DLTQ.vlog

I just saw that Six Apart have upgraded their pro version of Typepad: 5x space, 2x bandwidth (Duh, I didn't see this one before now) One gig of space is pretty good, but I will still not be using my Typepad space for my rich media when I have my own server space and Ourmedia/Internet Archive. I like uploading my files through ftp, but for the regular Joe 1 gig is very good news. Hopefully the speed of uploading files will also increase, meaning that the videobloggers/podcasters who don't want the hassle of Ourmedia still can upload their content without minutes of waiting. *** Now, to the DLTQ news. My initial reason for starting this Typepad blog back in December was to explore this blogging system. I was keen on moving into the blogging world after having had different blogs on-off since 99. After the three months of trial period had ended, I decided to stick with this host for this blog, despite having found a job with a competing company. Yes, heh, three months after I decided to move into blogging with a more serious note, I found myself working for a blogging software company.. :P I am going to fork my media content into different streams, and I ask you all to please subscribe to my feedburner feeds, not the feeds that come with the different blog systems, because I will be changing blog systems quite often from now on, but will consequently be updating my feedburner feed. Here are my streams with current url and feed-address: DLTQ.vlog DLTQ.podcast New! DLTQ.screencast: I have yet to find a blog host for my future blog entries. I have used DLTQ.vlog as a virtual log lately, but I will be more focused on video entries from now. DLTQ is my international concept, and consequently DLTQ.xyz will be in English. *** By the way, I find it amusing how I easily can map my Blogsoft blog to a different server (screencast of the process is here), or my Radio Userland blog, but to do the same with Typepad is a pain. Actually, I am only allowed to do domain mapping, as you can see in these screenshots: [Oh, yeah, an enclosure for you ANT readers] When will Typepad offer me the opportunity to mirror my blog elsewhere through ftp without using a whole domain-name for it?

(MEDIA) ( - video content for those who skip text-only entries) These days I am reading The Sixth Language by Robert K. Logan. A quote that left me thinking: When a medium first appears, it uses the content of another medium exclusively for its content until its users have learned to exploid the new medium to develop new forms of expression. (p. 19) Forms of expression. New language. Video and audio. From me to you. Us. Through RSS we can communicate. Mind-hive; vloghive. What happens once we use videoblogging for real collaboration. Not just creatively, but also practically? Creative collaboration has been attempted many times, but I am more interested in the practical collaboration. Practical-creative. To me, screencasting will become a great way to share our tools for 'learning a living in the internet age'. Sharing tools, habits, mannerisms. Together with videoblogging, screencasting can become a powerful visual tool for sharing experiences. Instead of X person in a forum describing his problem with a certain part of his computer, and Y person describing in return how it could be fixed, both parts could communicate through visuals. Science fiction? Perhaps for most of us, but some of us will use this method. This blog represents my workshop where I experiment with these new media forms. My site will then represent some of the outcome.

So, what type of media is this? A vlog? A screencast? Text in motion? The music IS important. Would it have the same effect if there was just silence? Or me commenting the media with some rambling audio. I have so many memories associated with this song by Leftfield. The album, Leftism, is over the top. Out of this world. Awesome. Kewl. Buy it. I have bought three copies of it over the years. When I get back from Oslo, whenever that is, I will sit down and finally go through this site. Clean up the broken links (it is just a directory error, mostly. go from /vlog/ to /media/ on most entries). And then pick out my favourite 10 vlog entries I did. What type of media is this? I would call it ... Nevermind. It is what it is. I am what I am. eheieh

Ok, to call a travelling salesman the arche-typical image of Norway is slightly far-fetched, but this guy was just hilarious. If you understand Scandinavian, you get what he says, but I guess you realize what he means in either case. I have to figure out what company he came from and what his name is - I didn't catch that. I will report here once I get it.

Markus Sandy is one of my major inspirations when it comes to videoblogging and life in general. He provides some good analysis on issues all us vloggers care about, and he also has a business ethic that I like. He wants transparency just as much as the rest of us, but I still want to learn more about his early experiences with computers! Anyway, he recently wrote a blog entry which made me thinking. Now that we are more connected than ever, how will we function socially? How will new ideas be approached? Will I, when you for instance come with a grand new idea, say Oh, that's old news. I read about it on a blog four months ago, check Technorati on X topic . On the other side, how many good ideas are left stranding because these ideas lack strong supporters? Or just supporters who want to see the things come alive? In this age of information overload, how will we navigate? I made a small movie where I show my reading/highlighting of Markus' blog entry and offer some comments on my own. On-screen behaviour vs off-screen behaviour. I have several times videotaped myself walking to the office. How often have I videotaped how I surf the net? Having surfed the net for ten years, I am bound to have some habits. Some of them are hard to break down, like my tendency to have a zillion windows open at the same time. I now have 11 different programmes running. There are so many good projects out there. What stops us from joining forces with some of them? The people? That they are not MY projects? Hmm. *** I am leaving for Oslo tonight. We will have a Norwegian blogger meet-up tomorrow, where we among other things will discuss having a blogging forum a la Bloggforum.se

Ok, I have documented the process of how I make my podcast. While making this podcast mp3, I used settings as you can see on this screencast. Here is a videoblog where you can among other things see me turn on my screencasting tool that records how I record the podcast. So: What is the normal weight of mp3 files for podcasting? Is it really 1mb / minute? What level should I aim for? What bitrate do you use?

Cisco and Microsoft: Shape up! Stop your pitiful excuses. Shape up and dare to oppose the totalitarian authorities of a huge market of 1.3 billion people. Become heroes in the fight for freedom of speech and decency, not spineless servants of the tyrants of Beijing. Shape up! Prove to be leaders, not slaves to short-term profit maximizing. Rebecca MacKinnon has the news. I will follow the stories here.

Link: Latest Business News and Financial Information | Reuters.com. NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks sank across the board on Thursday, with the blue-chip Dow average plummeting 1.6 percent, as oil gushed to a record $60 a barrel and global transportation company FedEx Corp. (FDX.N: Quote, Profile, Research) said high fuel costs will hurt earnings. U.S. Treasury bonds fell after a two-day rally, while the dollar eked out gains against the euro. Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeehaw! Errata: Norway is only the world's third largest Exporter of oil (after Saudi Arabia and Russia). And yes, we are only 4.5 million Norwegians, and we have so much money that it is not even funny. Our biggest worry is inflation, and how to invest that money in foreign companies in order to make sure that our own economy does not over-heat.

Music by

Yes, I know, it makes no sense :)

Screenvlog: A videoblog entry made entirely from action on the screen. (Yeah, as if we needed another term) Whereas my screencasts will have a mostly educational goal, my screenvlogs are more about artyfarty stuff. Having fun with the medium. This screenvlog is just silly, but I made it in order to test the differences in size on different output formats. It is 5 minutes 14 seconds long. .mov - 21.5 megs straight from Camtasia Studio (ie I did not edit it further in Quicktime Pro) .swf - 1.5 megs - ?! wtf is that even possible? including the 5 minutes of music? Does this even play correctly for you guys? .wmv - 2.5 megs pretty ok. I decided to not export as .avi or .rm (I HATE REAL MEDIA). I guess I will continue to export as .swf in the future. If you want a .mov version of any file just send me an email (raymondmk@gmail.com) and I will happily make a QuickTime file for you. Here are a few thoughts on the export options and in-screen look at Camtasia. My next screenvlog will actually make some sense :)

In this 6 minute screencast, I show you how to set up and use del.icio.us. For you ANT users out there, here is the direct link to the .swf file. I refer to Tim from realitysandwich because of this.

Watch this movie, then come back here and continue reading (select the text under to see it, I made it all white - evil). What I find so interesting about this movie, which I found through ad-rag, is how it challenges our (well, at least my) perceptions about sexuality. Well, we Assume this or that. That is why the ending is so surprising, and funny. Also, the ad is perhaps controversial, in the way it clearly supports unprotected sex between gay people, but then again, is there a real reason for reacting more strongly against their unprotected sex than any heterosexual couple? These gay people might have been faithful for years or decades. This leads me to the Oslo gay festival, or indeed any gay festival: It gives off a wrong image of what it is to be 'gay'. In my point of view, gay people are just like every other person. They just happen to like and love people of their own gender. This might unsettle you, but I don't see that as the real challenge. I am hetero myself, but yeah, I don't get why the gay community needs to always link the gay part with the wild flirty dancing fuckingaround part. And what the hell is with all that pink?! I don't find it offensive, just utterly tasteless :) But then again, that's just me. Thoughts on this ad?

March 1st, 2003 my father died of throat cancer. June 18th, 2005 I finally cried about it.

Here is a screencast-review of Audiojelly.com which is a site where you can pay for and download music (mostly electronica). I only learned about this site today. I have for long complained (although Very silently) about the lack of good sites that are easy to use. In the past, I used to get my music through first finding it on p2p networks, and then bugging my local record store to import them. Mostly they couldn't comply. So much for the long tail! I don't want to only work in the Darknet, swapping illegal files. However, I do neither want to pay $20 for a CD where I might only like song # 2 and 7. So, for me to actually be able to buy single songs without DRM on-line is a blessing. Why no DRM? The DRM limits me. It shouldn't. I hope the record companies will figure out that going the way of Audiojelly is the future. ***Now, try compare my experience with Audiojelly with this. Why on earth cannot people from all over the world just purchase from iTunes America? It IS an American company after all, right? Why should we create all these borders? I remember when I bought my QuickTime Pro key - it said $30 on the site but it turned out that ooh, because I am Norwegian, I had to shop on a Norwegian-languaged site, and I had to pay 300,- kroner, which is about $42. If this was because of taxes or anything else, I would have no problem. But I really cannot figure out why Apple has to make everything so darned complicated. No, I don't hate Apple. Yes, I have an iPod. If it hadn't been for the fact that this machine does not have .Net installed, I would use SharpMusique without a doubt.

Now, to some screencasting!

that's life - you edit it, and you die - Hugh MacleodLast night, while I was at this concert with Casiokids, I was thinking about life. How we all live it. And some of us edit it. Edit the stories of our lives, and present it to the world. Now, I just noticed this, linked to from here. Shannon Noble is one of my early inspirations in terms of vlogging. I had not always followed his work, just like there are so many others whose work I have not followed faithfully, and like many people don't follow my work. Shannon had a pleasantly different take on vlogging, and that was exciting to me. He stood out in the crowd. Now, this message: vlog::banal being the only one on his site is interesting. Some people on the yahoogroups are concerned about Shannon stopping vlogging, and part of me also sees this as a shame (I still don't have all his videos downloaded) But the question remains: Is vlogging banal? If so, why? Let's first look at the word banal. Hmm, lacking originality, freshness, or novelty . Yes, I can see what Shannon means. Me talking to the camera about whatever is really lacking originality, freshness, and novelty. Mea culpa. But still, does that make it not noteworthy? Does that make it less ... Well, I guess it does GIVE people less. There are not grand new ideas, no fascinating manifestos. Sometimes I do make attempts of being different, feeble attempts of being original, but most of the time I am very lax, and I hardly edit my work. Is that less interesting? Is it trite? Conclusion: Yes. Then the question remains: How to make it less banal? What best practice do we have? How can I make something not banal even though I am not a good filmmaker? And no, I doubt I will have time to spend hundreds of hours on one short movie. Or maybe I should do that instead of all these snippets? Hmm, loads of issues.

VCLP0003.mov

Last monday night Kristina and I went out to talk, drink some caffeine, and beat each other up in fussball (or however that is spelled). Unfortunately, she beat me more than I beat her. Oh, btw:

( - click this, baby) In this screencast which I made as part of an answer to this, I show one of the reasons why I like QuickTime so much: Quoting. I am still not a quote-master, but I will do some heavy quoting in near future as I explore further the whole granularity in vlog thing.

Summary of my Reboot Thursday last week I went to Denmark in order to attend Reboot, which is - surprise! - a conference in Copenhagen. Upon arriving Copenhagen, I met up with Kristina and we walked through town and explored the aesthetics of a bike. We went to a cafe and shared some time, whereafter she had to go to the cinema, while I went looking for a cheap hotel room and on my way saw the usual Hare Krishnas in the street. Thursday evening was the pre-conference meet-up at Digterkroen, which is a at nice location; I loved those buildings! At the place I pimped some vlogging, interviewed Dabitch (a great woman with a great site!), and did some other stuff too, like talking some with Robert Scoble and getting an update on advanced templates in Typepad by Heiko Hebig from Six Apart Europe. Friday morning I went to the Reboot venue using the metro, and took a look at the contents of my bag and the venue. Unfortunately I deleted my footage of the externals of the venue, but I guess loads of others took pictures of those pipes. Before the conference kicked of I found myself pimping ad-rag to a Danish participant (Hej René Hedegaard Petersen fra designalize.com!) in my rusty Danish. (God, I hate hearing myself speak Danish, I will stick to Norwegian from now on!) I also stole myself to some footage of Thomas talking with the speakers about some of the guidelines for Reboot. I also finally tried to get together some real interviews with participants, and decided to vlog René. I also tried to get a comment from Thomas, but it was not the best moment to choose as we were about to start, so I had to settle with getting a glimpse of Robert's tablet PC as well as 'DVD-Jon' who sat next to my colleagues at BlogSoft. And it begins! Doc Searls had the first keynote presentation, and it was one of the presentations that I liked the most. I still don't know quite why, and I did not have enough battery on my camera to record all of it, so, I will have to do with what I have. After Doc, Robert Scoble had his presentation, which was very loose. I liked it, but it did not have that much of a structure. Robert mentioned the website that the guy from Switzerland talked about at Digterkroen, and which Robert also later wrote about on his blog. Next, I saw Jason Calacanis from Weblogs Inc. give his presentation. Entertaining with good examples of why blogging matters. Then I saw Dina Mehta talk about Social Tools for Research and Collaboration . [media I II III IV] We also had breaks, and people talked. It was a good atmosphere at Reboot, in my opinion. I saw Jason and interviewed him, hah I will use some of that footage for my Reboot7 music video (forthcoming). During one of the breaks I also talked some with Doc Searls. After the break I listened to the conversation where Laurent Haug (whom I was honored to know better during the weekend and whose blog I now subscribe to) led us through the topic. After this conversation we had a one hour lunch break, but first I got a comment from Mattias Fredriksson who is behind mobilblogg.nu. During the lunch, I spoke with the 17-year old German who has done all kinds of crazy shit with the iPod. I had no clue what he talked about, darn, now I feel outsmarted by the teens. I also had an introduction to the Tablet PC by a woman whose name I cannot remember and I didn't get her card either, but she was from the UK. Will get it. I also got a nice talk with Hugh Macleod from gapingvoid.com **End of part 1 of the review - will post more later today** Oh No! [insert evil laughter] I have included multiple enclosures with this vlog entry! Now all hell breaks loose, and before long Satan will snatch us all!

near

[Sound | Sun]

Multi-layered. A study. Style. Presentation. Mannerism.

Happy Birthday, Norway!

Yes, I need to figure out SMIL and live links properly. One of my goals is to have videoblogs as granular as possible.

Two questions for all of you: 1) What is a videoblog 2) What is a lifelog? This is part of my collecting materials for "Lifelog/Vlog" which is my new multimedia project.

So, What is a videoblog? Oh, young padowan, if you thought that just because I unsubscribed from the yahoogroups, I will stop discussing what videoblogging 'is', you are wrong. Dead wrong. Ever since I did unsubscribe from the yahoogroups, I have been thinking about some of these things. What is a videoblog? What are the technical requirements? What genres are out there? Can I say that you are not a videoblogger? Can you say I am not? Can we say that Plutonians are not? What if my videoblog just consists of a page with five video files on it? Would that disqualify me from this latest fad? What if I delete my archives, would that make me less of a videoblogger? What if I removed my feedburner feed? What if I really annoyed you and made this BLOG all pink, with yellow text? What if I changed layout and title of this 'thing' just as often as I change my t-shirt? What if I moved my movie files all over the net, making Some of you ANT people re-download some of the movies which I made months ago and are proud of but you didnt really NOTICE, or comment on, or build upon? I do know how to relate to definitions. I do know how to relate to people who for instance go Oh, you are X, therefore you must be Y. Like: You unsubscribe from the yahoogroups, you must be nuts or You are Norwegian, you must be ludicrous or You are gay, so you must be dressed like a gay . I define things myself. I split up this world into types of people all the time. I analyze, I dissect, I mull over, I play games with my surroundings and myself. I get sad sometimes, I get overly pleased sometimes. I get heartbroken sometimes, I fall in love sometimes. So, what IS a videoblog? HAH! The problem with the internet is that it limits us. It limits us just so fucking much, that it is scary. BUT. Once we get over these limitations, we have gained just so frigging much more from the pre-internet times. The internet just has to catch up with the real world in terms of allowing different layers of meaning within the same message. But when it does, wow, we have so much potential. It stuns me. Every day, it stuns me a little. I wake up, and I think RSS?! HUH?! , I dream of technorati sometimes. Or I dream of sweet girls in other countries who I have NO knowledge of, apart from watching some video they chose to put online, as well as some chatting in Text. Or I dream of the fact that I can indeed get updated on my friends' lives all around the world. A storm in X country, a sunny day in Y country. Can text help us all? So help me Vlog. For fast scanning of meanings, text is best. But we all know just how tricky a few lines can be. I love text. I love reading strange books. Scanning them, reading the bibliographies, reading about the authors, googling the authors. But text is not enough. It doesnt SHOW me the author. I can imagine all kinds of things about him. I might say What an arrogant Harvard ASS-HOLE! , but I want to think the best of him, I want to understand him correctly. SUUURE I could just as well study the field, become part of THAT ecosystem, study it untill I became a doctoral student, and then I could attend a conference where he attends too, and I could step up to him and say Hello X, I have read your books for the last 7 years, I LOVE your work, could I get your autograph pretty please? (ok, imagine me as a blonde green-eyed tall Norwegian girl and this analogy might work). meandering. text. this entry has no meaning, and yet it does hold a lot of meaning. Maybe not for you, you came here for short, concise definitions. You came here for the nuggets of truth, you don't understand my reference points perhaps, because you came here for other things. You, my dear reader, are reading this. I assume SOMEONE is reading this, SOME day. At least myself, or my grandchild in 50 years. Or some journalist who heard about this new hype thing called videoblog and just realized that he has to write a story on videoblogging just because iPod photo now supports video and we can all run around with 60 gigs of vlog entries and watch on the bus or whenever. And yeah, I won't even get started on the whole videoblogging vs. podcasting thingie. We all agree podcasting sounds cooler. So, because it sounds cooler, and because Adam Curry is such a cool MTV-guy, we all want to jump on that bandwagon. What is a videoblog? I will be discussing that in a 5 minute videoblog that I am currently preparing. It takes a lot of time, I am now in pre-production (yes, this will be a 5 minute feature, even more heavily edited than We are the media which I loved) Time schedule: Pre-production: 5 days (mostly research) Shooting footage: 1 day Editing: 5 days. Note: This means days of work, not calendar days. I have other things on my agenda as well... The process will be as open as possible. Since I don't want to clutter this blog/vlog too much I will be posting my preparation notes on my other blog. There you go, Lifelog/Vlog the videoblog is underway. Update