How I learned to stop panicking and love disorder

Published Date 10/25/11 8:05 PM

At protest camps, after a time it’s inevitable that things fall apart. At St Paul’s (Occupy 2011) today we had the health and safety rep shouting and waving petrol cans around while unscrewing the top in the middle of a crush of tents. “We must shut this down now.” He had a point, but this was a person at the end of his tether.

The London occupation has reached the stage where those who have taken responsibility are starting to burn out, this happens with all protest camps, the danger is these key people can be the kindling that burns the camp to the ground. How do we put fire breaks into our organising structures?

Sometimes we need to open up spaces. By stepping aside, we open the space for someone to come in to fill it. If we believe in self-organisation, then this moment of disorder is a healthy part of OUR society.

The state of video aggregation on the web

Published Date 10/18/11 4:07 PM

There is an issue of centralization around a single portal for different types of content on the web, and the withering of diversity of outcomes that this entails. There are a few successful implementations of p2p web structures such as blogging and RSS but they are exceptions, we have total domination of video (youtube) social networking (facebook) and micro blogging (twitter). Still audio, music, and images are less locked down, and text news is still a open platform. 

One way of avoiding this locking and control is the use of aggregation, the are examples of video aggregators such as http://vodpod.com and http://www.mirocommunity.org which we both use. And the visionontv project it self is an aggregating project (with a strong focus on production to balances/editorialise the output).

BUT this alternative to centralised solutions is faltering, if we look at the wikipedia page of video aggregators http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_aggregator we see that  more than half have closed down or shifted their focus. This illustrates how the internet is closing down to a few corporate hosted/controlled sources for media, the is a slow reaction to this coming from such events as the recent http://live.rebelliousmediaconference.org event and the upcoming http://www.contactcon.com in New York. but there is currently no reaction strong enough to counter this centralizing logic/market monopoly.

If you would like to see a open internet it is time to act.

Using a good mobile phone with an external mic to shoot live video reports

Published Date 10/16/11 5:31 PM

Here are two short video pieces I did at the recent Occupylsx. Feel they work quite well, two crew, one on camera, one on mic and interview, then basic camera moves and VO/interview.

Shot and uploaded in an hour or so, I did a few more interviews but they were problematic for content and camerawork, it was a on the job training with the person I was working with.