Internet SIG, July Meeting

Scott led a lively discussion about Video Podcasting, or Video Blogging.


Everything in video blogging is MPEG-4, or MP4.

Use the Quicktime codec to compress; does a good job. There are other alternatives, some industrial strength, but this is a good start if you want to do your own.

If you don't want to host your own, consider youtube.com. They have basically taken over video over the Web. They convert it to FLV and then put a SWF wrapper around it.

The audio part of Flash Video is on a different channel than the video part, because audio was added to Flash first, about version 5.

As with plain text blogs, or podcasting, content is king--you absolutely have to have something to say.

More Scott

Scott thinks and paces.





Scott explains.

GIG, continued: PRIZES!

Apart from food, networking and the all-important technical information, why do people attend user group meetings? Prizes!

Note for this photo: I was taking one of those short, annoying video clips with my still camera, the kind Paul Tetreault chided us about. Scott, thinking I was just fumbling for focus on a still image, said "Any time you're ready. . . ." So I switched to the "most automatic" picture mode and snapped this. I guess it's a good thing, since I can't figure out how to post a movie file on blogger.com yet.


Please feel free to post your own caption.

OCMMA General Interest Group

Greetings. What a month it's been. For those who missed the main meeting of the month, a great time was had by all, at the Digital Media Center.

The captions for both of the photos above, taken by your mild-mannered reporter, might be simply "People Milling About." However, those of us in the industry refer to this as Networking. Learn some things, meet some people. The pizza was very good this time, too.

About this Blog

What is it?

The Internet Special Interest Group (Internet SIG) of OCMMA recently visited the topic of blogging. In light of the fast pace of technology change, I should mention that here recent means seven hours ago. Anyway, not only do the tools and technologies of blogging change fairly quickly, but, at any moment, there are a wide range of opinions as to what a blog is, and what the process of blogging means.

These differences became apparent during the meeting. Although everyone had some idea what a blog was, the ideas were a little vague. In short, it was surprisingly hard to pin down a definition we liked. So it is not surprising that talking about strategies for starting blogs of our own was a little hard, too. That's not a bad thing; it was a great discussion.

Well, that was part of the meeting. I jokingly mentioned to Scott that everyone present should pledge to start a blog in the next 30 days, before the next meeting, so as to be able to trade ideas in an informed way. For my own part, though, I was serious. I had wanted to start a blog anyway, for other reasons, and now seemed a perfect time.

Performing without a net--Just do it

After arriving home, and waiting for the microwave, I created a blog and posted my first post. Wow, that was fast, even easier and faster than I thought. Frankly, the most time spent was in searching Google for "free blog" and trying to decide which provider to use. As an analyst, analysis is good, but it is also definitely possible to fall prey to the paralysis part. So when I realized that blogger.com is part of Google and therefore I already have an account, the choice was easy. That's it. There may be a lot of other decisions, and I may move the blog somewhere else, sometime . . . but I got started right away. I picked mostly the default choices. To me, blogging is thinking slightly more carefully than for email, and then typing.

Who is the Intended Audience?

First of all, me. That's not as selfish as it sounds. It is satisfying to express thoughts, and, for me, clarifies those thoughts.

Second, OCMMA members who may not have had a chance to attend the meeting. It's a worthwhile topic; perhaps others will take away something useful, or contribute comments. (I haven't got to the comments settings yet).

Third, there may be creative professionals working in or learning about design, Web sites, Flash, video, etc. who haven't heard about Orange County Multimedia Association, but who are in Orange County, California. Come on by!

Many thanks to SIG leader Scott for preparing, sharing and generally riding herd on the presentation and vigorous discussion. For more, see ocmma.org. Next month's discussion continues with personal publishing, but focused more on audio content, i.e. podcasting.

--JBo

Welcome!

Hello, and welcome to the first issue, as it were, of OCMMA Beat, the independent view of the Orange County Multimedia Association. Your roving reporter has not been roving lately, due to a coursework conflict explained in more detail later.

Before I venture too far into my own observations and opinions, I should mention the inspiration for this blog. The OCMMA has a long history, an active current membership, and, of course, a site of it's own, ocmma.org. Many members have been helpful to me through the years and deserve a lot of credit for their talent and generosity.

--JBo