare time . Now I'm part Scot and we don't do very well with concepts like spare time and spare change . But until you participate, it is difficult to understand the joy that comes from pursuing this passion and, if you do, it will become difficult to understand how not to. That's when the BIG question hits you: how do I do this and get paid? Some are lucky and find a dream job. Most have to fit it in around their work. So perhaps the most important form of collaboration is the one where we support each other financially. A Call To Collaborate What can you do? You can participate for one. But don't just watch. Join in and create your own audio and video contributions. Get together with your friends or colleagues and make a movie. Then share it on the web or in the appropriate groups. And here too! Please leave a comment about what you are doing or suggestions for new collaborative projects. And donate please. Many collaborative artists and teams have PayPal buttons you can click on to quickly help out. Give it a try, it's fun and you'll feel great. I personally gave $200 to ANT the other day. I know someone who gave even more. Collaborate and match that! If you are a corporation who benefits from these collaborative works or, more importantly, markets to audio and video professionals, then where are you? Please come and join us in helping support creative professionals in the pursuit of their passions. We are just doing a little and you could too. Adopt a creative professional, they'll send you email and nifty videos that you can point to and say Look what we helped do! . Outhink is sponsoring Ryanne, Michael and others so they can pursue their passions. They generously sponsor me so that I can pursue mine and share it in this blog. Why? There are many reasons. First, we are trying to work with creative professionals on a number of levels to help understand how we can offer great products and services. You can't create passionate users by developing in a vacuum. These sponsorships give us direct access to people who can really clue us in to what's important to them and what helps them. Also, we believe that is better to seek out and support creative people and teams who are already successfully creating things than it is to waste money on mindless advertising campaigns, silly promotions or wasteful R We believe in the disintermediation of gatekeepers. We do it because we truly believe in what Kathy Sierra has taught us: it will help your users kick butt! Last, we do it because we believe in raising the level of the quality of our conversations and we believe that creative professionals are key in doing that. We believe that we can all benefit by working together and that a new human culture can be architected through a collaborative effort with creative professionals, and video, leading the way.

... Tuesday and the story continues ... Next we hopped in the car and drove to LA to meet with my step brother Larry Tollin. He's running a business that helps connect the Greek (fraternity) community through colleges across the country. We all have a passion for finding ways to create engaging experiences for our respective communities. What's yours? Please share your stories in the comments. On the way to meeting Larry we ran into a well known CEO of one of the largest Semiconductor companies. I had worked for him quite a while ago. We connected when we were doing an interview and he walked into the cameras view. It sure is amazing to run into people out of the environment we’re used to. Next off to one of Bela Canhoto's renown gatherings ... We had dinner with about 30 new friends in LA. The group was made up primarily of Creative Professionals in the Media business in LA and other parts of North America. Many had flown in for the E3 trade show. From film to TV to gaming, to music we had so many great conversations. One conversation that stood out for me was with a well known music producer that had downloaded SpinXpress a few days earlier. He told me he had just completed the production of a CD for a successful artist and could not have gotten it done without our product. He didn't need to send CD’s from LA to New York overnight express. This saved several overnight charges and, more importantly, the artist could make immediate comments on the work without the overnight delay. This sure made me feel that we are starting to provide a service to the artist community. We could spend a lot of time talking about other lessons learned from the evening (and I probably will in future posts) but we’re hard at work putting them into practice. After the dinner party, we returned downtown to the Biltmore Hotel after midnight and I think my traveling companion stayed up for a few more hours posting vids and chatting with our lead developer Eric in Portland. Those guys just can't stop when it comes to adding great new features to SpinXpress. Get some sleep you guys. To be continued ...

Last week I had the pleasure of spending some quality time with my buddy and old college dorm-mate Markus Sandy of apperceptions.org. It's quite a fun story and I'll share the highlights, and some pics and videos too, in the next few posts... We set out to go to E3 in LA to capture video interviews of what the gaming community defined as their passionate activities and to find out how we could make moving media over the Internet easier. We found a lot of people with stories about their successes and challanges with moving digital media over the net, but we never actually had time to explore the E3 show displays themselves; we were too busy in productive meetings! I started out early Monday morning from Campbell, where Outhink's headquarters are located. Driving down beautiful Highway 101, to stop in Ojai and visit with Markus and Alicia. I got a chance along the way to connect and have a chat with Ryanne Hodson in NYC about what she is doing with video blogging and how we are proud to sponsor her collabortation with Michael Verdi of San Antonio in their exploration of some of the coolest new ways of creating engaging on-line experiences. Look for a hot scoop about Ryanne's upcoming travels in the next big Spinflow post. Keep it up Ryanne and Michael! I'll start adding my own videos to this weblog soon. How many of you are working or playing with video these days? When I got to Ojai I saw the results of some of the coolest experiments that Markus had been conducting on Outhink's behalf. From contributing to on-line communities, to creating new forms of content, he is leveraging convergence between the art forms of software and content around creative teams. He’s also been breaking ground with his frequent postings on his own blog (I think he plans to post some entries of his own about our trip). He also coordinates the SpinFlow.org community aimed at helping creative professionals remove barriers to moving digital media. One of the things that we are both excited about is the potentials of personal and business videos on websites, blogs and in newsfeeds. In fact, we have both starting shooting videos so we can vlog about people's passions. I still have to edit my videos from this trip, but here is a fun little video we had some creative pro's shot for us back in the days when Outhink was first forming and we were first investigating workflows. This was an early training video segment and so I may seem a bit stiff, but it's a good first test video to see that things are working. Please let me know if you can view it ok. Markus also demonstrated his implementation of newsfeed syndication in SpinXpress; work he has been doing as part of an Outhink sponsorship. He demonstrated how SpinXpress can be used as the glue to tie together and integrate new and exciting web services. For example, he showed me how one can integrate SpinXpress with open-source tools like Mozilla's Thundirbird email, the powerful RSSOWL newsfeed reader and ANT's NOT TV, a hot video aggregator for Mac's and Pc's. Thanks for helping to move this ahead! How are you moving media these days? Please tell me in the comments. Are you using FTP? P2P? RSS? I'd love to hear your stories too. After the demos, we all enjoyed a nice bottle of 2000 Hermitage and a fine dinner at Suzanne's Cuisine near Ojai's famous old downtown arcade and post office. Then it was back for a nightcap and some more speed jamming about the future of SPIN. A late night, but fun. The next morning we set off early for LA. Nice day for a drive with the top down and ready for business. Look out LA! Here we come! To be continued... Links: ANT's NOT TV - A vieo and audio aggregator. Watch new videos everyday. Apperceptions.org - Markus Sandy's video weblog. Freevlog.org - Michael Verdi and Ryanne Hodson's Videoblogging Tutorial Site. Michael Verdi's Videoblog - Micahel is a creative video professional in San Antonio. Mozilla Thunderbird - Open-source email client with newsfeeds. RSSOWL - open source newfeed aggregator with advanced features. Ryanne Hodson's Videoblog - Ryanne is a creative video professional in NYC. Spinflow.org - Outhink sponsored site centered around the fine art of moving media for creative professionals. SpinXpress - Secure, private, invitation-only file sahring and collaboration. Suzanne's Cuisine - Fine indoor and outdoor dining in Ojai, California.