International Mix Tape Project: Analogue!

Thanks to ITunes I listened to my CC ( Cool Cat) neice Helen, on Saturday, in New Orleans, as she served as DJ in her weekly radio program at Tulane University. Her voice was as silky as it was smooth. And this production was certainly no Prairie Home Companion in its inception, completly digital instead. So very very hip.

Even Helen's grandfather listened from his I-Mac.

Remembrance of Things Past...Living In an Analogue Environment

But this all set me musing. There's a scene in Praire Home Companion in which a character plays a vinyl record in his dressing room that makes you think " How quaint."

Yes, you have your IPOD and are hip and groovey. But are you a closet digeratti who yearns for a walk along the pathways of a less hectic time? Is a networked life tethered to a Blackberry making you increasingly anxious? Do you long for those days when meetings took place offline where smiles and laughs were real not LOL?

Do you miss analogue technology, a gentler era when music mixes were made with cassette tapes instead of computers and you, (as Daily Candy posts today) passed..." Hours spent astride double decks, fingers poised above the pause button, timing each song (juuust right), with a little MC magic added to the mix."

Fear not. Today's sweet dose from Daily Candy describes a charmingly quaint and retro society of music mixers who trade casette tapes by snail mail. By joining the...

International Mixtape Project, you can tune into a growing community of global headphone hipsters who trade old-school tapes (and compilation discs) via snail mail.

Every month you swap your precious song compilations with music-minded pen pals around the world. Imagine! Your mix prowess heard from Helsinki to Beijing! And it’s just a few stamps away.

At the moment, 30 countries are exchanging beats: Israeli microhouse, Nova Scotia neo-soul, Bay Area hip-hop, and Congolese electro-folk.

Joining is simple and membership responsibilities are few (thank goodness, because summer heat makes us l-a-z-y). Cover art isn’t a must — but hello! — it’s, like, totally the best part.

And it just might save your life.

For reel.

You can find out more about the IMP at BBC Online.

Cisco Videos

Cisco has created a splash page comprised completely of video clips to sell their product Cisco Unified Communications. Visitors to the page can click on one of ten video clips or choose to view a video categorized by...yes, sigh... " solution". Heard that word before?

Web 2.0 Podcast

In a BusinessWeek podcast O'Reilly Media CEO Bill O'Reilly discusses Web 2.0 , and the the architecture of participation. Here where users create the content, design helps leverage the flow of collective information.

There's no buzzword more popular in tech today than Web 2.0. Conceived during a brainstorming session for what became the Web 2.0 Conference now held annually by O'Reilly Media Inc. and CMP Media, Web 2.0 describes the new online services such as the volunteer-written encyclopedia Wikipedia, Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing site, online marketplace eBay, and search engine Google. Unlike most of the first generation of Web sites, these services have an innate social component, often "harnessing collective wisdom," as O'Reilly Media CEO Tim O'Reilly puts it.

YIKES: Video Vixen Link Not Mine!

VIDEO VIXEN NOT ME!!!!!

YIKES!

I just found that the link to the blog I created to archive my video posts called "Video Vixen" leads to a blog maintained by another Video Vixen, this one named Joan.
The code for the sub-blog " Video Vixen" where I archive posts about video uses a hyphen in its URL. Joan the OTHER "Video Vixen"...NOT ME...does not.

Self publishing without oversight of a copy editor is a life fraught with peril indeed. Even as I post this I am blushing. If you were to check out Joan's blog you would see why.

How Did This Happen?
A while back I changed the template on this blog, Crossing Media and re-tagged tagged the links myself from memory to MY "Video Vixen." Big mistake. I left out the hyphen. Even bigger mistake I never checked all the links after republishing Crossing Media with the new template. DUMB.

Sorry folks! Next time you see something like that...please let me know!

Podcast: Race and NYC Ad Agencies

Ad Age really gets the Cross Media thing. They encode their video for a Flash 8 player which I now think is the way to go. And check out this podcast in which reporter Lisa Sanders talks her story Race and the New York City Advertising Industry An Update on the Human Rights Commission Investigation.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Ad Age reporter Lisa Sanders provides an overview and update of the New York Human Rights Commission's investigation of Madison Avenue diversity hiring practices. Both the Commission and the City Council's Civil Rights Committee are planning to hold public hearings on the issue. In the latest move, the Commission has issued subpoenas for 16 of New York's top agency executives.

Scooterati: Ironbound Rally

Here is another set of photos from Saturday's Scooter block party, as members drive in a rally from New York's Brass Monkey to Newark's Ironbound district.Click on the upper right hand link on the Flickr set page to see the pix as a slideshow.

Brouhaha's Video: The Finals of the Slow Race

Here also is a video shot during last weekend's Scooter Block party by a Scooterati and videodisti You Tubes member who calls himself Brouhahavids. On his blog he says "I'm a lawyer working at the intersection of Internet and travel in New York City." Mmmm.

Don't know about You Tubes? You can read one of my previous posts, NBC Threatens Video Sharing Sites re the viral blizzard it created for a Saturday Night Live skit called Lazy Sunday a few months back.

Video Cip by Jonathan a.k.a. Brouhaha

Brouhaha Blog


PS. Although my pix are " public" on Flickr, all rights are reserved. Feel free to pass the link to this blog to friends. But rights to post pix on your blog or website must first be requested from the photographer...moi!

Scooteratti Pix: Times Square

To view some of the pix from my latest personal photo project, " Scooteratti," click here to go to the Flickr set's thumbnails. Click on the right hand link for slideshow on a page.

Although these are " public" on Flickr, all rights are reserved. Feel free to pass the link to this blog to friends. But rights to post pix on your blog or website must first be requested from the photographer...moi!

Future uploads will include more pix from this weekend's Scooter Block Party, sponsored by the New York Scooter Club who throw a truly great event. Thanks guys! My newest project, four days old, seeks to explore the ties that bond scooter owners. This quirky and independent bunch live for the potholed roads of New York City and the smell of exhaust.

Slivercast Video Content Distriubtion

TotalVid
If you get your broadband from Verizon, have you noticed that little click through ad for TotalVid that is being presented by Verizon Online? I finally succumbed and clicked through today.

Remember a few months back when I speculated in a post that one of the future revenue paths for cross media producers would involve producing video clips for niche audiences to download for a price? Well check out TotalVid.

A frisky start-up this distribution " channel" for slivercast content features video downloads of more than 1,000 titles. A download costs up to $4 and expires after seven days, says CNET. " In a classic up-selling move, consumers can also purchase a DVD and permanent digital version of a movie and have the rental cost subtracted from the DVD buy."

Remember how I wrote that independent content producers might make future profits by producing niche content for example on subjects like.. say... woodworking? Well, TotalVid says that it "has the world's largest collection of the most popular Wood and Woodworking how-to videos available in our convenient download format. For as little as $2.99 you can download one of our top Wood and Woodworking how-to videos and begin viewing in just minutes. "

You can sign up here to have TotalVid consider distributing your content.

CNET CNET tells us that...

Start-up TotalVid, which sells specialty videos for sports and home-improvement enthusiasts, is tapping into growing consumer interest in easily distributed downloadable video.

....The download video service market is expected to grow in revenue from $1 billion in 2004 to about $5 billion by 2008, according to In-Stat. And though that number pales in comparison with the nearly $50 billion in annual revenues enjoyed by the movie industry, the download video market's growth is happening faster.

Weegee:F8 and Be There

Weegee As Blogger?

After attending the ICP opening last night of Weegee's undiscovered photos , I decided to republish this post I wrote in March.


Reading all the tabloid buzz about the rape and killing of Imette St. Guillen, reminded me of Weegee, the photographer who invented a whole new genre for us photojournalists, even as he photographed murders. If Weegee were alive today he would take to blogging like a fish to water...posting his pix in real time. Instead of smoking cigars while souping his prints in hypo Weegee today would probably be found at the closest Starbuck's with a PC, uploading his pix using wireless.

Weegee, born in Poland in 1899, took the name Arthur Felig when he imigrated to New York with his family at nine. This freelance photographer worked out of the trunk of his car which he used as darkroom through the 30's and 40's as he photographed the daily dish of newsworthy images for tabloids and the wire services. Equipped with a police scanner he roamed the city in search of its darker side...its latest murders, fires or robberies. In my previous post I briefly mentioned Weegee's pix of people watching movies, Weegee's World: Movie Goers that this consumate voyeur took in theaters using infrared film, his subjects unaware. The Side Photographic Gallery collection of Weegee photographs includes photos in a slideshow, as well, some of which I have never seen before.





Untitled (In the Movie House Watching "Haunting of Hill House")
ca. 1950, Photo Copyright Arthur Felig

"He will take his camera and ride off in search of new evidence that his city, even in her most drunken and disorderly and pathetic moments, is beautiful."

- William McCleery in Naked City



Sammy's Bowery Follies

When I read about Imette's last minutes at the Lower-East Side haunt the Falls, I thought of Weegee's Bowery Follies, where Weegee snapped pix breaks between photographing murders to catch scenes of humanity. The photos taken at Sammy's,

...was the scene of many of Weegee's most lighthearted and humanistic photographs, a great contrast to what was taking place on the street or curb or just outside the front door. The "poor man's Stork Club" became a refuge for Weegee, a safe haven allowing him to escape the blood and guts that his more salable photographs contained.
-Miles Barth

"F8 and Be There"

"F8 and Be There," Weegee was fond of saying. Using guide numbers for his flash he set the aperture on his Speed Graphic 4x5 press camera to insure enough depth of field to keep everything sharp. Stepping back he measured the space between his camera and the subject. Emotional distance was as important for Weegee as were the actual footsteps he had to take to insure that his pictures were properly exposed.

"His spontaneous, witty, and meaningful work went beyond that of a news photographer. He once said that he wished to show that ten and a half million people lived together in a state of total loneliness," Lee Gallery tells us.

As far as education, Weegee made it through the eighth grade. However, the family needed money and Weegee was needed to help work. He worked a lot of odd jobs: he helped his father with a push cart business, he even worked at a candy store for a while. It was when he had his picture taken by a street tintype photographer that he decided that this was what he was meant to do. Weegee often said that he was, 'a natural-born photographer, with hypo in my blood.' He quickly ordered a tintype outfit from a Chicago mail-order house, and after a few months he got his first job as a commercial photographer. After a few years he left the studio, due to a disagreement on what he should be paid. He then bought a second-hand 5x7 view camera and rented a pony from a local stable. He named the pony Hypo, and on the weekends when the kids were in their best clothes, he would walk around town putting kids on his pony and taking their picture. He would then develop the negatives, make prints, and go back to the families of the kids to try to sell them the photos.
Introduction to The Side Photographic Gallery collection of Weegee photographs

The web-site Weegee's World: Life, Death and the Human Drama was created in conjunction with the publication of Weegee's World by Miles Barth an exhibition at the International Center of Photography Midtown that was up from November 21, 1997 through March 8, 1998. It's worthy of a visit and proof that a web-site insures posterity for a " bricks and mortar" exhibition even after its photographs are taken down to make way for the next one.

Brangelina Sells Toothpaste

Illustration Copyright 2006 Gallery of the Absurd

Brangelina's new baby, Shiloh Nouvel Jolie Pitt? Wow. Now that's a name. Let's hope she doesn't plan on becoming a photographer. That name would never fit under a photo as a credit.

The baby's pix were leaked by bloggers before People and Hola Magazine were able to exercise their exclusive for which they paid millions of dollars for the right to post pix first, writes Daryl Lang at PDN Online in an update...yes an update on this HOT HOT HOT breaking story. Updated: Pitt-Jolie Baby Picture Leaks Online

Evidentally Shiloh's birth sells toothpaste as well as magazines. Crest Toothpaste sponsored this AP video clip online of IVillage of the birth in Namibia of Shiloh.

Feeling discouraged, as a cross media producer that all your earnest and worthy story pitches are going nowhere? Maybe you should throw a celebrity like Brangelina into the mix. Malaria...go talk to Sharon Stone. She donated money for mosquito nets which made it into the press worldwide.

According to this mysterious blogger ,Celebrities are Just Like Sea-Monkeys. Check out 14's great blog, Gallery of the Absurd , Gossip Fueled Art - Updated Weekly, created by this anonymous illustrator who calls herself simply 14, Fourteen.

PDN tells us that....

The supposed prices People and Hello! paid for the photos were quickly leaked to The New York Post. In total, the photos could gross more than $10 million worldwide, widely believed to be the most ever paid for the rights to a photo shoot.

The Post's Page Six gossip column reported Tuesday that People spent $4.1 million for rights to the photos after winning an auction over the weekend held at Getty's New York office. Hello! magazine won the U.K. rights for $3.5 million, according to a Post story Wednesday by media reporter Keith Kelly. The story also said People settled for the North American rights only after offering $5 million for exclusive worldwide rights.

This gifted blogger, " 14" says in her bio

fourteen (14) has been an artist and a keen observer of the human species for centuries. Her irreverent underground art in the form of hand numbered and signed posters has been seen and collected throughout the West Coast for years and yet she has remained gleefully outside the radar of commercial success. She lives in San Francisco, CA.

Lately, she's been both fascinated and horrified by the alarming rise in celebrity culture. She noticed that everytime she flipped through a celebrity tabloid at the supermarket, she would erupt into tears of laughter and everyone standing in line to pay for their groceries would glare at her.

She always wanted to be a comic book artist, and here, in the pages of a glossy tabloid full of stalking paparazzi photos, catty commentary and the exposed bloated excess of celebrity existence, she had finally found the material to amuse and inspire her. And that is how Gallery of the Absurd was born.

The art shown here is created mostly by hand using ink, acrylic, pastels and oils on paper or canvas. Digital enhancement using Photoshop and Illustrator is also used occasionally. Original art is available and for sale. If interested, contact 14 at fourteencelebs@yahoo.com. She promises if you purchase her originals, you'll get a good return on your investment.

What is Podcasting? A Ninja's reply

In February I wrote about the viral blitz of video downloads of the Saturday Night Live clip Lazy Sunday from YouTubes and how it helped launch this video sharing site into the Big Time. Now, if you are over age 12, you can go to YouTubes to learn from a Ninja all about podcasting.

Save yourself a lot of marketing dollars by clicking here Ask a Ninja: Special Delivery 1 "what is podcasting".

This Blogger Half-Naked...

While trolling for links related to my brother Burnes for my last post I stumbled upon these photos of me half naked.

Yes. Only on the Internet. Half-naked, that's right. But before you get too excited you might want to know that I was only a kid and chubby too. So there you go...half-bare but hardly buff. In these pix I'm standing on the beach holding the conch shell that was given to me by a family friend, a fisherman named Manuel, who took us out on his sail-powered fishing boat from Fajardo Puerto Rico, on weekends.

The conch was used in Peter Brook's film Lord of the Flies, a family affair. My father served as director of photography while my brother played the role of Douglas and my mother was casting director and shot movie stills. Unfortunately I only got to play a stand in for Piggy in a test filmed by my father at the beach at the end of our street in Puerto Rico before the film began.

As I was chubby, I eminently suitable to play this part. Running down the beach with my brother I acted out the scene where Piggy discovers the conch shell and then blows it like a horn. Manuel had cut the tip off this shell for me with a hacksaw one time while we were sailing to Icacos, a reef-like islet just off Fajardo.

My father, a still photographer and early cross-media maven had never touched a movie camera before shooting this epic film. Peter Brook gave him nine days to learn. Hence these tests along the beach. In a future post for Father's Day I'll show you the ingenious track my father devised for filming on the beach and a swinging gate that panned with actors's movement.

You can read a synopsis of the scene I am acting out in these pix. In Golding's book it is called " The Sound of the Shell." Or click here to hear Alan Cheuse in NPR's All Things Considered, March 29, 2004 edition,

...review William Golding's Lord of the Flies, 50 years after its first publication. Cheuse says this harrowing tale of a group of schoolboys stranded on a remote tropical island still holds up today.

Online Biz Video

Last week my brother sent me this link to a great promotional video produced by by 2x4 about their multimedia design business. This clip is hosted on Apple's Quicktime Pro site and shows how dazzling the new QT7 codec truly is.

It's also a demonstration of how businesses in the future will promote themselves online. Read my previous post about Google's intention to become a one-stop shop for click-through ads.

Google Video Ads

I'm baaack.

Read this interesting post today on video ads on Ken McCarthy's blog Looking at Video On the Web , an always informative blog that jogs me back to posting on my own blog.


Ken tells us:

As predicted on this blog last winter, Google is adding online video advertising to its pay-per-click arsenal - and it's happening this week.

Wow. So what else are those whiz-kids at Google thinking up? It's a no-brainer that they would begin to host video ads in the future as a one stop shop. For those of us that occasionally upload video clips to hosts for streaming, the user experience on the other end can prove varied as the player wars grind on in earnest.

In a previous post I linked to Google's video site to show a cool video clip about base jumping. Although the quality is funky it's easy to play.

At the time I thought Google's business was only about replicating the success of YouTube's model. No way. If Ken is right, it looks as if Google's video hosting service was the company's test drive for what may well prove to a lucrative venture.

I see a bright future ahead in which businesses promote themselves online with video clips such as this one by Guba, also featured on Ken's blog. What better way to get to know the services a firm provides than by hearing its owners speak on a video click-through ad?

For those of us cross-media producers struggling to support worthy documentary projects, producing video ads may prove a future source of subsidy. I have been dreaming of that day ever since I registered the URL www.streamingmessages.com three years ago.

Here's Ken's post if you're too lazy to click through.

Google pay-per-click video ads

Here's a super-short cheat sheet of what the service is going to look like:

1. It will be based on the winning pay-per-click model
2. The ads will appear as small, static boxes
3. The video plays only when the prospect clicks the static image

And here's the kicker... Google will host the video.

(If there's one group that has bandwidth to spare its the guys at Google!)