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Bootstrapping a Videoblogging Army November 16, 2009

Posted by Ryan in : Local, Podcast, Press, Video, , ; 1 comment so far

Every time I happen to catch a few minutes of the nightly news, I kind of want to vomit. The scare tactics, the way they talk down to the audience, the insanely short clips, and the tons of other tricks that mainstream media uses to bolster ratings and viewership really grind my grindable parts.

Then we have the exact polar opposites, like Orlando Event TV – Orlando Event TV this and several other shows produced locally are really trying to show everyone what it really means to be a citizen of this community, and they are all about the transparency. When you watch this video of Mark Baratelli in Winter Park, for example, the voice is completely different than the nightly news. He is much more watchable than a talking head in a TV studio.

I had a similar dream not too long ago, and that manifested itself as Orlando Scene TV and a bunch of other sites, like Orlando Video. The honest truth here is that I was not able to keep the momentum going for long periods of time. Producing video and being an unstoppable advocate for your product take a lot of time, energy, and the cooperation of a passionate community. Then there’s a question of money – how can I pay my rent, etc. if all I’m ever doing is recording people’s rock shows and theatre performances. It just never added up for me.

Then a little while ago I realized that the only way to really get a local indie TV project off the ground would be to distribute the workload as much as possible.

What does this look like? Well, now that I have the idea from The Art of Community to come up with a list of teams and their responsibilities, I see the teams as follows:
Internet TV and Local Events Community
Let me be clear about a few things:

Audience

The role of the audience here is to let us know that we are giving them something they want, and to give us some ideas to keep moving this machine forward. Kickstarter (or something like it) could be a powerful force here: we can hold certain great ideas for ransom unless there is a certain amount of community support. The audience laid out here is really a fraction of the audience, the most passionate 2%. I also think this group will be web-savvy enough to have their own web sites or popular facebook profiles (hundreds of friends), and they will want to use these channels to help us promote our cause.

Tech Leads

Aside from pushing buttons, I also put these people in the role of “product designers”. If Jony Ive has a lot to do with the success of Apple products, then we should be able to assign a few people in our community a similar amount of responsibility. These people are very highly skilled, and may only contribute once every few years, when we redesign the title graphics and the website, or they may help us create fliers, blog badges an mini-sites on a more frequent basis. These are also the User Experience designers – in charge of the overall way in which people interact with the product.

Producers

Here, a producer is anyone who makes something. That means hosts, script or show notes writers, video editors, etc. A production team could be all of one person, or it could be as large as 5 or 6. It really depends on the skills of everyone involved and the scope of the particular project. A large goal here would be to make sure that anyone who counts as a producer could technically do everything by him- or herself if needed, but it’s really a question of time. Like I said before, this is the repetitive and time-hogging part, even if we can streamline the whole process.

The other key is to make sure that everyone owns his or her work, not only from an intellectual property perspective, but in a support fashion as well – if someone has a question about the restaurant you reviewed, you should be the one to get the notification and reply. In this way, people may start to develop a “beat” or even “channels” of information, and it could make sense to give certain producers their own sites. Pulling a line from The Starfish and the Spider, the producers give little more than spiritual guidance to the community. He can suggest large projects or hair-brained schemes, but he will be on his own unless they get a decent number of other community members to support and participate. These ideas can even come from the Audience, but as they don’t often produce content, an audience member will have to find a champion for her great idea.

The last piece of this puzzle for me is the equipment. We only need a few REALLY expensive tools – many people already own a computer, and video editing tools are freely available. Coming by decent video cameras is what used to be difficult, until recently. If you really want to spend some green, go ahead and get a Flip or a Kodak – even most consumer still cameras have pretty nice video capabilities. However, this still costs anywhere from $100 – $350, and that is a large financial barrier right now.

What if we could make the cost of entry $30?
That’s such a small amount, we could probably raise a few hundred dollars from our community and outfit an entire army with these cheap video tools in no time at all!

I heard about the Coby CAM3000 Mini Digital Camcorder on a podcast I regularly listen to, The Daily Giz Wiz. As far as I know, this is the absolutely least expensive (yet decent) tool for capturing video made by a well-known manufacturer. I plan on picking one up just to field test it – it’s so affordable, why not?

The other part of my plan here is to get some training and best practices in the heads of these videobloggers before they get out in the wild. We already have some community spaces and LOTS of events happening, so the material is always out there. We could pair up one new guy with an experienced producer and mentor them in the basics. Make sure they know not to film in too much or too little light, how to get some decent sound, introduce them to some basic video editing, and how to post videos. This might take one long day or a few evenings out, but there will be a certain point when a new producer will just have to get out on her own and start learning by doing.

We won’t just “give” out these cameras – they will have to be earned. If we apply some sort of a value to the camera – say, 10 points, and videos another – say 1 point for a video shorter than 3 minutes, 2 points for a video 4 minutes or longer of a reasonable quality – later when we can offer better equipment – the Kodak Zi8, or the Flip Mino HD, or perhaps even other stuff to barter for. I also have this thought right now that if we have any advertising revenue to share, it will be based on your continued contribution of at least X points in a 1-3 month period – we would probably need a way to make sure that we always have fresh content coming in, so we need to assign deadlines to keep people from getting lazy. As soon as this machine loses a certain amount of momentum, it might as well not be running at all.

That’s as far as I’m going to wander into this thought experiment for now. I don’t have a great picture of how other organizations do it, and this is just something I’ve been stewing on for a few months when I really get the chance to think about it, which is not very often at all. I’d love to take a look at how NowPublic and a whole bunch of other public media entities handle this. There are lots of questions unanswered here, but I’ve been struggling to really write down and communicate this idea to a large group for a while now.

If you’d like to talk more, I think we should wake up the PodCamp Orlando mailing list. I’m going to send this same text out there to see if we get any bites. Please blog about this, tweet it, point to the list page, get everyone who might be interested involved in the discussion.

Tonight is a Florida Creatives Happy Hour, and Friday is MOOM. We should be having a Likemind on December 4th, and another Happy Hour on December 21st. If you’d like to talk in person, these days are really good ones to engage me and others who are interested in making Orlando more awesome.

Update: We now have a project planning site – if you want to get an invite, leave a comment below, and make sure you fill in the email field.

BlogOrlando >>> WordCampOrlando, more events = more specialization = more awesome June 12, 2009

Posted by Ryan in : Local, Tech, , , ; comments closed

The spring has kept me busy, so I haven’t been able to read every blog post on my RSS reader. However, the recent announcements around WordCampOrlando made me wonder what Josh had to say about it.

BlogOrlando 2009 from Josh Hallet’s blog:

After a great deal of consideration I have decided not to host a big, public BlogOrlando this year.
…
It is the complete end? No. I may still hold a small private event this year, or may think about hosting an event in 2010. We’ll see.

2 years ago, I talked about doing PodCampOrlando, but the farthest we got was a happy hour and photowalk (lately I’ve been using the site to teach people how to do stuff in Drupal). Honestly, the social media wave tends to hit Orlando a year or two after the West Coast, so while a small and intimate PodCamp would have been fun, it was hard to get the podcasters, videobloggers, and especially the news media to sign on for something like that.

BlogOrlando was serving many of those folks very well, but now there may be some room in the Orlando calendar to explode what was BlogOrlando into a WordCamp, PodCamp, PR-unconference, SocialMediaClub, etc.

There are a lot more podcasts being produced in Central Florida than there were in 2006, and the ones that are still around from those days aren’t going anywhere.

Would you come to a PodCamp? What presentation would you give, or what discussion would you like to have? Do you understand what a PodCamp is?

BarCampOrlando Downtown April 5th and 6th, 10AM – 6PM April 1, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; comments closed

BarCamp Orlando is a weekend for all types of creative folks to come together and share with each other. The event is dubbed an “unconference”, a format which derives power from the people instead of the event organizers or the presenters. Everyone has an equal opportunity to get on stage and speak, teach or lead a discussion, playing off of the idea that at any given conference, the people in the audience have more knowledge collectively than the presenter(s) on stage.

This second installment of BarCamp will be held over 2 days, Saturday and Sunday, April 5th and 6th, in downtown Orlando at the Wall Street complex, from 10AM – 6PM each day. Registration is free, and a registration promises a shirt and lunch on the sponsors of BarCamp, businesses who are passionate about the technology and media communities of Central Florida.

Saturday is the designated “Dev Day”, playing host to everything from web programming to robot building and video game development and everything in between. iPhone hackers, guys with soldering irons, the latest technologies, and plenty that haven’t been realized yet. Every 30 minutes, both venues will have a different talk going on, so if you’re feeling lost in the jargon, apply the “rule of 2 feet” and check out what’s happening in the other room!

Sunday is dubbed “Media Day”, and is the place for storytellers, journalists, writers, designers, filmmakers, musicians, 2D and 3D artists, podcasters, bloggers and social networkers to show off their work, share their tricks or talk about the state of the industry. From 12 to 1 we will be talking about the “Past, Present and Future of Media in Central Florida”, hoping to give our community a sense of our story, and where we’re headed.

Registration is free, and the event runs from 10AM – 6PM both days with a lunch break at 1PM. The event will be housed in Slingapour’s and One-Eyed-Jack’s, with Wall St Cantina acting as our “hallway”. There will be projectors and microphones, chairs and a space to speak. All you have to do is write your name on the whiteboard and you get 20-25 minutes to share your passions with a group of energetic, engaged geeks and creatives. I would not use the words “captive audience” to describe the BarCamp crowd, because they all want to get involved.

Visit www.barcamporlando.org today and register for Dev Day, Media Day or both days. Wall Street Plaza is at 18 Wall Street Plaza, Orlando, FL 32801 – barcamporlando.org/where has a map to the venue and information about parking.

BarCampOrlando April 5th & 6th @ Wall St. Plaza February 24, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, , , , , , , ; comments closed

April 2008 BarCampOrlando @ Wall Street Plaza, April 5th & 6th

View Video on Vimeo.

I’m recruiting presenters and attendees for the New Media Day. Be there, bring your A-game. (your B-game is equally welcome)

BarCampOrlando

At the last event, I think everyone’s understanding that there were going to be some crazy awesome presentations as well as some mediocre ones was not very solid. I spoke to a few people who presented and said “I thought I was going to be all by myself in a room with like 5 guys all scratching their chins, but I was SO wrong”, the other half of them said “I thought about presenting, but I didn’t think I was ‘good enough’, but then I saw it was just a bunch of guys like me, so I’m going to blow them all out of the water this time”.

Really, those are you only two options. You should have either presented at last year’s BarCamp, or decided that you were definitely presenting at the next one. If you weren’t there, then take my word for it and create a presentation. Really.

New Year’s Reflection January 7, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Local, Podcast, , , , , , , , , ; comments closed

Last night, I talked to (more like was interviewed by) Stephen McKenney Steck, the President Emeritus of the local PBS and NPR affiliates here in town. He was very interested in what I’ve done and what I’m doing, and he asked me several times to send him links to everything I talked about. While composing the email, I noticed a pattern. I would talk about the project and then I felt compelled to say “but this is what it’s really supposed to accomplish”. This gets me thinking…

It’s no secret that I’m making most of my bread and butter working for a local startup, but there’s a catch: I can’t keep myself stocked too well with bread and butter this month. This is no slight to Darren, Michael and Kia, it just happens that I need to find some additional sources of income.

I actually had a decent amount of inquiry about my person and my skills pre-holidays, but then the holidays happened and I don’t know the status of any of these requests. I’m thinking it’s time for a little of Plan A, a lot of Plan B. More on Plan B in the future, I promise.

For now, here’s how I described my past work to Mr. Public Broadcasting Himself:

Florida Creatives Happy Hour

The Florida Creatives is a networking group that meets every Third Monday of the month in downtown Orlando. I was inspired to form this group by several usergroups and meetups I’ve participated in the past – we meet in bars, because the best friendships and conversations are often had in the hallways after an event or in the bar across the street. In addition to our standalone after-work events, we’ve also hosted Happy Hours after the Enzian Film Slam and the Orlando Fringe Festival. I’d really like to have a program that lets us get in touch with students, both college and high school, and a long-term goal would be to have a summer camp for High School students to encourage them to pursue creative careers and programs of study.
Our Email Announcement List

Blogging Fringe

A community site built around the Orlando Fringe Festival. The Fringe is arguably the best 2 weeks of the year in Orlando, and I thought it deserved a fan site. I always try to get multiple people involved in writing reviews, posting updates or making videos, and in 2007 we were given the “Fringe of the Fringe” Award, which is exactly what we try to be. I was always hoping that my work on this website would get me some paying jobs, but artists don’t have any money, so it’s mostly a labor of love.

Ryan Price vs. the Media

My personal blog. I talk about media, technology, local happenings and whatever is on my mind.

Orlando Scene TV

The evolution of the Blogging Fringe concept, applied to Central Florida, with the caveat that all the posts would be video-centric, and another collaboration-heavy project. My friend Rebekah Lane is an actress, so she and I produce most of the videos together. We have also had other contributors, each with varying degrees of acting and production experience. I had always hoped this could be an open channel for anyone to submit video, and I hope we can get to that point as a city some day.

Pop Means Cuddle

A show “just for fun” I record with my friend Marc. He runs a music and media review site, and we get some music and interviews with musicians, and we’ve also interviewed the creators of an Internet TV show. So far, it appears we have a little Internet and a little music, which makes lots of sense if you look at the two people who host the show

Liberatr.net

This is the home of any podcast or blog I have produced myself, and those of a few friends. Many of the shows are co-hosted by friends, and 4 of them were produced solely by other authors, while I provided technical support. I had hoped that by having multiple “channels” we could attract a larger audience and become more attractive to advertisers. Now I am seeing the podcasts and blogs as a great way to support a larger content network and vice versa.

I realize as I read these descriptions back to myself that I always state a goal that is very far in the future or very much unrealized. I don’t doubt that if I could quit my job and apply 40+ hours a week to any one of these projects, I could reach said goals.

I have now come up with an even bigger, better project that is a real sink or swim scenario. I must either quit my job and start making money at this idea or decide that I’m still not ready and continue freelancing and consulting for a few years until I come up with another crazy scheme. I suppose this is the same dilemma all entrepreneurs face. The real kicker is the fact that there’s no easy answer to this question: When do you take the plunge?

Florida Creatives Meetup 1/5/08

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Florida Creatives Meetup 1/5/08, originally uploaded by hyperlinkguerrilla.

Here I am sitting with Stephen McKenny Steck from WMFE, Orlando’s PBS/NPR affiliate.

Photo by Jim Hathaway

Check out more photos in the Florida Creatives Photo Pool.

New Media ‘Think and Drink’ at Red Light, Red Light Saturday Jan 5th at 5:30pm December 31, 2007

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; comments closed

More than a year ago, I hatched an idea about uniting the creative communities around Florida under a common banner at a Creative Summit. We are much closer to such an event now, but still so far away. After doing a dance in several directions, we came up with a Think and Drink.

Event Info & RSVP

This Saturday at 5:30, local media producers will gather at Red Light Red Light in Winter Park (map) for perhaps the first event of its kind in Central Forida. 2008 will see the coming of age of many types of new media. Blogging will become a pre-teen; podcasting is no longer a toddler; YouTube even turns 3 this year. As we start to see the hardening and refactoring of several popular and useful services and standards, it becomes more important for the enthusiasts and early adopters to come together to get on common footing and think about the future of media.

PodCamp LogoOrlando’s technology, media and other creative communities have been growing along side each other for the past few years in a collection of several small fast and focused movements. What better way to start a new year than with a gathering with the purpose of setting goals and recording the words of the trend-setters of our community.

We’ve been setting aside January 5th on our calendars for some time now as a day to share our thoughts and experiences with new media. In December, a few of us got together to discuss what we’d like to get out of a PodCamp or a New Media day. Everyone agreed we should plan to have a much larger and more ambitious event later in the year, perhaps this summer, but a small event would help us get a solid idea about what sorts of topics to discuss and how we sell the event to the community.

BarCamp was a great event that really brought a lot of the community out in force, but the focus on programming made the video people, the podcasters, the storytellers and the writers believe that we could have our own Unconference. Enter this PodCamp Party.

Be sure and hop on the Facebook Group and to add some of your favorite sites and links to the Ma.gnolia Bookmarks Group. We’ll make it worth writing home about.

P.S. I’m also trying to plan a “Photowalk” at 3PM for all the photographers and people who might like to take a walk around Winter Park and grab some food before the Happy Hour. Reply via Facebook if you’d like to go.

PodCamp Orlando October 20, 2007

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, , , , , , , , , , , ; comments closed

Video thumbnail. Click to play
Click To Play

Orlando has at least 4 healthy podcasting networks, as well as hundreds of travel shows, religious shows and whatever else you get from the regular podcast crowd. It’s high time that we get an event together.

We had a BarCamp in September with 170+ attendees, but there was only one podcast session, led by myself. I realized we could take some of the geekery out of it and turn it into a media convention, akin to the BlogOrlando unconference held by social media guru Josh Hallet – instead of focusing on techniques, we can talk about what it means to podcast and what this medium is doing for the world.

I’m really hoping to get a wide sample of the community, not just geeks – arts groups, university professionals as well as other institutions and corporations as well.

I’ve contacted a few people directly and created a PodCamp Orlando Facebook group to get us started.

We have a great local networking group here called Florida Creatives – we get together once a month for a Happy Hour downtown – and we have a wiki where a lot of the organization will be going down. I own the domain OrlandoPodcasters.com and PodCampOrlando.com – the community is mostly organized, we just need to make the event happen.

This group seems to have great support internationally. I’m excited to become a part of it.

BlogOrlando Feedback: Podcasting September 28, 2007

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So glad to be able to share and converse with the great people in the podcast session today. I have some questions for you if you went to the session:

  1. What were you looking to get out of the session?
  2. Did you get what you were looking for?
  3. Did you get something you weren’t expecting?
  4. What would have made the session an over-the-top success for you?
  5. Would you like to have several sessions on podcasting, or a whole PodCamp in the future? Would you have something to present at said event?
  6. How would you have presented things differently?

If you can think of anything else, leave a comment.

If you want a copy of my talking points, you can download the Podcasting Theory PDF

I spoke to a woman afterwards that’s been sending off transcripts to an agency and had no control over her podcast whatsoever, and I opened her up to the idea that she can do it all for herself.

Really. PodCamp, but it won’t be just me. Come to Florida Creatives Happy Hour on Monday the 15th @ Crooked Bayou.