R U a footy fanatic? Get the latest scores sent 2 yr mobile free from vodafone for 4 weeks. Reply 2 this TXT b4 25/03/05 with NRL AFL or Rugby. Call 1509 4 info

So let’s just get this straight. Ten abuses of the English language must be close to a record: R U; 2 yr; shortening of “mobile phone” to “mobile”; no comma after “mobile”; no capitalised Vodafone; 2; b4; missing comma after NRL; 4; and no full stop after “info”. Not to mention the unsolicited SMS, and use of the term “TXT”. My reply:

I hate football. Stop sending me this marketing bullshit.

Vodafone’s response:

You’ve pulled a hamstring so you’re retiring frm footy TXT alerts. U will no longer receive footy updates.For sports results see the Vodafone menu on yr mobile

The English language just isn’t want it used to be, thanks to corporations like Vodafone. For starters they’ve already identified that I’m not a “footy fanatic”, so why continue using the “footy” analogy? Isn’t that just going to annoy me even more? Moving on, we have the “frm” misspelling; the “U”; the missing space after the second full stop; and the “yr”. Inconsistently they now have Vodafone capitalised, but consistently are still missing a closing full stop. My reply, in an equally creative use of the English language:

Fuck off you idiots.

Vodafone’s response:

Whoops, that was a wrong code. Please reply 2 this TXT with either NRL, AFL or Rugby. U can only choose one. Call 1509 for more information.

Right, so having already proven that an unintelligible reply from me means that I’m not interested, why have they considered my second unintelligible reply an invalid code instead of a “no”? Plus we’ve continued with the abuse of English with “2” and “U”, although this time inconsistently they’ve included the comma after “NRL” and have finally put a poor little full stop at the end.

I have no problem with inconsistency, so long as it is a genuine mistake or typo. After all, we’re all human. But when it goes beyond that, you need to seriously question whether this is the kind of person you need in a marketing department, dealing directly with customers.

Vodafone continues to reinforce the now Internet wide opinion that they do not understand their customers, do not understand quality (see my branded phone post), do not understand that markets are conversations, and continue to patronise the very people who keep them in business (see my ring tone conspiracy post), their customers. Get on the clue train.

Ready for your close-up? Here come the vlogs

We had another owl visit us over the weekend, and it’s not one of the pair who came to visit a few weeks ago.

We put on a big show on the weekend, at the Enmore Theatre, the Australian Theatresports 2005 National Championships. The stars of the show, were two carefully groomed red prop boxes. This is their story. (Apologies for the large 60MB file, but they demanded high quality for their 7 minutes of glory)

Update: I’ve changed the enclosure to a 36MB file instead.

On the videoblogging Yahoo! group, Jim Stewart suggested I try watching video while driving. I did, and here’s what happened.

Keep in mind that I’m holding the camera in my left hand, which on Australian right hand drive cars, means I can’t actually change gears. I’ve got my K700i cameraphone in my right hand which I’m also using for steering. Nuts.

There’s big bump in the later half of the video, which was me going over a speed bump, not stalling the clutch as it looks like. 🙂

This is an edited version of a post I made to the videoblogging Yahoo! group, about podcasting vs. videoblogging.

Typically I’d just post this rant to my blog, but blogging is a pull medium, so I’d be just preaching to my converted lunatics. 🙂 Now an email list, ironically, is a good old fashioned medium that we’ve been trying to make redundant for many a year, but has guaranteed eyeballs. So here it is: Podcasting, obscuring the real breakthrough in we the media.

Funnily enough, there’s talk on the podcasters’ yahoo group about forming a freakin association.

Podcasting is community radio, with an on-demand delivery mechanism. End of story. (In my humble opinion 🙂 )

Sure, it will change radio and the big media as we know it, but in reality it is just a cheaper on demand version of community radio.

Podcasting is not about content, it is about reach. Some a-list bloggers who should know better, confuse the content that they podcast, with their revolution. Sorry, but the amateur content of most podcasts has been around since at least the 70s, in the form of what we in Australia call community radio, and in the U.S. I think as college radio or a subset of public radio. I could podcast some radio I did back in the 80s and you’d think it was a groundbreaking podcast.

A good example is the Gday world podcast. I don’t want to dis these guys, because they’re fellow Australians, and they do a really good show if you’re interested in blogosphere theoretics. But all they do is set up known experts to talk for an hour (over skype), throw in a few questions here and there, use Australian accents (which most Americans love, because I’ve used this trick myself at conferences over the years), and throw in one or two pretty weak jokes. If I were to broadcast their show on community radio, few would know the difference. In fact I know several community radio shows which would trounce Gday world, if they decided to podcast. There is also benefit in being first to market.

The podcasting revolution has come about not due to the content, but because of three big innovations which all came to pass in the last few years:

1. Mobile mp3 devices like the ipod became available, so you can download free content.
2. The majority of internet users now see copyright as an after thought, and think nothing of reusing copyrighted content. (the end of DRM will follow, over the next 10 years)
3. Decreasing cost (in dollars and time) of bandwidth.

Now let me rant about videoblogging, or as I call it now, vogging (vlogging sounds way too much like “flogging”, and in Australia that’s slang for screwing), and yes I’ve been drinking the cool aid, and did a video about it the other day.

With podcasting (audio), delivery of information is quite thin, you have to listen for quite a while to get the same amount of information as text. In fact most podcasts would work better as text, if information absorption was the issue. Go figure.

This is why most people listen while travelling. There’s little else to do, and if you have a computer handy you’ll probably find the same information quicker by scanning text and blogs. Unless of course the podcast is music, in which case you can background it while doing something else, but then the copyright problem kicks in. A song clip or two you can probably get away with. A show full of songs? It’s only a matter of time before you’ll need to deal with the legalities.

This is probably why the podcasters are thinking about forming an organisation. Every day another big media broadcaster starts legal podcasting, which means the clock is ticking for backyard podcasters to get the whole copyright issue sorted.

Video is different. You can’t background video, you have to watch and listen. This is why good video is a challenge. However, I believe video is also the richest information delivery format, richer than audio for sure, and arguably richer than text. A good use of visuals, audio and text in a vog post can be an exceptionally frugal use of time for extensive information delivery. That’s the challenge, and the only thing stopping us at the moment are the lack of tools to justify the time spent in production, but even that is starting to change.

And that’s why I think video blogging is important, and will be the real
mover and shaker in the world of big media. That’s why John Udel’s
screencasting is groundbreaking; that’s why Channel9 is so exceptional
(wink to Scoble); and that’s why podcasting will make a big impression,
but won’t be the medium which has the most chilling effect to big media
as we know it.

Give it a few years, when bandwidth becomes irrelevant, and the production and aggregation tools mature, and I believe that today’s video bloggers will change the world.

I’ll say it again, video blogging will change the world.

I’m going to the hardware store… What started as an opportunity to video my weekend repairing the house, turned into a mini-ode to Weird Al’s Hardware store. Unfortunately when I got home I found out that I’d bought an acute angle concealed hinge, and not an obtuse angle concealed hinge. Silly me…

While at the store, I had the camera sitting on one of the shelves, when this guy came up and asked if it was $7.38. It kills the pace of the rest of the video, but it seems to divide the thing nicely into two halves, and thankfully saves it from being a segment from Simon Townsend’s Wonderworld.

Vog #4 is of last week when I was almost late for my radio show. Instead of just making it a doco/blog post piece, I played with the medium a little.

On one level the video takes me through various stages, or doors to get closer to the show. Not in real time though, instead it compresses about 15 minutes into 1 minute.

The audio however compresses about 3 minutes into 1 minute, and starts and ends when the video does, the last scene in fact synchronising them. The soundtrack is actually a recording of the radio show, not the on camera audio, and goes through incremental filter changes at each door I go through, which is supposed to give the impression of getting closer and closer to the sound source, or the show. I did a first version without this, just the high quality audio, and the whole clip seemed like a music video and was very pacy, which wasn’t too bad, but fairly boring. (For the techos, I used a decrementing high pass filter at about 15K, 9K, 6K, 3K, 1K and 300Hz respectively.)

The song is a cover of My Boyfriend’s Back by the Spazzys, and just happened to be the song we played before we came into our first voice break for the show. The track is actually 2 minutes 40 seconds long, so I removed a verse, two choruses, part of the lead break, and shortened the closing crescendo, bringing it down to roughly a minute.

Anyway, enjoy.

Speaks for itself really, another video. I came home one night and L* dragged me into the garden to see these beautiful creatures.

I played around with video again on the weekend, and the result is vog #2, Singleton Lets Loose, about our Synop mascot, Singleton the kangaroo/wallaby. I was determined to make something that could only work in the medium, and I think I’ve succeeded. It is also pretty crap, but at least I got to play.

I wanted to play with Final Cut Pro, and this is the result of a few hours of mucking around. I tried to use FCP for my previous vog post, but I’d forgotten how to use it, so I stuck with iMovie.

Anyway, I shot a few minutes of footage at work, without thinking I’d actually use it for anything, and then when I downloaded it I realised the sound was recorded by the built in camera mic. At least it allowed me to play with the FCP EQ and pass filters, but the result is still pretty bad. The scenes with Victor, Cordo and the shredder/printer are the only ones with original audio, the rest is dubbed by one of my dodgey voices, the one I usually use for little kid, and some additional music.

After recording the voice, I had to match the original room’s reverb (see Sound — the most experiential fingerprint of a 3 dimensional space for more on how sound affects recordings) with the reverb in FCP, to limited success. The controller in FCP (v3 at least) is fairly restrictive, and assuming it isn’t just my rushed mixing, you can hear how the dubbed voice doesn’t exactly match that of the real actors.

Finally, add a couple video fades and transitions, opening and closing titles, and a few other audio tweeks, and it’s done.

So assuming the cast of Singleton, Victor and Cordo approve, and haven’t made me remove it, grab it from the enclosure, and tell me what you think.