I’ve now been back from SXSW for one week. Apparently, I needed that week to get caught up with work and with life in general (I was at Barcamp LA the weekend before SXSW, so that means that combined with work I had basically geeked out for 21 straight days by the time last Friday rolled around). This post will probably fall under the category of "if a tree falls alone in a forest…does anyone give a sh!t" since I’m now one week behind the times, but the last two sessions that I attended were extremely interesting to me personally as they were about video blogging and I am in the (somewhat slow) process of converting yours truly (kid’s allright) into a video blog so that I can start writing about things more interesting than what conference sessions I attended at SXSW.
How to Add Video to Your Blog — Tuesday, March 14
Great to see video bloggers treated like rock stars. Panelists included:
Shlomo Rabinowitz — Echoplex Park
Eddie Codel — Geek Entertainment TV
Mike Slone — Daily Experience
Michael Verdi — freevlog.org
Sarah Hepola — sarahhepola.com and writer for The Morning News
Video Highlights:
GeekEntertainmentTV’s clip about What is Adaptive Path had the crowd cracking up at 10am. For the record, Adaptive Path is a user experience design and consulting firm in San Francisco).
Schlomo Rabinowitz showed a darling clip featuring his mom. His quote was killer, "Everyone likes moms…Moms are like the new cats of the 21st century internet."
Takeaways:
- Michael Verdi’s site FreeVlog.org is full of useful tips and tricks to get a video blog up and running. Michael is about to publish a book on the subject, and as soon as that gets out he’ll have time to add even more info to the website.
- Attention span –> shorter is better. Clips should be less than 3 minutes. Even 30 seconds can be effective. Clips should be less than 1MB each, should be rendered at 320×240 and compressed at 4-5 MB/minute. MPEG4 is good, 3ivx and H264 are good codecs.
- Hosting: There are three viable options including,
- Host yourself which can now be achieved for less than $10 a month unless you become extremely popular. Dreamhost is a great option as it provides a ton of bandwidth (I signed up for it this weekend.)
- Use the Internet Archive, a non-profit that is providing free hosting solutions
- Use blip.tv. Blip hosts the files for you similar to YouTube and other popular services, but with Blip you keep all of your rights to the content. Be very careful using those other services as you are surrendering your ownership rights to the content by uploading there. Also, I met Mike, co-founder of Blip, at SXSW and he’s a great guy so I certainly advocate supporting his service.
- Audio Quality: can be a concern if you are in a noisy venue and using a beginner camera (which they ALL recommended. Most of them shot on either a <$400 handheld digital video camera or even just a still digital photo camera using video mode). But you can always compress audio at a higher level.
- Branding: Put your brand at the front and back of your clip so that your brand (and URL) stay with your work in case people steal your content (which they will). On that note, the Center For Social Media has a great site that outlines best practices for fair use of content.
Video Blog Business Models — Tuesday, March 14
Panelists included:
Andrew Michael Baron — Rocketboom (a top daily video blog)
Casey Carvet — blastro.com (online music videos)
Josh Kinberg — Fire Ant (online video aggregator and desktop client)
Chris Nolan — Spot-On.com (political commentary site)
Chuck Olson — Minnesota Stories (a top daily video blog)
Kevin Sladek — Video Egg (providing video hosting, editing and sharing capabilities)
For the most part, discussion in this panel was pretty similar to the panel I attended the day before about how online comics make money. Lots of discussion about whether to put ads at the front or the back of the video, whether to do exclusive sponsorships, whether to do product placement, whether to do subscriptions, etc. For the most part, people were very protective of their content’s integrity and would conceded to an add near the end of the video and ads on their site but that was about it. Nothing earth shattering here, though I still think that the absolute explosion of Rocketboom (they sold their first ad on eBay a few weeks ago for $40k and you can also get Rocketboom on TiVo now) is astounding. Both Andrew from Rocketboom and Chuck from Minnesot Stories said that frequency is a big driver of success…people still want serial content. I had an interesting conversation with Chuck after the show. He posts content about Minnesota five days a week…but was in Austin…so what did he do? Well, Minnesota had a blizzard the previous night so Chuck took some free archical footage, a stream of Flickr photos depicting the blizzard, added music, and created an nice slideshow. Freaking brilliant…and so simple.
After the sessions, I had a great lunch with a number of these guys, and sat next to videoblogger Bre Pettis (I Make Things and Room 132) who showed me a cool site that he put together over the weekend: PhoneTagger.com. Check it out.
Technorati Tags: SXSW, SXSWi, SXSWi06, SXSW06, videoblogging, vlog, videoblog
