<![CDATA[The last days before Christmas I was busy fighting censorship in Myspace of all videoclips and all mentioning of Youtube. This was successful and Myspace seem eager to erase all evidence that this censorship took place and that many people were angry over it. Myplace is mostly place for teenagers but a very powerful social network, perhaps one of the biggest in the world with more than 20 millions active profiles.

Here is link to my blog posts
Dec. 24
Misunderstanding??? MySpace swallows and silences YouTube
http://samkoma.net/videoblog/?p=19
Dec. 23
Flushing Myspace Down the Tubes
http://samkoma.net/videoblog/?p=18

Dec. 19
Myspace in the Brave New World
http://samkoma.net/videoblog/?p=17

This has become my most viewed picture on flickr, with 738 views. Several thousend people read my blog post on Dec. 19 and 90 commented on it.
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<![CDATA[I have been using captivate and camtasia in screencasting. Here is an interesting screencast from Drextel University, it shows how good it is to have screencasts from conferences - and also the content is very interesting to me - about wikis, blogs and podcasting in university teaching and learning.

http://showme.physics.drexel.edu/bradley/DrexelCoAS034-Villanova.html]]>

<![CDATA[More about the LesBlogs conference
http://lesblogs.typepad.com

There has been a story going around bloghosphere since the conference ended. See here:
http://samkoma.net/videoblog/?p=10

During the conference an Irc channel which was called the backchannel was open and lots of the time content from that streem was projected on the two big screens behind the panelists. I did not participate in the Irc channel but according to some participants this was adding value to the conference. I liked the projection of the backchannel, on many occations participants added information such as weblinks for what the panelists discussed - and also some real-time critique of what the panelists said. In some cases the panelists and keynote speakers regarded this as rude behaviour such as a participiant saying that statement from a presenter was "bullshit" and that being projected in big letters on a screen behind the presenter.

I have been to many on-line conferences where slides and presenter voice is projected and the main medium of communications from the audience is some kind of IRC channel. On-line conferencing system such as Breeze,Horizon Wimba and Illuminate all make use of irc but now you can also have voice and video of participants. But for some the irc is the only two way communication tool that works, there seem to be lots of people who have somehow not set there environment up right to project sound - almost all can receive sound though.

This kind of IRC is valuable, it also creates community feeling among the participants and on the on-line conferences I have been to there has only been posted very relevant information. Somehow the norm seems to be different on the LesBlogs conference. Individual bloggers can of course post whatever they like but I think it was not fair to the presenters that sometimes a very disruptive information - and information that undermined what they said - was projected on big schreens. It is also interesting that nobody seems to mind that a picture of a sleeping man ( one of the keynote speakers) was projected on the screens and posted on flickr with scrambled logos - as a joke. Well jokes are important and you can make fun of your friends - but I wonder if there was such community feeling in this gathering of European bloggers.

Here is an interesting post about backchannel backchat:
http://fordlog.com/?p=19]]>

<![CDATA[I have been trying out videoblogging for a couple of months now. There are many new and quit good videoblogging services but I like youtube.com best. That is because it is a system that has the same features as flickr.com - the tagging, the ability to discuss videos etc.

As with all new mediums it takes time to master new tool and lots of trials and errors. It has not worked for me to have with me a video camera, they are too big and use too different system than my digital camera. What works is just videoblogging with my small compact Canon Ixus digital camera - the quality is ok for web but you have to buy extra batteries and extra memory - I have now two extra batteries and a 1 gigabyte memorycard. The main trouble is my camera shuts offs automatically after one minute or two minutes - I have not been able to adjust it so it is not timed.

It is easy to upload the videoclips to my labtop , this is by the same method as digital photos, using zoombrowser. Then I use Windowsoft Moviemaker for basic editing ( a free program) and connecting the videoclips and upload the movie to youtube.com
Then I can paste a code from youtube into my blog and the video is in place. Just like flickr. But the main problem is that all worldpress multiblogging systems I have tried dont allow users to paste in code. That is one limitation of those systems such as elgg blogs, wordpress.com blogs and edublogs.com

Content

And I am now starting to experiment with content - trying to make the content interesting - trying to tell a story. One way of doing that is to the people in the videoclips tell a story or react in a way....and I am experimenting with taking short videointerviews.

Here is a link to my videoblog
http://www.samkoma.net/videoblog

I am right now experimenting with videoblogging from Les Blogs conference
http://lesblogs.typepad.com

the tools mentions flickr and youtube
http://www.flickr.com
http://www.youtube.com

I find it difficult to work with a tool where you have no control ... are not able to past in scribts

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<![CDATA[I am now in Paris for the Les Blogs conference that starts Monday. I decided to stay in Paris for one week and I rented through the Internet a beautiful apartment with high speed Internet in Marais. I arrived on Friday and since I am here alone and know nobody in Paris I checked meetup.com for meetings in Paris. And there was a very interesting meeting on Friday night with the artists group IVY paris. I joined the group and went to the meeting in a gallery/home of one of the group members. I met lots of interesting people there. Here in my flickr photos from the meeting:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/salvor/sets/1499526/

Here are some pictures:

Susanne the founder and organizer of the group is the one in Icelandic style sweater. Susanne has a website www.ivyparis.com and a blog:
http://www.ivyparis.com/blog.htm
Alexandra is the blondie on pouring wine. She has a blog:
http://babyblog.blogsource.com
Laura and Grace are on the the third picture. It was in the gallery/home of Grace where the meeting took place. Laura told me about a friend of her who gives sunday dinners where everyone is welcome. His name is Jim Haynes and he has a website:
http://www.jim-haynes.com
He seems quit famous and interesting person. I phoned him an tonight I will go to his Sunday dinner party in his studio in Paris.

There is also an informal meeting of conference attendants tonight but unfortunately I can not be in two places at the same time.
The conference starts tomorrow
http://lesblogs.typepad.com]]>