Steve Garfield Across America Washington, D.C. Drinkup
May 10th, 7 PM
Steve Garfield is making a stop in Washington D.C. on his way to New York for Streaming Media East (5/12) and while in Washington D.C. we are organizing a Drinkup on Sunday May 10th from 7:00 PM on at Capitol City Brewing Company.
Thanks to Scott Stead for helping out. Looking forward to seeing all the DC Media Makers including Jim Long, Andy Carvin, Chris Parandian, Jill Foster, Carl Weaver and more!
Capitol City Brewing Company 2 Massachusetts Ave NE Washington, District of Columbia 20002
I was on CNN.com/Live live today talking about Columbine, Gun Control and President Obama's trip to Latin America.
It was a neat experience. I producer called in five minutes before air and we connected via Skype. The video stream coming to my MAc was choppy so I turned on my Panasonic Toughbook to see the stream. There it was nice and clear, but hten the producer told me to shut that one off since it was sucking up all my bandwidth.
Going into the segment, I thought that they were going to ask me about what bloggers were saying about the issues, so I did some web surfing and brabbed some relevant posts. Searching around like that brought me up to speed on the issues, but in the end, what they wanted to hear were MY thoughts on the issues.
I think I did a good job on gun control by referencing the violence in the streets of Boston and how illegal guns need to be taken off the streets.
I can't tell you how much fun it was to compare and contrast the Bush foreign poicy of Axis of Evil with Obama's let's talk policy. I loved that!
Twitter It was also fun to be able to post to twitter live and see responses. That is the future.
Technical Behind the Scenes I was wondering how the anchor would moderate a remote conversation between four people. I used Skype on a MacBook Pro, with a Canon GL/2 connected via a Firewire card, and an audio-technica AT2020 USB mic.
My BU New Media Tools for Journalism class is covering the Boston Marathon today with text, audio, photos and video. All their twitter posts, flickr photos, utterli and BlogTalkRadio audio posts, YouTube videos, Ustream and Qik live streams are being aggregated using friendfeed.
The Boston Globe's DC Denison has an article about Twitter in today's paper called So little space, so much ado. The article misses the point that marketers can use twitter listen to and engage customers.
I'm mentioned at the top of the article with this:
Steve Garfield offered a link to his video review of a new microphone.
Your readers might want to see what I was talking about. You could have even embedded the video, like this:
The beauty of twitter is that you're not actually limited to 140 characters since you can provide links to anything including text, audio and video.
DC goes on to say:
...in Boston, the most popular Twitter celebrities - including Fitton, Chapman, and Garfield - are for the most part marketing and advertising professionals using the service to stay on the front lines of communications.
I know the article has a marketing slant, but my twitter bio is pretty clear, I'm not a marketing and advertising professional:
Bio Video Producer and Mobile Broadcaster / Teacher / Speaker / Listener / Writer / Founder of Boston Media Makers
DC finds a ready critic for twitter in Babson's Tom Davenport:
"... Twitter reminds me of the CB radio fad. Twitter fans are the same people who last year were excited by Second Life. And where has that gone?"
Do serious marketers spend a lot of time and energy on Twitter campaigns? I doubt it. Sure, go ahead and play around with it — it doesn't cost much. But I defy you to do serious brand management in 140-character messages. I defy you to prove that Twitter users are your typical customer — unless you sell bubble tea or something similar — or that their tweets are a true reflection of their relationship with your company."
Davenport is only talking about serious marketers, and he missed one of the main benefits of twitter for marketers, it can be used to listen to and to respond to customer's conversations about their products.
Any good blogger, competing journalist or alert press critic can spot and publicize false balance and the lame acceptance of fact-free spin. Do users really want to be left helpless in sorting out who's faking it more? The he said, she said form says they do, but I say decline has set in.
One more point about blogging, see how I linked to Davenport's blog and blog post? That's how Boston.com should do it. Link out so readers can read more about Davenport's thoughts on twitter. He uses 3,891 characters to talk about twitter on his blog, plus he's gotten 44 comments ( excellent conversation going on over there ), and he links to an opposing view.
How many times do I have to ask Boston.com to link out?
I went over to Hubspot in Cambridge yesterday on the promise of @biz stone, free burgers and Hubspot TV.
When I heard that twitter co-founder @ev was going to be on Oprah, I didn't feel the need to rush to get over exactly at 3:00. I thought Biz was on a flight to Chicago too. So I got over there at about 3:25 and I just missed Biz, but not the free burgers.
Hubspot's musical superstar Rebecca Corliss was there to greet me and show me the way to the food. Sliders! Yay! Note to B.Good, either make all the burgers medium-well, or put a flag in the rare ones.
The show is hosted by Karen Rubin and Mike Volpe. They broadcast live every Friday at 4pm EST, and if you are in the Cambridge area, you can join the live studio audience (just contact Mike and Karen to RSVP - they're at One Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02142).
They've got a nice setup for live streaming with three lights in the front and a few track lights in the back. Hubspot uses the whitelabel version of Ustream.tv called Watershed which allows customization among other features.
The show itself was much like a TV show, very well planned.
I spoke with Rebecca after the broadcast and suggested that they think about opening up the show more to people in the room, and people in the chat room, to make it less structured. One idea might be to do the 'show' for 20 minutes and then keep the live stream going for a free-form version where audience members both in person and on the web can participate more.
There's a tendency to copy what TV does. That works, but we also have an opportunity to push the technology to add interaction and conversation, and that's exciting.
It's an astounding menu of television and web programming, everything from heart tugging reality television, mini-documentaries and animated children's series, to fast breaking news and information. But this is no lineup for a national network. It's the variety of shows produced right here in New England by independent producers, work that is seen on local and cable outlets. Chronicle takes you behind the scenes of some of the area's most intriguing homegrown programs.
John Herman is featured too.
High Quality version of the segment on my Video Blog.
See the next post for an easier way to embed this feed.
Prior to finding that, I edited my own friendfeed feed embed code and replaced my name with BostonMarathonBU. You don't have to do that. Just grab the embed code from this post.
Links to all the Qik's sent in by students who attend this Qik event, will also be posted to the friendfeed stream. For those students who set up Qik to auto-post a twitter message, and who gave me thier twitter username, those posts will show up in the friendfeed stream too.
To add BlogTalkRadio, you click the little RSS Icon next to the username on your BlogTalkRAdio page and add that to friendfeed as a Custom RSS/Atom feed.
1. Thou shalt pay us for content 2. Thou shalt pay the news gatherers 3. Thou shalt pay to support our infrastructure 4. Thou shalt search for news on our guide 5. Thou shalt license for reuse 6. Thou shalt search for news from our members 7. Thou shalt consume news from our trusted sources foresaking all others 8. Thou shalt not use our content without paying for it 9. Thou shalt not steal 10. Thou shalt not worship the false idol of fair use 11. Thou shalt love everybody
It's like national book writing month in that it pushes vldeo bloggers to post one new video a day for a week.
I put a new video up each day, some days more than one. It's changed since the early days where everyone had their own video blog and you knew where to go to see their videos.
Now, when I look at my videos and where they are hosted, I see that depending on the circumstances and content, the videos end up living in many different places. Videoblog, blog, Qik, YouTube...
Here they are:
Sun Boston Pillowfight 2009 - Shot with Panasonic FX37 and edited with iMovie. First time using themes.
Mon IKEA - Moments from Ikea shopping captured in a Flip mino HD and edited with FlipShare.
"To build a new generation of Ford car buyers, the 'Fiesta Movement' marketing effort is enticing its 100 test drivers with a free car for six months, auto insurance and gas. In return, they agree to upload their adventures online.
Ford selected the 100 participants from more than 4,000 video submissions viewed more than 640,000 times online. Ford assigned applicants two scores: a 'social vibrancy' rating based on how much they were followed online and across how many platforms; and an overall grade based on those factors plus creativity, video skills and their ability to hook a viewer within the first five to 10 seconds."
Now that's in interesting inside look at how a major brand looks at the value of videobloggers.
Ford Video Blogger Scorecard
Social Vibrancy - # of online followers - how many platforms
Creativity Video Skills Ability to hook a viewer within the first 5 - 10 seconds
Note to the Wall Street Journal:
How about a link to the featured videobloggers. Can't you embed the Brooklyn Hilary video?
We have all read recently about the threat of possible closure faced by the Boston Globe. A number of Boston-based bloggers who care about the continued existence of the Globe have banded together in conducting a blog rally. We are simultaneously posting this paragraph to solicit your ideas of steps the Globe could take to improve its financial picture.
"We view the Globe as an important community resource, and we think that lots of people in the region agree and might have creative ideas that might help in this situation. So, here's your chance. Please don't write with nasty comments and sarcasm: Use this forum for thoughtful and interesting steps you would recommend to the management that would improve readership, enhance the Globe's community presence, and make money. Who knows, someone here might come up with an idea that will work, or at least help. Thank you."
My ideas:
Follow the plan of BostonNOW and include bloggers as part of the paper and not as an afterthought. John Wilpers can help with that.
Link to blogs. You've never gotten that right. I've got a lot of students that would love to have thier articles featured in the Globe.
Highlight user submitted local videos on the home page. In recents weeks you seems to have stopped doing that.
Shut down and produce a Boston/New England focused insert to the NY Times.
"FriendFeed 2.0 suggests is the capture of the sense of the moment. Like a Kennedy press conference or the incredible rhythm trills of Lennon on the roof in Get Back, we’re seeing something electric and tangible appearing out of nothing. I dive in and swim in the current, swooping from swirl to eddy, then into direct communication and back to the world I’ve left behind for a moment. It still takes several moves to accomplish a single task, but the handwriting is on the wall and the time is near when we can pick up where we left off months ago."
Just got an email from Comcast saying they are rolling out higher speeds in my area. If you are a Performance or Performance Plus customer your connection speed is automatically doubled for free.
I did a speakeasy.net speedtest and got these results:
25,179 down and 6,668 up. Upload speed was 2,616 prior to the speed boost. That's a nice increase. Download speed is similar.
