19 responses so far ↓

• 1 aes // Apr 6, 2007 at 5:21 pm

  Sigh. So much for that blogger mystique. You should try another sign-off, though… Stay classy, San Diego…?

  Or is that copyrighted?

• 2 Jim Henley // Apr 6, 2007 at 5:27 pm

  I could’ve read that in a minute.

• 3 Anthony C // Apr 6, 2007 at 5:30 pm

  Liked it a lot. Value added was definitely achieved through the employment of opening theme music that provided just the faintest hint of pornographic video soundtrack. Also, love the clothes.

  Should you choose to produce more of these, I’d encourage you to brave the copywright lawyers’ wrath and try to manufacture flimsy excuses to include either clips from Transformers or footage of William Shatner going “Khaaan!”.

• 4 digamma // Apr 6, 2007 at 5:56 pm

  What software did you use for this? What format was your Griffith source in? I look forward to the day when everyone is producing stuff as slick as this.

• 5 Julian Sanchez // Apr 6, 2007 at 6:02 pm

  Just iMovie; presumably one could do more with something like Final Cut Pro, but that’s pricey as hell and would involve a steeper learning curve. The Griffith clip was just pulled from a WMV excerpt (and converted with Flip4Mac) I found somewhere online.

• 6 LP // Apr 6, 2007 at 6:49 pm

  While I agree that this was a better-quality vlog, and agree that video has some advantages over text blogging, I still have to come down on the anti-vlog side of this. Not that I don’t think bloggers ought to ever communicate via vlog, which can be especially useful as a getting-to-know-you tool — but vlogging on substantive topics just doesn’t serve much purpose. When viewing video, and especially when watching someone talk “face to face,” the right side of the brain is very engaged — the side that processes facial expressions and tone of voice, and responds to emotion and humor — this is the ‘storytelling’ part of the brain. So video is very effective for getting acquainted, sharing jokes and experiences, etc. It’s even effective for persuading people using emotional tactics. But if you’re a blogger addressing substantive issues in at attempt to explain, critique, or otherwise analyze them, you don’t want the intuitive right brian paying attention, you really want the left brain, which is in charge of processing word meaning, getting the ‘meat’ out of statements and following out the implications. This part of the brain kind of goes on standby when the right, social side is engaged in a face-to-face interaction.

  What this means, in practice, is that while I paid attention to your vlog, Julian, and found myself nodding at some points, shaking my head at some points, etc., I don’t really have a clear idea of what those points were, and why I agreed or didn’t. I could watch again and maybe retain more, but it will never be as effective as if you’d blogged the salient points, with links to the clips you used. And as somebody noted above, it took much longer to convey what you had to say than it would have taken to read it.

  Anyway, with that being said, by all means continue with the occasional friendly vlog, especially for those of us not living in DC, who don’t get the pleasure of actually talking with you in person. Good work on sorting out the camera angle, lighting, etc. And nice threads!

• 7 FinFangFoom // Apr 6, 2007 at 7:05 pm

  Minor point. When you gesture with your hands in the video, they look huge. It almost looks like you’ve got someone close to the camera sticking his hands into view to gesture for you. It is somewhat distracting, especially since you appear to have your elbows firmly planted to the arms of your chair and aren’t moving your upper arms at all. I don’t know if you can get much farther from the camera, but you might want to change the angle or something.

• 8 Joe Strummer // Apr 7, 2007 at 4:02 am

  Yes. I could’ve read that in a minute, but it wouldn’t have had nearly the impact. I thought it was quite good for what it was, and particularly thought the discussion at the end about copyright was great. Excellent

• 9 Rue Des Quatre Vents // Apr 7, 2007 at 10:32 am

  I think what you’ve done is brilliant–still rough, but you’re working in the right direction. I haven’t seen many vlogs, and though your knowledge and analysis of the effects of new media is impressive, I await vlogs whose content does not refer to its own medium.

  The setting is particularly nice. I find myself searching your bookshelf. Keep these things in mind as you cultivate your persona.

• 10 tom // Apr 7, 2007 at 10:52 am

  Yes! Julian, that was great. I’ve been bitching and moaning about the video infestation of Matt’s site, pointing out that talk of getting in on the ground floor of an evolving medium is silly so long as none of the participants are taking actual steps to *make* it evolve.

  But this clip does, and so I’m pretty pleased. A lot of these developments have already happened in the parallel video podcasting world, but if political vlogging picks them up I’ll be pretty happy.

  Two quick things: first, if you’ve got Parallels, BootCamp or access to a PC, Wax is a handy (and free) post-production tool. It let me do a few things that iMovie didn’t.

  Second, there are a couple of sites that let you add flash overlays to your videos, providing the sort of clickable video bookmarks you talked about in this clip. BubblePly is one; Mojiti is another.

• 11 Anthony C // Apr 7, 2007 at 12:40 pm

  “The setting is particularly nice. I find myself searching your bookshelf. Keep these things in mind as you cultivate your persona.”

  You can tell a lot about someone by looking at their book shelves (or lack of them), I find. When I find myself in somebody’s office or study, I generally take the first opportunity to scan the shelves and see what’s what.

  Unfortunately, in this instance, Plato was the only thing that was in big enough print to catch my eye…

• 12 Christopher M // Apr 8, 2007 at 12:21 am

  Very nice! One technical complaint: the hyperlinks disappeared too soon. If a hyperlink only stays up while you’re in the middle of discussing something, that’s not very useful — I don’t know whether I want to bother clicking the link until you’ve gotten to whatever point you’re making about it. Were it technically feasible, the ideal might be to have a list of hyperlinks that either scrolls slowly by (so that I have a minute or two after you mention something to click on the relevant link) or simply gets longer and longer as the video goes on (so that all the hyperlinks are visible by the time the video concludes).

• 13 Julian Sanchez // Apr 8, 2007 at 12:46 am

  Chris-
  Hmm, good point. I’m not sure there’s a good way to do that with the available overlay programs (or at any rate, a way that could be kludged together within the amount of time I’m disposed to devote to it) but even with the system I’ve got set up here (1) the links open in another tab/window (depending on your settings), so you can always click and take a look later, and (2) I’ll keep the index of references below the video, so you can always refer to that at the end of the video. Of course, (2) is less helpful if your’e looking at it as an embed on someone else’s site… I’m still playing with the overlay programs, and will see if I can’t figure out a better method.

• 14 laurex // Apr 8, 2007 at 12:53 am

  So what you’ve got is interactive short-form documentary, albeit of the polemical variety and of course, without those pesky cleasances documentary makers are always having panel discussions about. If well-done, I’m sure they could prove interesting and add value- on the other hand, I doubt I would follow a blogger who utilized this style frequently. Practically, I can’t read a vlog on my blackberry (and even with the capability, it would require an environment suitable for video-watching); viewing is time consuming; and ultimately there are few bloggers I can think of who can pull this kind of thing off without being dull, smug, or awkward.

  Making movies is fun, though! With the bandwidth barrier weakening, I’m sure there will be a lot of people trying this out.

• 15 Julian Sanchez // Apr 8, 2007 at 12:59 am

  I think what I might try next time, instead of just a flashing link icon, is a hyperlinked subtitle that actually provides some description of what you’re clicking through (“Click to see my previous vlog”; “Click to read The Wealth of Networks“; “Click for more on director D.W. Griffith”) so that people maybe get a better sense of whether that’s something they want to have waiting for them in another window when the video finishes. And where appropriate, I’ll time that to come up and linger a bit *after* I’ve said enough about the relevant topic to provide the viewer with the context to decide whether they want more information.

• 16 Jacob T. Levy // Apr 8, 2007 at 9:55 am

  I have seen the future, and its name is Julian…

  I liked that the two books I could kind of identify on the shelves were Plato and a Marvel trade paperback.

• 17 mattsteinglass // Apr 8, 2007 at 10:44 am

  For me, blogging from Vietnam, the potential advantages of vlogging are all bound up with being able to post more weird videos of shamanistic rituals and Hmong kids. But I suppose I don’t actually have to vlog to do that – I can just post the videos in the middle of my regular blog. Vlogging would only be advantageous in order to promote my own personal brand in an egotistical and performative fashion. Which means I better get right on it.

• 18 Lester Hunt // Apr 8, 2007 at 3:53 pm

  Nice going, Julian! The competition is dining on dust!

• 19 Dave Weigel // Apr 9, 2007 at 2:13 am

  I liked that the two books I could kind of identify on the shelves were Plato and a Marvel trade paperback.

  The Marvel is mine – it’s the “X-Men Encylopedia” released to cash in on the second Bryan Singer film.