RSS feedFor those following my exploits for quite a while, back in May I rode my motorcycle from Sydney to Melbourne for a videoblogger meet up. On 31st May, half way there, Singleton and I found a nail in the rear wheel. Well today, 7 months later, I finally had the nail removed. No idea why I’m mentioning it. Just to conclude the story I guess.
I’m not a fan of still photography, particularly in “olden times”, when most photographs were posed for. I don’t like modern posed photos either (he says, noticing the posed shot of himself on his website), but that’s fine, as we have other methods for documenting history.
Looking at old “posed for” photographs, I can’t even start to visualise what life must have been like. The body poses are all put on, as are the faces, all those happy smiling faces. I find it hard to believe that everyone was happy in the early 20th century. It’s like watching professional models in an advertisement for Versace or Coca Cola, everyone’s happy, everyone’s beautiful… and everyone’s jacked up on speed and Cocaine, which they well could have been back in the 1800s when it was all legal, and the most famous poems in history were all drug induced. I’m starting to ramble…
Anyway, I’ve done photography rants to death already, so I’m not going to do that again. But I am going to point out that this is one of the reasons why videoblogging is so cool. A lot of it is real people in real situations, not acting, not putting on anything, just doing the real stuff they do, and being passionate about it.
In 100 years, our successors will look back at the massive amount of real media documenting real people, and although it won’t be like being here, it will be pretty damn exciting being able to view audiovisual representations of hundreds of years in the past. Imagine if we could see crystal clear (digital) quality video of Napoleon, King Henry VIII, that peasant guy from London who shovels shit off the cobblestones each week, or even a videoblog from a convict sent to Australia in the late 1700s.
This video is a snapshot of real people wasting real time.
Nobody thinks that it will happen to them. That is, until it does. Break and Enter.
Note: This is a 39MB file, but I think well worth the wait. But then I’m a little biased, and don’t really care how much bandwidth you’re chewing up. Regardless, bring on the fat pipes.
Kitzmiller, et al v. Dover School District, et al
Pennsylvania court decision that ID is not a science, and the teaching of it violates the first amendment of the U.S. constitution.
Wow, this is so exciting! It is rare to get good news from big media, but today we must celebrate a U.S. court decision in Pennsylvania, that Intelligent Design cannot be taught as an alternative to evolution. I know there have successes and failures elsewhere, but this is the first big test of ID (creationism, you know fire and brimstone stuff) against the U.S. constitution, and a surprising statement by Judge John E. Jones III:
In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not
The case came up when a Dover, Pennsylvania school board ordered teachers to read a statement to ninth grade biology students, saying that there were still gaps in the evidence for evolution as a theory. Eleven parents then sued the school.
Some of the more significant statements from the 139 page decision:
We hold that the ID Policy is unconstitutional pursuant to the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution and Art. I, Section 3 of the Pennsylvania Constitution.
Intelligent design is nothing less than the progeny of creationism [..]
The judge even went so far as to head off complaints of bias and activism:
Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred [..] Rather this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources
There’s good coverage at The Guardian and Sydney Morning Herald. You can grab a PDF copy of the Kitzmiller, et al v. Dover School District, et al decision, from the court’s web site.
There’s a great site called www.vlogmap.org, which uses Google Earth to plot the location of videobloggers around the world.
Every few weeks I check up on how many people are vlogging in NSW, the state in which I live. According to vlogmap, there are now eight, four in Sydney, and four outside of Sydney.
However, clicking on each, its soon clear that of the eight, one is an aggregation site and only three ( Rantings of Joan, Video Phil and myself) have content which could be called videoblogging.
It comes back again to old media’s message that audience is king. People want to be publicised, to reach a larger audience, and I’m assuming that adding a pin to vlogmap.org will help do that, regardless whether they’re actually videoblogging.
In big media, audience is the product, and these companies exist to sell eyeballs to advertisers. They use programmed content (like television shows) to attract the audience, but they don’t care what is shown, so long as the eyeballs are there and can be sold. Remember, big media isn’t about the content, its about eyeballs.
70 odd years of TV have ingrained this into us so much, that people still think audience is king, especially bloggers and videobloggers who get a sniff of popularity. Its a slippery slope into being excommunicated from a community, and not being talented enough to go and sleep with big media.
We’re all just amateur video makers. So keep making art your own way, and don’t lose your perspective.
So I finally worked out why iTunes Store was being displayed in Kanji, because it was selected at the bottom of the page. Of course the entire drop down was in Kanji, so I had no idea what the drop down was for. I got so frustrated with the whole thing that I just started selecting things from various drop downs, and suddenly, bam, iTunes Store UK pops up in English. A quick switch to Australia, and yeah, it now works fine.
The interesting thing about iTunes Store, is that there’s no top level category for “videos discussing the theory and development of videoblogging”, so I just chose “Technology” as the category for my feed. However the last 5 videos were just personal things, so now I’m stuck with a pending submission of my vlog under the Technology category, and whoever the dude is that validates it, is going to see all this personal stuff and probably recategorise it, or just not accept it.
There’s a freakin’ video iPod, so why isn’t there a video category? And there’s no category for the discussion of blogging or dare I say the word on my site “podcasting”, let alone videoblogging. How come?
Well, I guess we’ll wait and see if I’m added or not.
And yes, I am working on the second in the storytelling series. Stay tuned.