Vlogs & Video Sharing, IPTV in Wired’s Geekipedia
Geekipedia is a one-off supplement to Wired magazine, promising People, Places, Ideas and Trends you Need to Know Now. It goes from A to Z, and feels a bit like Lilu learning about planet earth in the sci-fi parody Fifth Element. Geekipedia is a thin booklet, available online, which gives you a lot of systematized geek lore, and leaves you with a mixed feeling from ‘Scoble? Oh no! Let’s skip the guy. They have missed out on so many _really_ important faces…’ through ‘Biotech is coming up.’ to ‘It’s good to know!’
The emphasis is on Need to know Now, in October 2007.
I have checked the A-Z entries to see how video sharing, video search, vlogging is in the limelight. Blinkx, StumbleUpon, Metacafe, Revver? The answer is not much. Except for YouTube, which is very much. It seems mainstream geeky media is sending the message it is hard to catch up with YouTube for other video social networking or search sites, or maybe video. Or wait a moment. Let’s see what they have come up with.
B, Blogosphere Any vlogs or internet TV, or internet TV news page plus blog in the blogosphere? None. Maybe we need to make a separate vlogosphere map. Any suggestions are welcome for a list of top vlogs in the comments.
C, Crossovers “Upload a video to YouTube, land your own prime-time TV show. … Maybe one of these will be the first Net-to-net crossover.” And here we get some vloggers/ private dork TV personalities:
Brookers (Brooke Brodack) is a 21-year old strange girl. Check out her Harry Potter summary to get a taste from the room theater monologue (has been favorited more than 10,000 times on YouTube).
Then comes Amanda Congdon, former Rocketboom host: “Homecoming-queen looks and class-clown delivery.” We are told that she landed at ABC News from Rocketboom (saying at that time “bridging the gap between old and new media”), but Amanda has left ABC too. Maybe next year she gets into Geekipedia with her new digital project. Or maybe not.Justin.TV where you can stream your life live plus chat with your viewers live. Weird. But understandable if your startup idea fell flat because of Google Calendar.
Justin Kan and Emmett Shear were driving around late at night in Boston trying to figure out what to do about their previous startup (Kiko Calendar) after Google Calendar dried up the early adopter market. Justin realized that their conversation might be interesting for other young entrepreneurs, then thought that perhaps you can create really compelling content by just live broadcasting the lives of ordinary people, then thought… why don’t I wear a camera on my head 24/7.
Andy Milonakis??? Hey, about a year ago I saw a crazy adolescent chanting (OK, not much tune in it) Everything is Gay. And it turns out that he is 31 years old, happily doing a lot of other videos, plus has his own show on MTV. Here’s the theme song.
Then comes LonelyGirl15, and Ask a Ninja. Widely known. That’s about it. The real heavyweighter in Geekipedia is YouTube mentioned in various A-Z entries like Free, Googleverse, Mashup, Mob politics, Myspace bands, Twosomes etc.
L, Long form TV Long form TV enlists the current series that are for geeks, like Heroes, 24, Lost etc. What is missing though is some of the TV series originally or experimentally developed for / run on web consumption, like Quarterlife (from the creators of Blood Diamond) launching on MySpace on Nov 11. The idea is not new, but it is just getting in the juicy mainstream.
S, Social Networking FaceBook, Friendster, Linkedin, MySpace, Twitter. That’s it guys. No video social networking. Maybe next year with Twiddeo, the mobile vlogging mashup?
T, Twosomes Congrats Joost, and the founders Zenströmm & Friis, you are in! Twice. Also in the IPTV section:
The marriage of television and the Internet was a no-brainer, but it’s less obvious what the offspring will look like. IPTV — video transmitted as Internet protocol packets &mdashs; tarted out on the cable industry’s closed networks. But with Internet access hitting video-capable speeds, exotic hybrids are proliferating: BitTorrent and YouTube, followed by Joost, MediaZone, and scores of others. iTunes and Amazon.com have their own services, and every old-school TV network has a Net-based service. Surely, with 5 billion channels, there’s got to be something worth watching.
W, Weblog variants
Now that everyone has a blog, posting diary entries isn’t enough … those who do so in 140-character SMS messages engage in microblogging. And vlogs — featuring video clips — were the winners at the first-ever Vloggies in San Francisco in November 2006. Of course, there’s no need to choose: If you feel like jamming words, links, images, audio, and video into a queasy blend, do it. That’s called a tumblelog.
Suggest entries for Geekipedia here. Or just give me a wi-five (” Wi-Five: To do a hi-five with someone across the room. No contact necessary.)