Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

I just added RSS to the Vlog Comment Generator and even exposed the API to the public. Now you can receive every comment generated via RSS or create mashups that incoporate the generated comments. I have no idea why you'd do such a thing, but my web 2.0 manual stated that these features are vital to the success of any website.

You want to participate in the online conversation, join the discussion, and be a part of the community, but you haven't quit your full-time job to vlog and compress video all day. Between trying to provide for your family and keeping up with all of your Pownce/Twitter/Facebook friends, you have no time to write comments on videoblogs.

Over the weekend Brittany and I have been working hard to release our new tool for busy videobloggers. We are introducing the Vlog Comment Generator. This tool will automatically generate a comment for you to post on your favourite videoblog. You can generate comments from 4 different categories and even automatically add a 'thank you' and/or a smiley. We believe this lowers the barrier for entering the community.

This is a very long entry. Don't say I didn't warn you.

On both the videoblogging group and the Show in a Box (SIAB) working group the question of How do we best present video on the internet? has come up multiple times over the past 3-5 months. It is a vital question for the average videoblogger who wants to improve his or her site and especially for groups like Show in a Box which are trying to create software and designs that help present videos in their best light.

However, the discussions on those lists are mixing together three separate issues to answer the question of how to best present video on blogs. I will outline the three issues below and attempt to explain why it is important to solve these separately.

During 2006 I tried, but failed. Last year I succeeded in posting more videos on my blog than Jay Dedman, the creator of the videoblogging Yahoo group. I first found Jay in May 2004 when he first started videoblogging and since then he has been pushing me to put more video on my blog. While he has been posting less and less video I have been posting more and more mostly because of the lumiere project. During 2007 I posted 55 videos and Jay made it to 37. Because it's January 1st and I have nothing better to do I broke it down month-by-month:

Despite participating in both videoblogging week (April) and navlopomo (November)—I participated in neither—he couldn't keep up. Take that! As you can see neither of us really did anything in the first months of the year. I didn't get started until the lumiere project began in late May.

In the future I will be referring to the amount of videos Jay posts January to December as the dedman index. Use it to benchmark your own videoblog. Are you above or below the dedman index in 2007?

Note: Brittany and I have written a manifesto based on our experiences with these rules. We are also collecting lumiere videos at http://videoblogging.info/lumiere. Please link to one of those pages rather than this blogpost if you are writing about lumiere videos.

The rules are as follows:

• 60 seconds max.
• Fixed camera
• No audio
• No zoom
• No edit
• No effects

Aske Dam, a good friend, told me about these rules last summer when we were attached to the same research project. They mimic the conditions under which the Lumiere brothers made their movies in the late 1800s. All transfer seamlessly to web-video and videoblogs except the last one. On the web we are used to compress our videos because the raw files from our cameras are too big to be practical. But is the compression not an added effect? You can certainly tweak the compression settings to provide results that differ tremendously from the raw camera files.

If you've been wondering what Richard BF has been up to the past many months the answer is here. Yesterday his latest project launched. It's an ongoing series of improv comedy of the brilliant understated kind. It's called Bonny & Clyde and it's a mockumentary where we follow two mastermind criminals (well, housebreakers) in their endeavours to become as famous as the historical Bonnie and Clyde.

Unlike many other fictional, comedy videoblogs this one is genuinely funny (the first episode, anyway!). I am curious to follow along to see where the improv takes the characters.

The production journal is fascinating for someone like me who've never thought about how improvised acting is done. They even promise eventual behind-the-scenes footage and with stories like the following it's bound to be good:

Apart from a fairly scary situation where we had a car with the two front people in balaclavas and the two back people (including myself) with bags over our heads, and the driver deciding to drive into a service (gas) station as a joke, the day went fairly well.

Oh, and Australian accents? Hot.

So it is surprising that the media-aware Labour Party has not made a move to reign in this new media, in fact it has studiously ignored or remained rather ignorant of its possibilities. Instead, the old-fashioned stodgy British Conservative party seems to have jumped on the new media bandwagon and actively leapfrogged the old media approach of Labour. Moving straight into the new media world of Internet video diaries, or videoblogs, Web 2.0 and grassroots narrowcasting. In fact it is telling to what extent Labour have missed the entire new media juggernaut ? the blogging community, for example, being decidedly off-message.

Trine and David Berry wrote an article on the Conservative leader David Cameron's use of web video. I missed it last month when it was published online. It's a nice run down of communication in British politics in a bite-sized format and it is all the more relevant considering Blair's resignation today.

The article poses some good questions that can bear deeper research. I'm hoping someone picks up where Trine leaves off. What caught my eye was the concept of authenticity. As the article points out Cameron creates authenticity (and there's no doubt it's orchestrated) through the use of hand-held camera, rouch edits and a lack of titles sequences, music or credits (example).

What is fascinating is the trend among videobloggers where authenticity is sought after using the complete opposite strategy (High Definition recordings, professional lighting equipment, fancy title sequences and credits with titles like ‘Director” and so on). If nothing else it is amusing that Cameron is trying to mimic the genre that a large group of videobloggers is trying to eliminate by themselves mimicking the television genre. It does pose additional questions regarding the motivations for seeking one strategy or the other among politicians and videobloggers alike.

Why does the politician think he needs to mimic YouTube videos to seem authentic? Maybe easy to guess. Why do the videoblogger think he needs to mimic the production values of a television broadcast to gain the same authenticity? Maybe not so easy to guess.

I did a short talk on videoblogging at AAU yesterday. We had a very good discussion afterwards, but unfortunately I can't put that online. So here are the slides instead (it includes links so click around):

• Slides from videoblogging talk (PDF document)

Six years ago today I bought my first domain (that'd be this one). I'd been blogging for a month or so using the free forwarding service ninja.dk to cover up the fact that I was using my highschool's webspace. Yes, my high school was cool enough to provide public webspace for all pupils (at least since '97 when I made my first webpage there). While the killifish.ninja.dk domain I was using was certainly cool it would be infinitely cooler to have my own domain name. I had also finished high school that summer and wasn't sure when my access to their servers would be cut off.

So I've been blogging on and off for 6 years now. The archives in this incarnation only goes back to April 2004 and that's probably a good thing. I can't point to my first post and say “Boy, that was weird.’ I've gone from being “a snot-nosed 19 year-old Danish kid” (according to The Archive's Wayback Machine) to being “a 25 year-old university student living in Aalborg, Denmark” and I like to think my blog has changed along with me.

I feel I should find something from the archives even though they only go back two and a half years. It'll be videoblog-related since that's what this blog quickly turned into:

• It's a gif! It's Flash! No, it's videoblogging! in which I discover that there is a thing called videoblogging (May 3rd, 2004)
• Testing videoblogging in which I put my first video online (June 21st, 2004)
• Julius Caesar the abridged version in which I re-create a book-a-minute version of Julius Ceasar with puppets. It is also the video I tell people was my first and then hope they don't find the real first. (June 26th, 2004)
• …and finally: A Small Confession in which I accept automated video comments for the first time (August 31st, 2004 — also my third video). It features younger, more handsome versions of Eric Rice and Chris Weagel. It looks like my original video won't play (comments play fine). Here's the direct link to the video that isn't playing

Earlier this month I recieved a copy of Joshu Paul and Jay Dedman's book Videoblogging from Wiley Publishing. I was giddy as a little school boy because I'm listed as a contributing author. The book looks great, I've read most of it and it's a great reference book for beginners and experienced videobloggers alike.

However I did get an unpleasant surprise a week and a half ago. Some guy in the mail room at Wiley had — in his infinite wisdom — had decided to mark the value of the package at $13.500 (that's just over 80.000 Danish kroner). A rather ludicrous amount of money for a book. Despite this the friendly customs department at the Danish UPS branch decided that they should help me and automatically clear my package in customs. Usually a great deal, but this time… not so much.

They told the Danish tax department that I had bought "Documents" in the USA that amounted to a value of $13.500. Since this amount is larger than the lower limit of $40 on purchases made outside the European Union I have to pay the usual 25% Danish sales tax on the purchase. That's a nice, even $3.375 I now owe the Danish government for a free copy of a book I contributed to. I'm pretty sure that makes me the owner of the most expensive videoblogging book.

I did of course contact Wiley and Ashley from their marketing department got in contact with me on instant messenger within one hour. She has been very helpful and I wish all companies were as adamant about correcting their own mistakes. Hopefully my situation will be resolved in the next week.

The photo above was taken by Jon Froda. I'm very fortuante he was nearby as I was much too shook up to think clearly (… or something).