More videoblogging history from Raymond: Two years of videoblogging part 1 ("I felt as if my head was about to explode every few hours, when I realized just how much this could change everything") and part 2. Part 3, which will cover july 2005 - december 2005, will be up soon.
A brief and personal history of videoblogging
Since memory is fickle, and these days, and blogs - not news - are the first draft of history, I wanted to note down my personal history of videoblogging before I forget most of it. I'm going to use my own blog to refresh my memory, and some of the history on the wikipedia entry. Most of this story happens in 2004.
First, Adrian Miles posts his first (known) videoblog entry ever on November 27, 2000, although it's debatable what really was the first "videoblogging" entry. As with many categories, the category of "videoblogs" doesn't have a clearly defined boundary.
But let's start at the beginning.
I came to New York in 2002. I rented a room in Harlem, and I became friends with Jay Dedman. Back then, our conversations were mostly about the future of robots. I moved to Hoboken but we stayed in touch.
I spent a few years working as a consultant, generally a pretty boring time.
In May 2004, me and Jay were walking in Central Park (Jay's story). Jay was working at MNN, a community television station, and we were talking about his frustrations with that model, and how cool it would be to see videos on the internet. It was a really long and excited conversation, and it got us started.
I had started blogging in the beginning of 2002, and I told Jay about blogging and we talked about whether you could put videos on a blog. We got pretty excited.
So we started to experiment. Jay got a blog (http://www.momentshowing.net/, Jay's first video post ever), and we tried to put videos on our blogs. We had to learn about encodings, and all that stuff, and we worried a lot about bandwith.
I remember that, when we discovered you could take videos with those little digital photocameras, we were pretty excited.
We also found out that Steve Garfield had started his videoblog in January 2004 - one of the first videoblogs ever - and had declared 2004 the year of the videoblog.
In June, we started the videoblogging mailing list (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/videoblogging/). Jay insisted on the importance of community, and I proposed the idea of starting a mailing list. I remember Jay saying that mailing lists are for teenage girls. In any case, we started the list, and that's where the "community" of videobloggers started.
Over the next months and years, Jay was always the one stressing the importance of getting people in one by one, helping out everyone, building community. He was a "connector", an evangelist for the cause.
What David Winer was for blogging, and Adam Curry for podcasting, Jay was for videoblogging.
I also have to mention Ryanne and Michael, of Freevlog fame, who have also personally been responsible for getting hundreds of videobloggers started, if not more.
In the second half of 2004, the group of videobloggers was still small (slowly growing to a few dozen, then to a few hundred), but we were all very excited and experimenting a lot. We did thing like videobloggingweek - a challenge to post a video every day for a week.
There was a lot of offline community building, videoblogger barbeques, meetups and so on.
I remember Mica told me how she showed videoblogging to Charlene, who then got very excited and spent all night getting her first videopost to work. That's how it went, people told each other. I was always surprised to see how excited someone would get when they realized they could publish their video in the internet, without needing to ask anyone's permission.
I have to also mention the podcasters. For the first few years, podcasting was, as far as who was involved in it, on a separate track from videoblogging. We didn't really talk to each other. Podcasters got a lot more press (especially in 2005), and videobloggers were much more unknown. There was a lot of bickering in the podcasting world, and videobloggers were generally a more fun bunch to be around. Less money involved too. The best think about podcasting was the enclosure element in RSS that they promoted. Videobloggers started to use it too, and this stimulated the emergence of video aggregators.
In December 2004, Kenyatta Cheese made a mockup of a video aggregator (a "vogbrowser"). I thought that looked cool, and spent 3 days coding something together that was the first version of Mefeedia, the first video aggregator.
PS: I always hated the words "vog" and "vlog", and always fought to use "videoblogging". "Vlogging", it just sounds like something you wouldn't want your mom to know you're doing.
Anyways.
In January 2005, we organized the first Vloggercon (http://vloggercon.com). I remember Jay saying, "these are the fun days, the early days, enjoy it". And they were, and we did. We (I just helped with coffee) organized that conference on a budget of about 600 US$ (for coffee, mostly), and it was an incredible success.
And that's where I'm going to end this part of the story. It's the most interesting part.
In 2005, the Starting Of Companies started in the videoblogging world, iTunes and YouTube came along, blip.tv was started, and things generally became more commercial and perhaps less fun. The pioneering days were over. In 2006, vloggercon felt a lot more commercial, although the organizers did their best.
Apart from some video projects (http://colombiamigrationproject.net), I haven't been a very active videoblogger on my personal blog. I spend about 2 years working on Mefeedia, but I got tired of it and sold it in January 2007.
(Remember that memory is fickle, so please correct me in the comments.)
Josh Kinberg writes: Just want to add a little to your history... Kenyatta's VlogBrowser was based on my implementation if ViPodder as a desktop based aggregator and video playlist manager (first created with Applescript and then later as a command-line Perl script -- it was initially based on Adam Curry's "iPodder" script). This became the basis for FireAnt, and Kenyatta's implementation came after a discussion with him over the merits of desktop based aggregation vs. web-based aggregation. Truthfully, I would say that ViPodder is the first video aggregator.
I didn't know you could sign up at delicious without handing in your email. I like that.
Good tips for fast game design that could also inform quite a few websites I know.
I feel sad but I won't go to the excellent IA Summit this year. Two reasons:
1. It's in Vegas, and I have an intense dislike for Vegas.
2. It's in Vegas, which means on the west coast, and I'll be in Europe, so the jetlag would have me messed up for about a whole week, and that includes during the conference. No good.
For those who were trying to contact me, I'm back in town, connected again.
Now that the new Rails is UTF-happy and REST-friendly, as far as I can tell, my reasons for sticking with PHP are mostly gone (apart from the learning curve that is). A BIG leap for Rails.
I may have been a bit harsh about Amazon's CTO Werner Vogels - here's his blog that's worth a read.
The guy (Werner Vogels) has an incredibly annoying way of lecturing the obvious as if he personally invented everything, but any Amazon scaling talk is worth a link ;)
A letter from Guantanamo:
"I would rather die than stay here forever, and I have tried to
commit suicide many times. The purpose of Guantanamo is to destroy
people, and I have been destroyed. I am hopeless because our voices are
not heard from the depths of the detention center.
If I die,
please remember that there was a human being named Jumah at Guantanamo
whose beliefs, dignity and humanity were abused. Please remember that
there are hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo suffering the same
misfortune. They have not been charged with any crimes. They have not
been accused of taking any action against the United States."
As posted on the videoblogging mailing list, I've sold mefeedia:
"We've decided to turn over the reins of mefeedia.com to Frank Sinton.
Frank is planning to keep it running as the best place to find
videoblogs, focused on independent videoblogs, and he's putting more
resources into it. And of course he'll respect all user agreements
(ie. he won't spam your emails and such, he'll respect CC licenses,
...). I've talked to him and I believe he's got all the right motives.
He's on this list, you can ask him your questions :)
I made the decision because I just didn't have the time and money
(those servers cost $) to keep mefeedia going. It had grown way beyond
my expectations, it's been getting lots of pageviews and attention and
I just can't support that anymore. Frank is looking to invest more
time and $ in mefeedia so rather than let it die a slow death due to
lack of attention, so we thought that was a good thing.
Meanwhile, I have to thank Devlon Duthie and Mike Meiser for all their
incredible work to make mefeedia what it is today, and for all the
support we've gotten from y'all in the past 2 years!
Let me know if you have any questions!
Here's a word from Frank:
"Hello to everyone in the vlogosphere. First of all, thank you Peter
and Devlon (and the many others involved) for creating such a great
tool for videobloggers. Your hard work and support for Mefeedia shows.
As far as plans for Mefeedia, i was actually looking for your input on
seeing what you would like to see! Please use this group, email me
or join our mefeedia users group:
http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/mefeedia-users/ All comments,
suggestions, and questions are welcome."
Nathan is the first to notice YouTube seems to be blocking Flash from today?
Longtail: "Yesterday in Las Vegas I spent a great afternoon at the headquarters of Zappos,
which is the Amazon of shoes. They have what may be the largest
in-warehouse inventory in the world--750,000 unique products, amounting
to more than 1.5m pairs of shoes in the Kentucky distribution center
(needless to say, this is a great Long Tail retail example, although
I'll save that analysis for a later post). Having just read David Weinberger's great new book, after which this post is named, one of the things that struck me most about Zappos was the way it organizes its massive warehouse. It doesn't. The shoes are placed randomly on the shelves."
OK, why do Digg's links in their RSS feed link to the digg page, not to the linked article page? That's just dumb.
Health-care in the US is incredibly broken. A good article: "Most Americans are unaware that the United States is the only country
in the developed world that doesn't already have a fundamentally
public--that is, tax-supported--health care system."
Not sure why, but I started a diet wiki. Feel free to add stuff about dieting...
a great article on myspace scaling (via simon willison)
Ethnographic research video about Youtube.
"Guess we'll auction on eBay, coz Yahoo's buying no more" (Quicktime song)
Jeff Lash started a blog on being a product manager. (not a project manager, a product manager).
It's the web 2.0 song (Quicktime movie)! By Nathan from Cruxy.
"The industry was young and without API's."
Alertbox: "DaimlerChrysler offers global content in German or English,
automatically setting the initial language based on the language
preference settings in the user's browser."
The never-ending issue of "adult" content on community sites:
"Going forward, we would *love* to find an equitable solution to this
problem. Our prior solution (the mature designation on profiles, and
mature category for listings and tribes) was not optimal. Having a
category for "mature" was the wrong thing because it clustered together
a huge breadth of mature content that didn't really belong in the same
bucket together - effectively "ghetto-izing" all of it. What we found
back then was that "mature" should be an attribute, not a category."
Simon Willison is going freelance and leaving Yahoo. Go Simon!
lifestyle of a monk:
"I usually get up at about 5 a.m. and then take a shower. I then
prepare myself to go out on the alms round. It takes a while for me to
put on all of the robes. I then leave at about 6 a.m. When I come back,
I put all the food on a tray and sort it out. For example: curries,
desserts and drinks. We then give some food to the Buddha image and do
some chanting. After that we just eat until we are full. I then usually
go back to sleep for a few hours. Sometimes I walk around the temple
grounds and chat with other monks. Sometimes we watch t.v. We do this
until lunchtime which is about 11 a.m. We cannot sit down for lunch
later than 11.30 a.m. Most people think we cannot eat after mid-day.
But that isn’t true. If we don’t get up from the table, we can actually
eat all afternoon! But no-one is going to do that because that is
crazy. In the afternoon I might sleep again or chat with the other
monks. Sometimes I watch t.v. In the late afternoon, when it has become
cooler, we then do our chores. We sweep around the temple and water the
plants. At 7 p.m. I go with a group of other monks to the big meeting
hall to chant. Not everyone goes. It is your choice. We chant for about
one hour. After that, my group of monks usually goes to sit by the
river and drink and chat. When I say drink, I mean soft drinks! We are
not allowed alcohol. We chat there until about 9 p.m. Then we go to
bed."
Solid state disks:
"And, it will change the way your software runs. When there’s little
penalty in saving to disk, there’s no reason not to. Your changes are
stored as your writing the memo, or playing with the spreadsheet. I
won’t shed a tear over the loss of the Save button."
A great walkthrough of getting started with Amazon's EC2.
Ryanne gets harassed by some guys on the street, and instead of walking on, she takes out her camera and confronts them. A great moment for videoblogging.
I installed flock but for some reason pages loaded really slowly (compared with FF) so that's it for me. Bye!
I published the first version of the poorbuthappy guide to Colombia in PDF format (PDF, 1MB). It's kind of stapled-together quality, and needs a lot more work, but I thought I'd get it out there. As it goes, it's a pretty decent backpacker guide to Colombia, and more up to date than any of the commercial guides. And free, too. It's written by the collective intelligence of 100s of travelers. I'm planning to build some systems that'll make it easier to gather that information.
Anyways, it's ugly but real good. I don't think you'll appreciate how good until you actually use it. :) Not shy today, me.
Does anyone want to analyze the loudness of the cheers during Jobs' keynote speech, and correlate that with what he was announcing, and propose suggestions for how to improve it?
Free idea
Here's a free business idea: branded SecondLife-like experiences.- Build a Second-Life tool (hey, it's open sourced, how hard can it be?)
- Sell branded, managed versions to everyone with a brand: a Star Trek world, a Disney world, you get the picture.
- Help these brands monetize.
that RSS icon
It's taken some time for me to learn to just click on the little RSS icon in the address bar, which then automatically opens my Bloglines subscribe page. I used to hunt around for an RSS link on the page, and I still do sometimes. The new way is better though, nice and consistent, even between FF and IE.
Steve Jobs makes mistakes too: "As other studios throw in with us as 2006 rolls on ..."
Nothing on TV tonight?
Nothing o TV? Watch Steve Job's MacWorld keynote, complete. It's entertaining.
Steve Job's Telephone Number is ... 408 966 1010?
At least according to this picture it is. I'm not in the US, anyone want to try him :) Say I like the phone but won't be able to afford it.
Now that Apple is doing the iPhone (and it's looking good), I wonder if Cingular (their partner) will open up the platform a bit more. I don't think so - Apple isn't known for being very open, they wouldn't have pushed it.
I agree with Ethan Zuckerman: open sourcing SecondLife is cool, but it's still a closed platform. Hence any comparison between SL and the internet itself are thoroughly mistaken.
Installing the me.dium.com Firefox plugin (I got an invite) is painful: you gotta download, restart, then it takes 5 minutes to show a login page, then I can't find the submit button on the login page. And why am I installing this again? (Value proposition??) I disabled it.
"Recently I began to work on an essay about why there are no longer any
good essays about why there are no longer any good novels. In
performing a survey of the literature, I was able to trace things back
to Umak of Sur, who in 6000 B.C. etched into clay a complaint that the
quality of Sumerian pictographic prose had gone down terribly since the
new Gods had been introduced."
More
For search engine optimization, I recommended SEOmoz to someone the other day, purely based on their blog. Apart from the blog, recommendations from people I trust and personal experience, how else am I supposed to know if they're any good? In a field so full of idiots, finding a firm that seems to do good work is a godsend. (or godsent?)
Aha it's the first working day of the year! And I'm not 100% sure what I'll be doing this year yet. :)
A question about OpenID: if you click "Allow" some site access to your id, do they get access to your email as well?
This screencast convinced me to try OpenID, and now I'm sold and I'll be looking for openID signin buttons on every new site I visit.
What also convinced me is that hardcore geeks I respect seem to think it will work.