Here is a very inspiring example of how video can be used in a very professional way to communicate a message and build public opinion:
This video is spreading around the world and has already been viewed millions of times. Click the image to see it yourself, it is well worth the 20 minutes!
I recommend viewing it for several reasons:
It presents the topic in a very engaging way. The presenter, Annie Leonard, is giving a highly passionate, fast-paced overview that is greatly enhanced with simple but very effective animated visuals.
The video has smart interactivity, you can mouse over the images above Annie’s head to see links to each of the five categories.
The video is perfectly integrated in a web site that effectively quenches all your thirst for more information that the video has caused.
It demonstrates how a well produced video creates both understanding and deep feelings in viewers. It is also a good example of how effective it is to use simplistic cartoons to explain complex issues. (For another example of this, check out this explanation of the microblogging tool Twitter.)
This video was first published in December 2007 and it is now being translated into multiple languages. It will have a long life! More info in Wikipedia.
Here is a very informative and inspiring analysis of the YouTube phenomenon from a very human viewpoint:
An anthropological introduction to YouTube
This video is produced by Michael Wesch, a professor of anthropology at Kansas State University. It is long (55minutes) and unfortunately it does not have any interactive navigation tools. But it is worth seeing if you are interested in social media, Web 2.0, videoblogging and why video is such a powerful form of personal communication. The video contains numerous very interesting examples of the YouTube culture and its social, collaborative and creative successes since the launch in April 2005.
Quotes from the video:
“You are not going to convert passive consumers into active trollers on the internet.”
- Stephen Weiswasser, ABC Television, 1989
“We are moving from place-to-place connectivity to a person-to-person connectivity.”
Some interesting numbers:
The three national US TV networks (ABC, NBC, CBS)Â were founded around 1948, 30 years ago.
3 networks * 60 years * 365 day/year * 24 hours per day= they have so far produced up to 1.5 million hours of programming in total during the last 30 years!
But the users of YouTube uploaded more video than that in the last 6 months only! YouTube uploads are now around 9232 hours every day! This is equivalent to 6.5 hours of video being uploade every minute, 24 hours per day!
around 200 000 3-minute videos per day!
One major difference is of course that a vast majority of the YouTube videos are addressed at less than 100 people.
Michael Wesch is most famous for his video “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us.”, as stated on wikipedia:
“Wesch created a short video, “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us.” Released on YouTube on January 31, 2007, it quickly became the most popular video in the blogosphere and was viewed over 6 million times. Wesch has won several awards for his work with video, including a Wired Magazine Rave Award and the John Culkin Award for Outstanding Media Praxis from the Media Ecology Association.”
Google is in high-speed pursuit now of new functionality for YouTube. Google has acquired one of my favourites: Omnisio, a US company offering a very smart and nicely designed video service. Omnisio allows you to share compilations of different videos in a simple way, but their most interesting service is a video player with embedded user comments, tagging and a very nice synchronized slide timeline.
See this example, a speech by Paul Graham, entrepreneur and founder of the US incubator Y Combinator, (who backed Omnisio):
I really like the divided video window with the slides to the left and the live video to the right, with the slide timeline at the bottom, it is intuitive that you can navigate by clicking in the time line. This is the best user interface I have seen for speeches!
The Omnisio founders say this about being integrated with YouTube/Google:
“We believe we’ve only scratched the surface in terms of what’s possible with online video, and we are really looking forward to taking the video viewing — and creating — experience to the next level.”
YouTube says this about acquiring Omnisio:
“…having this kind of talent at YouTube should help us further explore ways to enhance your YouTube experience.”
Indeed! As I have said before: we are only at the beginning of a marvellous online video development!
Henrik
PS. Google and I seem to have the same nose for interesting internet-based applications
In the summer of 2005 I tested the brand new YouTube video service and thought that it was going to become a big hit since it was so easy to use. YouTube was acquired by Google in Nov 2006.
I started using an online word processor app called Writely in august 2005, they were acquired by Google in March 2006 and turned into Google Documents, which I have been using heavily ever since.
Jaiku is a Finnish microblogging system that I am fond of since meeting the brilliant co-founder, Jyri Engeström at a conference in Stockholm in Nov 2006. Jaiku was acquired by Google in Oct 2007.
In May 2008 Omnisio launched their app for synching slides with video presentations, I loved it immediately for its beautiful and intuitive interface and smart annotation tools. Well, Google acquired them on July 30, 2008…
As I have written before in my post Empowering internet video, automatic voice-to-text for online videos is already here. It means that any words spoken in a video is automatically transcribed into text.
The transcribed text can be shown in the video window or be used to search for the part of the video where something of particular interest is said. This is of course very powerful for videos from speeches and seminars etc, but there are many more possibilities such as automatic translation.
I have said for some time that this will become the 2008 killer application for online video.
So I’m not surprised that Google just started adopting it on YouTube. They start now in a moderate way with US presidential campaign videos:
Try it: search the election videos here. Your search term is highlighted in yellow lines in the video timeline, point your mouse to the lines to see snippets of the transcript. See also an interview with Steve Grove, head of news and politics at YouTube.
I am convinced that Google and YouTube will go full ahead with voice-to-text services, for several reasons:
Video has many advantages but two major drawbacks: 1. It is hard to search video content. Most videos can only be searched by their titles or meta tags.
2. It is time consuming to watch. A 5 minute video takes 5 minutes to watch, but a text that takes 5 minutes to read normally can first be glanced through in 15 seconds to give you an idea of what it is about and let you decide to read it, all or not.
.
.
Voice-to-text solves both these problems effectively! Search engines can search for anything said in a video and it is easy to create video controls that lets the user jump directly to the interesting parts in the video, for example by clicking on a word in the text transcript or in a word cloud.
Monetization!
Exact information of the media content is a key factor for all kinds of monetization. Voice-to-text enables targeted video ads in a much more effective way. This is undoubtedly a key factor for Google’s interest in this technology. The obvious start is to integrate it with Google’s Adsense and include video commercials in search results. But it will be much easier for all the new online video sites to create valu-adding business models with this technology.
Another giant step for voice-to-text technology will be taken later this year when Adobe reportedly will integrate it into their Flash technology, thereby enabling it to a vast majority of all internet users.
So, 2008 will indeed be a breakthrough year for a more powerful and interactive online video!
Loading ...
