The recent tsunami disaster in the east was so horrific that it riveted the world. People scrambled to see — from others point of view — any news, photos or videos. Anything to try to make sense and understand the magnitude of what had happened. Blogs were a medium of immediacy that allowed global dissemination of information quickly. This was most evidenced as photos and videos of the tsunami disaster began to proliferate around the Web — led by bloggers posting them — and people around the world had a point of view from those that were there.
If you don’t think things are changing with communications, then you’re unaware of the groundswell of activity in blogging, audioblogging, podcasting, video or ‘v’ blogging. This activity has been enabled by the power of personal production environments (iMovie, Garageband, etc.) and the proliferation of tools for blogging to name just two. Here are just a few directories or ways to find them:
- Video blogs, searches and feeds: Last Minute Blog, Me-TV, Yahoo Video Search, Google Video Search, Feedster.
- Podcasting (also sometimes called audioblogging): Podcast Alley, Podcast.net, Penguin Radio, Podcast Directory, Digital Podcast.
All of this together is taking the points of view of the masses and allowing them to be instantly available worldwide. Some believe that it is leading to Grassroots Journalism that is changing the face of news, information and eventually human communication itself by accelerating the transference of memes from person-to-person (or culture-to-culture, country-to-country) at internet speeds.
About Steve Borsch
Things are changing in terms of how people get their information and how they share that information. I don’t get any of my “news” from television anymore. In fact I’m like a mini broadcaster and my audience is my friends, my family, other bloggers and google searchers! The fact that I can make a little video and make it available to anyone in the world with a connected computer is amazing. Even more amazing is the idea that I can take an image on my cell phone and beam it to my blog wirelessly. How long before we are sending out high quality video from cell phones to the web or to any device in real time?!!
I think the high quality video stuff is right around the corner. If you haven’t seen the H.264 demo’s yet, wait until it ships in Quicktime 7 in the next couple of months.
Here’s some info on the H.264 standard — and what that’ll mean for delivery of video content and a major evolution — take a peek at these when you’ve got a moment:
+ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264
+ http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/h264.html
+ http://www.apple.com/mpeg4/h264faq.html
Yeah h.264 looks amazing low bitrates and high quality!
I can’t wait…