Video!

This year is clearly ramping up to be the year of video on the net. And it’s kind of a stupid year, and video is a stupid medium. It’s the worst and the stupidest of the major broadcast medium — television. I mean it’s the vast wasteland. It’s kinda, the dumbest. And this is, uh, this is a particularly dumb year, you know, because there’s not a lot happening in the waning days of the Bush administration. So, I think it’s kind of useful to see video being metabolized by the net in a, kind of, ‘non-year’ like this.

…

Broadband just eats everything. It just eats the living day-lights out of it.

—Bruce Sterling at SXSW 2007

The HV20

I now have a nice, small video camera sitting next to me here in “the office” (this living room for today), a Canon HV20. I’m getting around the clunkiness of transferring and encoding video (it’s nothing like the simplicity of getting pictures off a digital camera, brother): and there’s so many options for formats and whizibangs! Man, I really wish there was just a “I’m dumb, do it for me!” button where I could say “I just want to get a video for the web!” Oh no, buddy, there’s all these p’s and DV’s and all manner of madness, all controlled by this fragile joy-stick that I’m afraid I’ll break off for lack of proper handling.

But, enough of complaining: figuring out all that will just be one of my adventures! (I should probably go to PodCamp in San Antonio next month, huh?)

Let’s Shoot Some Tape!

The point here to say: who wants to get in on some video interviews and podcasts? Clearly, video (with a camera) is bound by geographic location, unlike podcasting. So, you’ll have to be in Austin or one of the places I travel to from time to time — like SAP Sapphire in Atlanta next week.

What I’d really, really like to record are what we call “practitioners,” meaning, not people selling technology, but people who buy and (more importantly) use it. My dream segment — this morning at least — is visiting someone who uses mainframes and asking “so, what’s it like hanging out with mainframes? Can we go watch it blink and hum?” Any hot data center action would be equally exciting. The visit I did with ERF Wireless last year would have been great.

Why is that? Well, in preparation for doing video podcasts (vidcasts?), I’ve been watching several other video podcasts. They seem to fall into the YouTube camp of (a.) watch someone talk to the camera, or, (b.) talk to a vendor about their product. Hey, no problem here, friend., I’m just interested in doing something new so that I don’t waste viewers time with duplicate genres.

The other thing is, when it comes to technology, I’m truly always curious to answer the questions: do people actually use this stuff? How? Video seems like the perfect medium for answering those questions.

Now, I don’t mean to exclude other people: I’m just saying talking to the “do’ers” is high on my preference list. In actual fact, as everyone knows, I’ll talk and actually be genially interested in almost anything related to hi-tech. It’s, like, my professional sickenss. I have a feeling our man at Jo’s would be good for video: maybe even a little series, “Austin Tech!”

Somewhat equally high is talking to software developers and seeing them “go” and explain things. I’d love to capture a bunch of white-board things that discuss things like, “what is this REST business?” or “do you like SOAP?” or “what are the dumb things you have to do to get your job done?” or “how many times a day do you get coffee?”

Open Call

Honestly, if you’re in the area — or out and about where I am — and you’re game for 5-10 minutes of interviewing, let’s do it. Buy-side, sell-side, user-side, in-side, or out-side: sounds great to me. I gotta start recording a lot video: volume is the beginner’s way to find quality (don’t worry, I won’t subject you, dear future viewers, to too much crap). Not to mention that I need to start doing something with video every day to hone my skills.

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