Bloggercon live video

The conference is over, so I've taken my 'bootleg feed' down. This is the problem with 'live' video - easy to do but no persistence. (Well, OK it wasn't that easy to do - I spent 2 years coding it at Apple so it could be this easy).



Being able to do a live broadcast to the world on a whim with the contents of my backpack, an ethernet cable and a friendly server in Japan is something I would not have predicted when I started working for the BBC in 1988 - especially as I was also using the same computer to share wireless connectivity with half the room, to chat with people on 3 continents, and to write and debug code in the session.



Something I said a few times at Bloggercon is that video and audio are missing the essence of blogging. You can do live video, or you can use your computer to edit together a professional-looking video presentation, but the equivalent of the 'just-in-time' publishing that blogging provide is not there.



I spoke to Jennifer Neal of VidiBlog about this - their's is a live event service, which isn't VidiBlog, it's VidiChatRoom - it may still be interesting though.



Adam Curry and I had a chat about trying something more like blogging using the RSS 'enclosures'. I have the beginnings of a tool to automatically move audio posts into iTunes (and hence iPods) as I just can't listen to speech radio at the computer - I need to do it while driving.



There are two aspects we need to solve to make this work. One is on the capture side - making this straightforward. Audblog and similar services do this, but their output is effectively voicemail in the browser, and voicemail suffers from the problem of being easier t make than to listen to.

Coming up with a new grammar for presenting video and audio in a 'skimmable' way (as Dan Bricklin put it) is going to be interesting to work out.