Binge blogging

My blog backoffice is awash with unpublished drafts and lists of links - some of them pretty old - so in the best traditions of British binge drinking I'm chucking all the still-vaguely-relevant ones here in one go. It's an erratic selection of shorts, and will probably end up rather blurred towards the end.

First up, I'm really grateful to cartoonist Matt Buck for this brilliant illustration of where many of us are at:


I probably go on about the Washington Post too much, but today they've revamped the web site to Increase Emphasis on Video. Always worth a look.
Meanwhile here's something it published a while ago. It's one of those cool uses of googlemaps that works beautifully. Clinton's Golden Voice Bill Clinton's Paid Speeches washingtonpost.com .

Via Andy Dickinson's blog, here's proof that radio journalists are also waking up to the power of web video: Why video is a must for radio stations


Martin Stabe reckons I'll eventually work out why he and others are so excited about Twitter, although it seems his argument may have taken a hit at the British Press Awards. Sorry Martin, but this graphic courtesy of Wired says it all for me...



Like many other people I followed the Scoble-hosted debate about the death of the newspaper. I also like this from Information Architects Japan: 10 Newspaper Myths Deconstructed

A completely irrelevant post for here, but I'm excited to find that the guy from Askaninja.com, one of the World's Finest Bits of Web Nonsense, is unmasked on a site called The Vloggies Show.
Actually it's not totally irrelevant. Ninja is a fantastic example of how a community can be built (and advertising dollars earned) from a simple idea, brilliantly executed, in which you involve the audience all the way along.

Now here's a great bit of regional journalism storytelling from the Bay Aread News Group in the US. Ripples of a Homicide tells the story from multiple angles of the death of a 23-year-old local man, using audio, stills photography and video. It allows the users to pick their way through the story of how an apparently unremarkable death impacts on family, friends and the wider community. Beutifully done. I'll try to squeeze it on to my next videoblog. There's something similar, although not quite so complex, here: Democrat & Chronicle: Audio Slideshow

This sounds encouraging: Online videos pull in ad money - Editors Weblog. Although by contrast, here's the story of how Rocketboom (one of the web's apparently most successful videocasts) is finding the commercial going tough despite having 200k daily viewers.

I found this little tutorial pretty useful. Particularly now I've discovered the joys of the H264 codec... MultimediaShooter » The Dark Art of video compression

An explanation from Silicon Valley Sleuth: Broadband finally gets its killer app on the power of video.

Frederator has been a regular on my video ipod for months, but I've only just discovered that the people behind it have other web shows too, including Threadbanger, Fast Lane Daily and PulpSecret. Worth keeping an eye on to see whether web 'formats' can really take off: next new networks: our networks


And finally I've just discovered a whizzy little start-up called Mixpo, which I'm testing out for my next videoblog. It might just save me having to relearn Flash...

Oh and by the way, it took the Guardian a further 24 hours or so to work out how to post the video (see post below) on to the relevant page. But they got there eventually. Perhaps some of their £1m video investment will be spent teaching the 'cut' and 'paste' commands...