my ramblings about new media
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Go to EricSusch.com. The new blog is better, stronger, and faster.
I just finished watching the first two episodes of Quarterlife.
There’s an article over at NewTeeVee that examines the shows audience numbers, specifically that the numbers were going down. Andrew Baron commented about it on his blog too. Quarterlife seems to be losing their audience. The question is why.
I had no idea who made this show until the end credits and I nearly fell out of my chair. How could Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick be responsible for a show that I thought was so terrible? I usually like their work!
I’m reminded of a conversation I had a few days ago. We were discussing the difficulty in doing drama in short segments. Comedy and spectacle are easier and more satisfying in short clips but drama takes time to build. I think maybe the 8 minute length is part of the problem. It’s dragging the show down. There’s just not enough time to get into it.
OK maybe that’s part of it but there are other problems too.
So the main character calls her roommate an alcoholic on her blog and then she’s surprised that it becomes a problem? How clueless are these characters? How can I care about someone who basically creates their own problems this way?
Oh, and having TWO product placements in the first 90 seconds was really off putting. Product placement needs to be much more subtle to work. Corporate logos invading the frame constantly hovering in front of and behind the actors just kills the authenticity of the drama. It really pulls you out of the story and makes you think you’re just watching a contrived advertisement. The main character rolling around on her bed with her computer just screams product shot! product shot!
The product placement right up front set a really bad tone right at that critical point where you should be concentrating on winning over the audience. Hmmm… Maybe I was just put off right from the start and didn’t give the show a chance after that…
OK, so I just watched the third episode. I’m trying. Maybe it’s getting better. I’m not sure. I’m thinking that there are too many characters. With so many character arcs to cover in 8 minutes the plot moves forward way too slowly. Maybe this show is over-reaching and would be more successful concentrating only on one character.
And where is the RSS feed? Why isn’t this show on iTunes? I want to subscribe and watch this on AppleTV in my living room. That’s a much better place to watch something like this. Maybe it would help me get into the show more.
I’m going to watch a few more episodes but only because I respect the producers’ past work. I really want to like this show, but it’s hard.
(Whoops! I wrote this entry a few weeks ago and I guess I never posted it. Still getting the hang of this blogging thing…)
On the last day of the Podcast and New Media Expo, CAT and I sat down for a quick sandwich just before having to leave to catch our plane back to NY. We happened to sit next to one of the Internet’s first video bloggers, Steve Garfield. He had seen our latest show, liked it, and wanted to interview us for his video blog. We only had a few minutes but that’s all it took. We went out into the hall and he recorded us on a tiny digital camera. Check out the interview.
It was a pleasure to meet you Steve!
So the new widescreen iPod that everyone was waiting for was announced a few days ago. Most of the discussions I’ve seen focus on the fact that you can’t change the battery, I got ripped off because the iPhone was reduced in price, iPods suck, PCs suck, you suck, etc.
What about the most obvious issue? Hello! It’s an iPod with a bigger screen for watching video, but it only has 16 GB storage! The new iPod classic has the old tiny, tiny, tiny, screen but has 160 GB! This is crazy! I bought a 30 GB iPod 5G when they came out and I’ve been regretting it ever since. I’m constantly deleting files because there just isn’t enough space for my video podcast subscriptions when they update. I’d be happy with 60 or 80 GB and 160 GB would be fantastic… but 16? I can’t do it! Sorry Apple, I’m going to have to sit this one out till you come to your senses. Give me the bigger screen AND the storage and I’ll buy a new iPod immediately.
And, oh yea… The new screen isn’t really 16×9 like it should be. Come on Apple. You guys are supposed to be good at design.
When I heard that YouTube videos were going to be available on AppleTV I didn’t think much of it. YouTube videos look bad enough on my computer screen, why would I want to watch them on my big TV? I also heard that only select videos would be available so, who cares…
Well, I ran the software update on my AppleTV the other day and the new YouTube interface is fantastic.
You don’t have to download the videos. You stream them directly from the internet. Browsing is very similar to the YouTube site but you can do it right on the TV with the Apple remote. The video actually looks OK. My understanding is that YouTube is re-encoding all the videos on the site from flash to H.264 so the AppleTV can play them. That sounds like a huge-crazy-insane job to me but hey, it’s Google, they’re the guys who think driving all over the world in black vans to take pictures of every single street is doable.
You can search via an on screen “keyboard” with the remote. I hate this type of interface (I call it “Ouija board“) but it’s better than having no search at all. You can also log in with your YouTube user name and access your favorites. This is all a really impressive first step. It’s what TV of the future is going to be.
Check out this episode of Don McAllister’s video podcast Screencasts Online for a video tour of the YouTube/AppleTV interface.
This may be the first documented case of a user generated YouTube video put into service in the class room. Learn what Mrs. Trudeau’s eighth grade class was doing with it on Christian Long’s blog think:lab. (I found all this via Scobleizer.)
I wish all of these resources were available when I was back in school. I might have actually learned something in history class.
What happened at Digg really points out that once something is out there, it’s out there. There’s no taking it back. Take down notices are irrelevant because even if Digg had held fast, the code would just keep popping up like a massive game of Whac-a-mole. Not to mention the fact that Digg is only a small corner of the internet anyway. It doesn’t matter what the information in question is, a hex number, an .mp3 song, or a motion picture… when it’s out there, it’s out there. Period.
This is a reality of the digital age. Wishing it to not be so, or worse, staking the future of a business or industry on it not being so, is suicide. It’s not a matter of right or wrong, stealing or not, it’s simply a practical matter of the way things are. You can fight it and waste a lot of time and energy with threatening letters, DRM, lawsuits, that will all ultimately make your own customers despise you - OR - you can try to deal with it and structure the economics in such a way that everyone gets paid fairly.
How can this be done?… Well I don’t know. But I do know that obsessing with the past means not working on the future. We need new ideas and new business models, not more of the same.
Knowledge goes everywhere and is not ashamed. - Issac Asimov
Enjoy the number:
Sometimes when shooting a documentary magic happens right in front of you. It just happens and you know that you’re suddenly capturing an important moment that will enlighten the show, the one moment that brings meaning to everything else. You freeze, do your best not to shake the camera or fall over, and just let what’s happening in front of you happen. I had a moment like that on March 22, 2007. Magic happened right in front of me. I saw something that I had never seen before. The only problem was that my camera was locked in it’s case at my feet because we were forbidden to shoot. Let me explain:
CAT and I were invited to a big event at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York city. It was the kick–off promotional event of Stephanie Pearl-McPhee / The Yarn Harlot’s new book. Here’s part of her blog post/invitation:
The point of the evening is to get a whole whack of knitters into one room, then invite the media to come and see. Straighten them out on the world of possibilities, provide all of us with a moment that we can point to and say “See? Do you see what I mean?” An evening of proof. (Apparently The Knitting Olympics and Knitters Without Borders did not provide the world with this proof.) Now. The auditorium holds 750 people. This means that I could really, really be humiliated here (that’s the only part I don’t like. The image of me and the media in this huge auditorium while I try to explain that there really, really are a lot of knitters, I swear it.) but I don’t think that that’s going to be the case.
CAT and I were ecstatic. It was an event right here in NY, a message that was dear to our hearts, and they needed the media to cover it. Our video podcast and this event were a match made in heaven.
We then spent the next three days trading emails back and forth with the organizers. For some reason they kept throwing up crazy roadblocks that prevented us from shooting. What was going on? Don’t they want the publicity? Don’t they want the 5000 or so knitters who watch our show to know about the new book? According to the blog post they wanted the media there. We were very confused.
We finally got an e-mail the night before from Stephanie herself asking us to not shoot while she was speaking. We made arrangements to meet with her earlier in the day in Central Park but we couldn’t capture any of the main-event in the evening that people were coming from all over to see. OK, fine, we don’t understand but it’s her event so we won’t shoot it.
I didn’t think we had a show at that point but CAT is a big fan of the Yarn Harlot and she still wanted to go. We decided to make the best of it and see what we could get. We could always decide later to not post the show if we didn’t have a story.
We shot interviews with knitters before and after the event. Some of the knitters were a bit confused when we asked them to “guess” what Stephanie was going to talk about but we knew we couldn’t shoot inside and we needed something, anything, to fill the hole. I thought that we might get by somewhat on the knitters enthusiasm and to some extent that turned out to be true.
I also stole some shots inside the auditorium before the event began. There were about 650 knitters in there sitting, waiting, and knitting. It was still a prelude to the actual event but at least it was something visual and not just people talking about something that’s off screen.
Then I packed my camera away and CAT and I sat down for the presentation. It went well. There was humor and “snarky comments” as some of the knitters we interviewed had predicted. (Her speech was essentially an expanded version of her blog post/invitation.)
At one point Stephanie asked the 650 or so assembled knitters in the audience a question.
“How many of you read blogs on the internet?”
About 600 hands went up into the air right in front of me. It was like that moment in Close Encounters when they ask a crowd of people where the music came from and all the hands in the foreground pointed up to the sky.
“Man,” I thought. “That would have been an amazing shot.” Then she asked another question.
“How many of you write a blog on the internet?”
A few less hands went up but it was still quite impressive. Everything started to go in slow motion for me. The magic was happening. I felt the camera bag next to my foot. Should I reach in, grab the camera and try to get the shot? No. We agreed not to shoot the event. Probably take too long to power up the camera anyway.
“How many of you buy yarn online?”
Every single hand in the damn room went up. That was it. That was the moment. The economic power of knitting was on display. This was exactly what Stephanie hoped would happen in her blog post before the event. It was spontaneous, powerful and honest.
I saw it. My wife saw it. All the knitters in the room saw it. But unfortunately none of the people there needed to see it. And the people who do need to see it (the bankers, the “muggles”, etc.) will never know that it even happened.
I can describe what happened. I can show you still pictures of Stephanie standing at the podium. I can show you pictures of knitters sitting in an auditorium. I can show you talking heads of people just before and just after the event. But I can’t show anybody the actual magic… I can’t show anybody the actual “proof” …because it’s gone.
I hope somewhere, sometime, someone will organize another event like this and create another magic moment, so knitters will be able to show their numbers to the world. I’ll try to be there with my video camera, pointed in the right direction, in focus, and steady. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll catch lightning in a bottle again rather than just selling a few books to the choir.
LetsKnit2gether episode lk2g-014 Yarn Harlot in NYC to Represent
