Vlogging at Namac

I just returned from this year's National Media Arts Conference ("Taking Liberties: Creativity, Freedom, and Risk"), which took place in Philadephia. With more than one hundred speakers Namac is a big deal for media makers in the US. The program attempted to bring together traditional film & video practices including activist documentary with emerging uses of technology such as video blogging.

Vlog users create diaristic, experimental or documentary blog posts of short videos. Artists pre-release parts of longer videos on their blog. Increased interest in vlogging is demonstrated by the exploding traffic on mailing lists like "videoblogging."  Media makers at freevlog offer tutorials on video blogging. Melbourne-based Adrian Miles pioneered vlogging for education: "A vog is Dziga Vertov with a mac and a modem. A vog is a video blog where video in a blog must be more than video in a blog." I look forward to an iSight conversation with him soon. At the Share, Share Widely conference site I used audio and video blogging to bring in remote participants.

Producers manage to keep vlogging at low cost by hosting large video packages either on their own server or at www.ourmedia.org (a collaboration of Archive.org and the Creative Commons), which offers unlimited, and free hosting of media files. Sometimes the content reviewers at ourmedia.org are overwhelmed by the amount of uploaded material but repeated upload secures eventual success. The miniature Sanyo Xacti VPC-C5 video camera supports such vlogging practice in the day-to-day. The camera allows transfer of mpeg-4 clips directly from the camera via USB into the computer.