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Blogging vs. Journalism with John C. Dvorak and Om Malik

John P.

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Blogging vs. Journalism - John C. Dvorak and Om MalikAs many of you may recall, last weekend I was in San Francisco attending the WordPress user conference called WordCamp. Well, I had a brief chat with Matt prior to attending and we decided that it would be a good idea to capture the lectures on video, so I went ahead and took my gear with me and played cinematographer for the weekend.

This first video which I’m releasing (they are coming out in no particular order) was actually the second session filmed on July 21, 2007 from 11am-noon at the Swedish American Hall in San Francisco, CA. John C. Dvorak and Om Malik led a public discussion entitled “Blogging vs. Journalism“.

The video has currently been uploaded to Blip.TV in a pretty high quality version, but it’s large and takes a long time to download, so I’m embedding a Revver version which is much easier to embed in blogs. It’s also available for download in Quicktime format and now available on Viddler as well.

For those of you that are wondering, the video was filmed with a Canon XH A1 camera with an Audio Technica AT897 shotgun microphone. Our sound system did not have audio cables to plug into my camera so at times the volume is a little weak despite the fact that I cranked it up during the editing process. Sorry about that, but I think it still turned out pretty good.

If some of you could please give me some feedback to let me know if you have any problems with the playback, or with embedding it in your own posts (if you are doing that) I’d appreciate it. I just want to make sure this is going to work for the vast majority of people.

Comments

  1. The problem is that all of the video sharing sites out there really only want either low quality movies, or short high quality ones. No one seems interested in long, high quality content.

  3. The majority of media companies have missed the train and the readers are turning to amateurs, people with a deep knowledge about a special subject, and others with a motivation for writing or have interesting stories to tell, many many bloggers who have become part of the internet media. If the news media chooses to ignore it, it’ll lose a connection with readers on an intimate daily basis. If not careful, the mainstream media as we know it will become a bit less relevant with each passing day. Bloggers have the ability to create personal news entities. When ordinary people contribute photos, videos and news updates, many would argue they are doing journalism. When bloggers comment on and link to news stories, is that journalism?

  5. Anyone tried viddler.com? They claim to allow videos up to 500Mb and you can even set index points on the stream. AND you can add comments (just like a blog) to the video. Looks pretty cool.

  6. Ok, good news folks. The video is now available on Revver and I’ve embedded a much simpler version in the page here, so please let me know if that works better for everyone. You now have the choices to watch it here, download a Quicktime file, or watch the high quality version over on Blip.tv. Seems like that should cover most bases.

    John

  8. I’m currently working on it Douglas. I’ve already uploaded it to Google Video, but they are “transcoding” it… meaning they are butchering it with horrible compression. As soon as it’s complete I’ll let everyone know.

    I’m also trying to find some adequate settings for compression which will let me get the 1 hour long video down under 100 MB with reasonable quality for uploading to all of the other services. I’m confident that within the next few hours I’ll be able to break through this barrier.

    John

  9. I can’t play Windows Media files, because Microsoft no longer supports it (and Flip4Mac doesn’t work with the plugin). Could you please release it in a QuickTime/MPEG-4 format, or else could someone upload it to YouTube or Google Video please? :)

  10. Patrick,

    At the moment I’m re-encoding the video with a lower bitrate on both the audio and video portions to see how much more I can squeeze the size down. If I could even just get it to around 200 MB then at least it could be uploaded in two parts.

    After it’s finished in a couple of hours I’ll upload it to Google Video either way. The only problem there is that sometimes their compression is so lossy that it is almost unbearable to watch.

    Still, I guess that people would rather watch something that looks crappy than not be able to watch anything at all. ;-)

    I’ll keep you apprised.

    John

  12. Hmmm I just checked with Google Video Sharing (I’ve noticed that its at least better then YouTube, and I’ve seen long programs on it). And according to the site:

    If your video file is over 100 MB, please use the desktop uploader.

    So they do support over 100 MB, so it may work for you. Mind you have to use their tool. I wonder if its some failing in upload scripts. I’ve seen the 100MB limit quite a bit.

  13. Patrick,

    I just created an account on Vimeo, but they apparently only allow 250 MB uploads per week. Just one of these 1 hour videos is already bigger than that, so looks like they are out. Metacafe only allows 100 MB files, as does iFilm.

    The problem is that all of the video sharing sites out there really only want either low quality movies, or short high quality ones. No one seems interested in long, high quality content.

    John

  14. In case the trackbacks don’t work. Just to let you know I’ve embedded the video in the post announcing that you’ve uploaded the videos, and I plan to embed each one in its associated live blog. I’ll try and keep an eye out in case you upload them to IFilm, Metacafe or Vimeo. I didn’t bother mentioning YouTube because of its ability to slaughter the quality of any video.

  15. You did a good job with the sound, John. It works just fine.
    The only problem is with very long (10 minutes to start) buffering times with the Windoze Media Player. The video sometimes stops during play so that WMP can catch its breath and buffer some more. I’m on a 2Mbps line; adequate but not blazing fast. :)