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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.
I’m having a mini crisis at the moment, as I’m writing a lot of stuff across all three blogs (work Intranet, work Internet, this personal blog), and a lot of it is starting to converge topic wise. I’ve tried cross posting, cross posting but with slight context changes, and just hyperlinking, but none really solves the problem.
It’s not a reuse issue, because most of them require small changes in most paragraphs, depending on where they’re posted. Good old microcontent reuse failing again.
One solution I am thinking about, is centralising, perhaps on this blog, and having the others simply pull a category feed from here. The category filtering is already here, it’s called customise… on my home page. All I’d need is for the other blogs to suck down the right categories. We’ll see what happens. If you have a better idea, please let me know.
For now though, you can read about CNet’s new Newsburst service on my work blog: Welcome Newsburst, the revolution WILL be aggregated.
CNet is starting to get it. Today they announced Newsburst, an online aggregator. Or as they put it:
Newsburst is a personalized tool that tracks virtually any type of information on the Web: news, blogs, shopping lists, weather, search results, alerts, auctions and more.
Information is everywhere, and Newsburst lets you access it from one place. Read differently.
Sure, it’s a feed reader (or RSS reader, if you’re drinking the Cool Aid), but it changes the game in several ways.
As far as I’m aware, this is the first big content producer to provide an aggregation front end to their and other providers’ content, without simply rebranding a third party reader. This and their size in the market, gives them unprecedented access to content, metadata, data analysis and consumption statistics. Sure, Bloglines and many others provide a similar service, but they aren’t a content publisher, and must survive on what they can scrape from feeds and public web sites.
CNet has access to the full original content and metadata, so by centralising the aggregation with their own front end, they’ve effectively cut out the lossy middle man. This is personalised consumption from behind the big media firewall. The catch of course is whether they intend to keep the same controls over their content as big media has in the past, or whether they really do get what aggregation is about, relinquishing control.
In previous posts Content as product, a new nirvana and The Mrs Soccer Mum news filter, I talked about content producers changing their ways, to provide customised content for consumers, the way we want it. In the case of CNet, they’re supposed to know the technology space, so who better to develop interesting ways to produce customised content, based on metadata, filtering and data analysis? And if they had full access to the original content, who knows what they could come up with. Oh hang on a second, they do! 🙂
Newsburst. Take a good look. It’s platform/machine independent, backed by a content publisher, and treats RSS the way it should, as just another data source that can be combined into a single personalised information consumption tool, just the way we here at Synop like it. Blog readers be afraid, be very afraid.
Update: This post was originally made to my Synop weblog.