Video Angst [en]

[fr] Quand j'ai des vidéos à mettre en ligne, c'est toujours la même prise de tête. Quel service utiliser? YouTube, Viddler, DailyMotion, Facebook, Google Video...? Tous? Qu'est-ce que vous faites, vous?

Earlier this month at BlogTalk 2008 in Cork, I ended up taking a bunch of videos of the talks there, as there was no official video-taking. Rob Cawte, who happened to be sitting just behind me on the first day, also took a whole bunch — check out his WebCamp on Social Network Portability and BlogTalk2008 Cork Video Index.

I’ve finally got around to encoding, stitching together, and uploading (not in that order) almost all the videos I made. And as always, aside from the oh-my-god-what-format-do-I-export-in headache I’m starting to get used to, I find myself wondering where to upload. YouTube? DailyMotion? Viddler? Google Video, even though I don’t seem to be able to get upload to work? Facebook? Serve them myself from my own server?

After going through a DailyMotion phase, I’ve now mainly switched to Viddler, because I like the way it allows you to make notes or place tags on any frame of the video. You can also link to any particular moment in the video. But unfortunately, I’m aware that placing a video on YouTube, for example, would ensure that it’s seen more.

How do you deal with this? While we wait for the service which will upload your videos everywhere, what do we do?

Please Make Holes in My Buckets! [en]

[fr] Tour d'horizon de mes différents "profils" à droite et a gauche dans le paysage des outils sociaux (social tools). Il manque de la communication entre ces différents services, et mon identité en ligne s'en trouve fragmentée et lourde à gérer. Ajouter des contacts en se basant sur mon carnet d'adresses Gmail est un bon début, mais on peut aller plus loin. Importer ses livres préférés ou des éléments de CV d'un profil à l'autre, par exemple.

Facebook is Stowe‘s fault. Twitter was because of Euan. Anne Dominique is guilty of getting me on Xing/OpenBC. I can’t remember precisely for Flickr or LinkedIn or — OMG! — orkut, but it was certainly somebody from #joiito. The culprits for Last.fm, DailyMotion and YouTube have disappeared into the limbo of lost memories. Kevin encouraged me to sign up for a good dozen of blogging platforms, open a MySpace account, and he’s probably to blame for me being on Upcoming. As for wordpress.com, I’ll blame Matt because he’s behind all that.

Granted, I’m probably the only one responsible for having gotten into blogging in the first place.

Let’s get back on track. My aim here is not primarily to point an accusing finger to all my devious friends who introduced me to these fun, addictive, time-consuming tools (though it’s interesting to note how one forgets those things, in passing). It’s more a sort of round-up of a bunch of my “online selves”. I feel a little scattered, my friends. Here are all these buckets in which I place stuff, but there aren’t enough holes in them.

Feeds are good. Feeds allow me to have Twitter, del.icio.us, Flickr, and even Last.fm stuff in my blog sidebar. It also allows me to connect my blogs to one another, and into Facebook. Here, though, we’re talking “content” much more than “self”.

One example I’ve already certainly talked about (but no courage to dig it out, my blog is starting to be a huge thing in which I can’t find stuff I know it contains) is contacts or buddies — the “Mine” in Stowe’s analysis of social applications. I have buddy lists on IM and Skype, contacts on Flickr and just about every service I mentioned in this post. Of course, I don’t want to necessarily have the same contacts everywhere. I might love your photos on Flickr and add you as a contact, but not see any interest in adding you to my business network on LinkedIn. Some people, though — my friends — I’ll want to have more or less everywhere.

So, here’s a hole in the buckets that I really like: I’ve seen this in many services, but the first time I saw it was on Myspace. “Let us peek in your GMail contacts, and we’ll tell you who already has an account — and let you invite the others.” When I saw that, it scared me (“OMG! Myspace sticking its nose in my e-mail!”) but I also found it really exciting. Now, it would be even better if I could say “import friends and family from Flickr” or “let me choose amongst my IM buddies”, but it’s a good start. Yes, there’s a danger: no, I don’t want to spam invitations to your service to the 450 unknown adresses you found in my contacts, thankyouverymuch. Plaxo is a way to do this (I’ve seen it criticised but I can’t precisely remember why). Facebook does it, which means that within 2 minutes you can already have friends in the network. Twitter doesn’t, which means you have to painstakingly go through your friends of friends lists to get started. I think coComment and any “friend-powered” service should allow us to import contacts like that by now. And yes, sure, privacy issues.

But what about all my profile information? I don’t want to have to dig out my favourite movies each time I sign up to a new service. Or my favourite books. Or the schools I went to. I mean, some things are reasonably stable. Why couldn’t I have all that in a central repository, once and for all, and just have all these neat social tools import the information from there? Earlier today, David was telling me over IM that he’d like to have a central service to bring all our Facebook, LinkedIn, OpenBC/Xing, and MySpace stuff together. Or a way to publish his CV/résumé online and allow Facebook to access it to grab data from it. Good ideas, in my opinion.

I’ll mention OpenID here, but just in passing, because although in my dreams in used to hold the promise of this centralised repository of “all things me”, I don’t think that it’s what it has been designed for (if I get it correctly, it is identity verification and doesn’t have much to do with the contents of this identity). Microformats could on the other hand certainly come in handy here.

So, please, make more holes in my buckets. Importing Gmail contacts in sticking feeds here and there is nice, but not sufficient. For the moment, Facebook seems promising. But let me use Twitter for my statuses, for example, or at least include the feed somewhere (I can only include one feed, so I’ve included my suprglu one, but it has a huge lag and is not very satisfying). Let me put photographs in my albums directly from Flickr. Talk with the profiles I made with other similar services. Grab my school and work info from LinkedIn and OpenBC. Then make all this information you have about me available to republish how I want it (feeds, feeds, feeds! widgets! buttons! badges!) where I want it.

Also, more granularity. Facebook has a good helping of it: I can choose which type of information I want to see from my contacts. I can restrict certain contacts from seeing certain parts of my profile. I’d like fine control on who can see what, also by sorting my people into “buddy groups”. “Friends” and “Family” as on Flickr is just not enough. And maybe Facebook could come and present me with Stowe-groupings of my contacts, based on the interactions I have with them.

Share your wild ideas here if you have any.

Vidéo: nécessité d'une formation blogs [fr]

[en] I explain that it's normal that most people don't "get" blogging naturally. Active bloggers today "in the wild" are the result of a natural selection. You can't turn a bunch of politicians or employees into bloggers (all the more good ones) just by throwing blogging tools at them. Training is needed. Media education.

Voilà, chers lecteurs (et maintenant auditeurs!) francophones, c’est à votre tour d’être les victimes d’un vidéocast Climb to the Stars, après mes lecteurs anglophones qui ont eu l’occasion d’entendre pourquoi je pense que Lush devrait bloguer. (Je sais que podcast est également un terme techniquement correct pour ce que je fais ici, mais j’aime bien indiquer qu’il s’agit de vidéo.)

En sept minutes et une ou deux poussières, j’essaie d’expliquer pourquoi même si le blog est un outil facile à utiliser, il reste utile (voire indispensable) d’apprendre à bloguer autrement que sur le tas.

Dailymotion blogged video
CTTS: Nécessité d’une formation blogs
Vidéo envoyée par Steph

Quelques liens en rapport avec le contenu de cette vidéo:

Edit 12h30: Je vois maintenant qu’il y a des sauts, dans la vidéo — quelqu’un a une idée à quoi ça peut être dû? Il me semble pas que j’avais ce problème avec la vidéo d’avant. Le seul changement que j’ai fait c’est d’avoir mis les “key frames” sur automatic au lieu de 150 à l’exportation.

DailyMotion Problems Solved: View Robert's Video Now [en]

[fr] La vidéo de Robert Scoble que j'ai faite à LIFT'06 est maintenant réparée et visible dans le billet initial.

Finally! With help from Olivier of DailyMotion, I’ve solved the DailyMotion problems which prevented the wild videocast of Robert Scoble from playing correctly in the post I’d written.

I had copied the code from another video I’d embedded in a post on my Cheese Sandwich Blog, and changed the video ID. The only problem is that DailyMotion code includes a key which is blog-specific, so people were getting an error message when they tried to play the video on the blog. I tried republishing the video here using their “blog this” feature, but that didn’t embed it properly. Finally, Olivier pointed me to the “manual” option — which I hadn’t seen, although it was what I was looking for! — which simply spits out code for you to copy-paste into your blog.

So, if you gave up earlier, or didn’t have a chance to see it, go and watch Robert being podcasted by two swiss guys at LIFT’06.

DailyMotion Problems [en]

[fr] Un problème avec DailyMotion, heureusement réglé. Si vous n'avez pas pu voir la vidéo où je fais la bobette derrière Robert Scoble, c'est le moment d'y aller!

You probably know I like DailyMotion. I posted some feedback about DailyMotion yesterday, and bumped into some naughty problems today.

The problem with DailyMotion is that it doesn’t have a nice forum or a real devblog like coComment where we can leave feedback. So I’m posting it to my blog and tagging it in hope it will be found. By the way, I’ve been wondering what the best place is for this kind of feedback: here or on the Cheese Sandwich Blog? What’s your take?

After LIFT’06, I put this video of Robert being interviewed online and wrote a post about it here. Unfortunately, it seems at least one of my readers is not able to view it . (I guess there are at least 20 of you out there who just didn’t tell me about it.) The message says something about a key not being valid for this blog.

DailyMotion allows you to blog your videos directly from the site. That’s neat, but as I’m a control freak, I like dealing with the code myself. Back in November I had posted a video to my other blog, so I grabbed the code from over there, adapted it (video id), and it seemed to work. Actually, that was because I was still logged in to my DailyMotion account.

I first tried adding CTTS to my DailyMotion account, as a second blog. That failed (error message, just doesn’t work). As I was writing this post, I tried logging out of DailyMotion, and actually saw the message all my poor readers have been seeing these last days! In a click of my trackpad I was able to fix everything.

So, if you haven’t seen me goofing off behind Robert Scoble as David and Marc-O try to podcast him (red wine and Apple hardware involved), now’s the time to do it! Sorry for the buggy post, and thanks a lot to Raphael for pointing out the problem to me.