The Boston Media Makers met at Sweet Finnish this morning for what was billed as an Amy Carpenter Fan Club meeting. In fact it was gathering of friends.
Sam Allis from the Boston Globe came by and interviewed us all about videoblogging. What is it? When did it start? How many videobloggers are in the Boston area? What do you vlog about? Who watches? Do you make money? Why are there more vloggers in NYC and San Francisco?
Watch for an article about vloggers and vlogging in a future Boston Sunday Globe.
Amy told Sam all about the S.S.D.S. and their plans for world domination. We talked about the power of blogs and sites like MySpace to get the word out and foster a community around things of interest to people. So much is happening in the video blogging space these days. It's exciting to try to keep up.
Steve made sure he got a picture with Amy.
D.C. Dennison talked about how he was really interested in seeing my video from the New Media Munch at WGBH from earlier in the week on my blog. I said it was a perfect example of the long tail and the immediacy of citizen media. I'd taken a video while at a meeting at WGBH and immediately posted it to my blog. This furthered the discussion of the power of vlogging.
Carl got an Amy Carpenter original, autographed by the artist. Lucky Carl.
Abby related how she uses her blog to post info about new things that she finds on the web and was searching different things that we were talking about as we discussed htem. Someone coming into a meeting like this might think it rude to have a computer open while meeting, but in fact it enhances the meeting, where you can look things up that are being discussed and add to the conversation.
Michael Oh was working on setting up the Boston Globe Pulse point during the meeting and some of us were logging on, setting up our user accounts and doing trial posts. Michael says the Pulse Point will be up and running at hte end of the week. I tried uploading a 385MN video file, but Mike suggests reducing hte size of videos to under 100 MB and using H.264 compression. I'll compress a video and bring it in mext week.
We also talked about various hosting options for video ranging from free to paid services.
NEXT MEETING
The next meeting is our big one, Sunday March 5th, and will feature a visit by the Four Eyed Monsters.
All the details are on the Boston Media Makers Forum.