RSS feedWe’ve started experimenting with podcasting for our radio show, grok.radio. The rest will be put up on the grok.radio web site, but I’m putting the first one here for reference.
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.
The exciting thing about vogging, is that there still aren’t any defacto
standards for how video should be presented on blog or even a web page.
Many have a static frame on the page, then a mouse click takes you to a
popped window and the video. Others pop a window to another page
containing the video and text, which you then have to click on yet again
to view. Yet others, like myself, embed the video directly in the page,
using the QuickTime plugin, and you click the static image to start the
video.
And what about the preview movie? QuickTime can present a shorter movie,
or more often a static graphic, over where the movie will play when you
click on it, or as in some of the examples above, in a hyperlinked
graphic to a pop window. Should this be a credit, title, scene from the
movie or just a placeholder icon? I’m just using the QuickTime logo at the moment.
And what about feeds? My RSS feed contains the enclosure, but the
description text (my full text blog post) doesn’t include a hyperlink to
the enclosure. Whereas if you go to my blog page, the video is clearly
embedded in the description text. The assumption being that if you’re
pulling the feed, then you won’t want the enclosures duplicated in the
description text, and if your reader doesn’t support enclosures, you can
always click back to the permalink which does. Is the first real example
of when a web page blog post differs from the copy in the feed?
And not much work has been done in the whole area of cross linking and
combining video, audio, images and text. Unsurprisingly it sounds like
yet another microcontent and reuse problem.
Who knows when the space will start to settle. Maybe six months? For
now, it’s exciting, and an opportunity to ride the wave before the flotsam
and jetsam of the already going stale podcasting community, starts to wash in.