Video on the web cannot be understood as anything like what it has been used for in traditional media.

Unlike the photograph in which amateur photos and snapshots have always paralleled the professional and high profile photos of magazines and news journalism video has never been used by the masses as a means of communication in so widely a fashion as it is now on the internet.

One of the results of this new found freedom is people are rediscovering the video camera as a tool to communicate in a much more abstract and non-traditional way. In short they’re using it like a photographic camera. These camera-like shots communicate in sometimes abstract, non-traditional, and sometimes even purely aesthetic means.

Some examples:

“Lumiere #20: clouds, horizon, cyclists” by SAM RENSEIW

Click To Play

See also, “Patafilm #458: Jellyfish” and “Patafilm #462: landscape” by .

Further information:

1) For great examples of video as the new photo visit the “lumiere” tag meme on mefeedia.

2) What is a “lumiere”? Andreas Haugstrup explains it best.

3) Video blogger Mike Moon explains his thoughts on lumiere.

He seems to think there’s a remarkable resemblance between the moving photographs from the popular Harry Potter movies and books.

With digital photo frames becoming increasingly popular I think it’s an amazing observation. We could very well increasingly be displaying “moving photographs” in digital picture frames and as screen savers on our computers in the next few years. Certainly the ipod has already brought the video to the pocket the same way wallet sized photos brought photos to the pocket.

When a grand mother is going to pull out a media player at the grocery store and show an unsuspecting cashier a video clip of her grandson I cannot say for sure, but then again it may have already happened.

See more in:journalism, lumiere, thoughts on videoblogging, traditional media, video on the web, videoblogging

Techcrunch is reporting, via Jossip, that Wallstrip - one of my favorite video blogs and part of Mefeedia here - is being acquired by CBS for around $5 million. Jossip reported that the vlog has zero ad revenues, but does have a great show and some great talent (Lindsey Campbell does a great job). Congrats to Wallstrip!

As part of the videoblogging community, this brings some great validation that a great show is a great show - whether that means it is produced independently or by a larger entity. This is a sign of things to come in the vlogging space. We will be sure to do our part in helping people discover great video blogs through Mefeedia’s community discovery engine!See more in:cbs, jossip, techcrunch, videoblogging, videoblogs, vlogs, wallstrip

From: Internet Video Hyperaggregation

About a week ago, the hot topic online was NBC Universal and News Corp launching a joint-venture to provide “the largest Internet video distribution network ever assembled.” The joint-venture is still months away from being finalized - and from reading TechCrunch’s notes of the conference call, it is obvious a lot of details still need to be worked out.

However, there are currently hundreds of sites that allow you to upload a video and share it with others. While partnerships like NBC Universal/NewsCorp demonstrate that offline video content will be coming online, how those videos are organized and delivered to end-users still is an open question. I believe a new set of companies serving as ‘hyperaggregators’ will emerge to fill that role.

What is hyperaggregation?

For the purpose of this post, I’m focuing on the lightweight web services that empower users to select videos from the hundreds of video sharing web services and point to them for distribution. Om Malik coined the term ‘hyperaggregators’ to describe this approach on the web in February’s Business 2.0:

“This is one of the hot opportunities in new new media: hyperaggregation. If aggregation is what we’ve seen so far on YouTube and Flickr, hyperaggregation is aggregating the aggregators. The way of the Web is to go meta - a website is born and covers politics, then another, and another, and that leads inexorably to … a blog that covers all the websites that tackle politics.”

I agree with Om’s characterization of hyperaggregation. So for the remainder of this post, I’d like to highlight some web services that are trying to achieve this in the online video industry.

3 Step Process

I’ll start with the set of services that I believe offers the most compelling approach for online video hyperaggregation. At a high-level, this approach involves users:
1. Selecting videos they find interesting as they surf around the web;
2. Categorizing these videos and adding additional meta-information about the videos;
3. Syndicating the videos they have selected to their ‘audience’.

See more in:business 2.0, dabble.com, flickr, google video, hyperaggregators, magnify.com, meta, nbc universal, news corp, om malik, readwriteweb, techcrunch, videoblogging, vodpod.com, youtube