Earlier today news leaked out that the comment management system Disqus (background here) has enabled video commenting on sites that use the service through a partnership with Seesmic. Basically this means that people can post video comments in addition to regular old text comments in response to articles, blog posts, etc. You can see it in action here. Seesmic had previously released a plugin that enables video commenting on Wordpress blogs, and plans to release a plugin for Typepad and Movable Type as well.

When I first saw video commenting on blogs “in the wild” a few months back, I thought it was a novel idea . At this point though, I find them mostly annoying for a few reasons:

• When I’m using the web, I’m not always in a position where I can watch a video.  Sometimes I’m listening to music.  Sometimes I’m in a public place.  Sometimes I’m on a mobile phone. If part of the conversation is taking place via video, I will often miss it.  Many others will as well.
• It is much quicker for me to read a comment than to watch it.
• The use of video in commenting is usually unnecessary - in most cases the same point could be made just as well through text commenting.
• Video comments disrupt the flow of text comments.

Beyond the initial gee whiz moment, I don’t see how the value video commenting provides the end user in most cases. For me, the rise of video commenting is largely a case of people using video for using video’s sake.

If video commenting takes off and becomes ubiquitous in the coming years, I think the best practice will be to separate video comments from regular text ones, as YouTube does with video responses. This will allow people to have the latest toy on their site without disrupting the experience of people just interested in text comments.

Recently, I was considering trading in my broken iPod for another type of MP3 player…that is; until I ran across an article from Wired stating that I'd better hold on to at least one Apple product.

According to InStat, by 2012, 40% of all music purchased is going to come from digital music downloads.  Most impressively, the vast majority of those downloads come from Apple iTunes.  Almost 30% of the computers in the world have the download software, according to Digital Music News.

I personally buy nearly all of my music through iTunes.  For me, it seems easy, safe, and quick.  I like the fact that I can purchase a single song from an album, and the fact that an entire album on iTunes is typically less expensive than a CD.  Do I hate the fact that Apple controls yet another aspect of the computer market? Yes.  Will that hatred stop me from downloading the latest free single of the week? No.

It will be interesting to see if these predictions from InStat and Wired are correct.  I would like to also predict that by 2012, Apple will have released another five ‘upgrades' to the design of the iPod.

I'm sure that there are some videos on YouTube of people driving angrily, and there are probably some of people who are angry about their drive.  In fact, I'm betting that more of the later will appear on the site soon.

The cash strapped Northern Virginia Transportation Authority (NVTA) — especially after the Virginia Supreme Court stripped it of the taxing authority the governor and legislature gave it — is asking residents of the Washington, DC area to make videos of their commutes and post them to its "Piece of My Commute" campaign page.

NVTA officials hope that if state legislators see how much long commutes affect quality of life in the state through videos submitted by commuters, the legislature will provide more funding to the authority to build and improve roads within the state to alleviate traffic jams.  This idea has potential since it is: (1) cheap for the NVTA to pull off, (2) got it some free media exposure, and (3) using a website that is accessible to many state residents.

I'm interested to see how this campaign performs as it can serve as a great case study on how creativity mixed with some social media savvy can help an organization cheaply accomplish a goal. 

It is very important to note that NVTA doesn't want to risk drivers' safety to get more funding as it mentions on its site: "Warning! Please Don't Use Cameras While Driving. Tripods Are Prohibited In Metro Stations.Please Use Hand-Held Cameras Only On Metro."  Further, I highly doubt that this gives us a license to do other multitasking while driving.  While you can star in your own commuting reality show on YouTube, the NVTA likely doesn't want you to eat entire meals, apply make up, conduct entire meetings, and do other such activities while driving.

I have written a few times about the various options available for the hosting of videos online via third party services. If I have a choice in the matter, I use Blip.tv for all the reasons you’d expect: interface is easy to use, they allow the posting of video in higher quality than most providers, they’ve help when I’ve had questions, it works, etc. It is the best third-party option I have found, as a web developer.

But I think my favorite thing about Blip.tv is their Flash video player. It is awesome for a couple of reasons:

(1) You can remove all Blip.tv branding from the video player and replace with your own site name or URL, meaning you don’t have to turn your website into an advertisement for your video provider if you don’t want to.

(2) You can turn off any options in the player you want to. So if I can turn on/off options like embed code, autoplay, view in full screen, ads for other videos on Blip.tv, etc.

(3) You can customize the colors of the Blip.tv player so that it matches your site’s colors perfectly. This allows for designers to really seamlessly integrate video into the sites they build.

(4) The player is just really good looking.

Basically, the Flash player is super flexible and gives you the ability to do whatever you need to with it to make it fit into your site.

Below are some examples of the Blip.tv player being seamlessly integrated into various sites. Please click on the images to view the player on the actual sites.

WallStrip

This is basicallly what the player looks like by default.

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If you've got a computer, you know what YouTube is.  In fact, most people, including myself, have uploaded videos to YouTube at one point or another until our accounts have inevitably been suspended.  It's the circle of life on the Internet, and I am very pleased with it.  Without YouTube after all, I would be unable to watch my guilty pleasure, America's Next Top Model.

What's the bad news about YouTube?  Well, the videos that are uploaded are typically of lesser quality.  In fact, the most common complaint that you will see on the video comment sections is about the quality.  In reply, most users will explain that "something" happened to their video during the upload process.  There is a hack to be able to view high quality version of videos, but soon, that hack will hopefully be rendered useless.

YouTube has finally announced all users have the option of watching some videos in higher quality. A blog post on their site claims they're slowly integrating this new feature, and videos uploaded in the proper format will be the first to be available in high quality. The rest of the library will soon follow, with any luck.

Simply go into your user account and select the option: "always show me higher quality when available." High speed Internet is going to work best, because otherwise the videos may suffer from lag time.  Nobody likes lag time.

I have been waiting for this feature for a long time.  Finally, my prayers have been answered, and I will soon be able to watch YouTubeHD.  There are enough capital letters in that word to make anyone excited.

"Ideas worth spreading" is the motto of a growing annual convention that is held in Monterey, California.  The Technology Entertainment Design (TED) conference covers a wide range of topics, from science to the arts, and nearly everything in between.  My fraternity brother, Chris, recently made me aware of this conference, which has been conducted since 1984.

There is an annual membership fee of $6000, however, this fee not only covers attendance to the events, but also attendance for other special gatherings and DVDs of the presentations.  Since not everyone can afford to be this enlightened, the official website was created in response, providing the highlights and best speeches from the conference.

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Combining aspects of things that people already enjoy is one of the best ways to make an impression on a market without having to be completely original or creative.  For the past couple of months, there has been a surge of such activity in the form of ‘angry' video game reviews.  These reviews combine aspects of life that many males (and some females) enjoy, including ranting, nostalgia, cheap Photo shopping, and dirty humor.  Taken together, these form a "review" of a classic video game.  The reviews have the taste level of an episode of Family Guy, but also have the marketability, as well.

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For awhile now CNN has used its iReport campaign to collect viewer generated media that it uses in its newscasts and on its web site.  While this content doesn’t always pass the muster of professional standards, TV news does have use for raw footage and images.  Regardless of the quality of submissions, CNN clearly has had success with this initiative. 

Today CNN launched iReport.com, which it purchased the URL in January for around $750,000, to collect and highlight all the content submitted to CNN.  Unlike in the past where only some (likely, a small percentage) of submissions made it to air or online, this new site will feature all iReport content.  Of course, when visiting the site you’ll notice that submissions used on CNN or its web site are featured. 

The site also other features that enhance the iReport experience and fosters a sense of community.  Each user (iReporter) has a profile in which site visitors can learn more about them, choose to track their submissions and activity on the site, and send private messages to them.  Beyond this visitors can sort submissions by what CNN has used, highest rated by site members, most comments, most recently submitted, etc.

The site is still in its beta stage, but it’ll be interesting to see how it evolves.

Hat tip: Mediabistro’s TVNewser

Last night I got an e-mail about a new site named LiveNewsCameras.com from Fox Television Stations.  It has culled many live video feeds and presents them in one place so that people can easily find what's going on throughout the country and the world.

The e-mail pitched the site as an interesting way to observe TV coverage of Super Tuesday, which involved over 20 states having their Democratic and Republican primaries or caucuses for the 2008 Presidential Election yesterday.  Why watch national television, when you can watch coverage from a local perspective?

As I visited the site to write this post today, there is a woman who is manning a live news feed that starts when one visits the site.  She monitored and highlighted local coverage of the bad winter weather in the midwest.  Thus, she calls attention to feeds with interesting footage coming in.

This seems like an interesting site.  While there are many sites out there that enable people to access video feeds from around the web, the fact that this site has a live "anchor" calling visitors' attention to certain feeds is interesting.  What do you think?

My friend Kevin Anderson, who is over blogging and interaction at The Guardian in the UK, is experimenting with Seesmic, a new video site that is still in its private alpha stage.

Although I don't have access to the site yet, it seems like the child of a marriage between YouTube and a message board.  While you can respond to videos with videos on other sites, it appears that Seesmic is focused on getting people to interact through video.  Uploading and viewing videos is only a small part of participating on the site.

Understanding this expectation, Kevin is using the site to converse with the site's small community to discuss the US Elections, and he is getting some interesting responses.  If you check out his post about this experiment, you can see how people have reacted to his initial questions for readers to respond. 

It'll be interesting to see if a larger community will respond in such a way as this small — which has to be tech savvy — is.  Perhaps this is a great future tool for newspapers.

Baseball player Roger Clemens was accused of using steroids in the Mitchell Report, which was released a few weeks ago.  Since the report came out, Clemens has been silent, letting his lawyer do his talking for him.

In a sign of the times, today Clemens spoke about the allegations for the first time in a video posted to his website and to YouTube.  Interestingly, the YouTube account he posted from was created a few days ago.  Another example of how the web allows folks to talk directly to the people without the filter of the media.

The video statement is embedded below.

The Fred Thompson campaign, for whom we are one of the web vendors, recently launched a new consumer generated video program called Be a Star. The program encourages users to submit their own Fred videos to the campaign. Site visitors can then go to a page on the site to view all the videos that were submitted and vote on the ones they like best, much like Digg. Anyway, check it out.

Disclosure: we did work on this project.

I thought I'd kickstart the end-of-year-prediction-writing season with my own wacky technology predictions for the next 6 months.
 
1. The ASUS Eee laptop is going to sell like hotcakes over the holiday season and other manufacturers will soon follow suit in creating light, barebones, home-use laptops.
Its 2 pounds of weight, small form factor, integrated camera, wifi, few moving parts (read: it's durable), decent battery life, and $400 price tag all spell good news for Asus's home-use ultraportable. It's not a Windows PC, instead it provides users with a suite of basic browsing, messaging and productivity applications over a dumbed-down version of Linux. The word on the street is the preinstalled install is fantastic, although you can install XP on it if you want to. Reviews have been very positive. I think I'll be picking one of these up. (2 months)
 
2. Apple will announce a digital camera with integrated video recording and wifi, and seamless YouTube video upload functionality.
Now before you call me crazy, remember that Apple is now a consumer electronics company. What does everyone want and not have? A way to effortlessly get their videos from their digital camera immediately up on the web. Apple's recent collaboration with Google on the iPhone underscores a relationship that I think will continue. (6 months)
 
3. RIM will release a 3G Blackberry and the Curve will prove to have been a huge success.
This will help Blackberry sales in Europe where 3G has more widespread use and availability than in the US. I also predict that Blackberry's balance sheet will show that the Curve has been a huge success. (3 months)
 
4. PS3 will outsell the XBox360 in the US.
Granted, this has already happened in Europe and, of course, Japan, but here in the US the PS3 has finally found its sweetspot — a lower price and a great new advertising campaign. With every firmware update the platform also keeps getting better and better (read about the recent decision to add local and network play of DivX files - this is huge), and Sony's take on a SecondLife-like virtual meeting place for gamers, Home, promises big time. Couple all that with a slew of games from exclusive franchises coming out in the next 6 months and you've finally got a winner. (5 months)
 
5. The Wii will outsell all other game consoles, but the number of game sales per owner will be significantly lower than on other platforms.
Why? Demographics: the Wii is a disruptive platform that has successfully found a new market of gamers. Still, many of those users are not hardcore gamers and do not spend as much time on the Wii as other players on other systems. Those users will be content with a handful of decent games to play on social occasions. (3 months)
 
6. 24 inch widescreen monitors will hit the mainstream and soon thereafter will become the norm.
Quick on the heels of 22 inch monitors, the price of 24 inch LCD monitors will come down below $300 and people will begin to look at this monitor size as the size of choice. (5 months)
 
7. Cellular providers will start to offer cell-phone Internet plans with VOIP.
It's like what happened to the music business with mp3s — there is just so much pressure on them to open their services up to VOIP that it's simply inevitable. The first provider to cave in will be Sprint. (4 months)
 
8. Google will embrace OpenID and it will finally take off.
For those not in the know, OpenID is an open effort to create a multiplatform sign-in solution for users. That means create an account in one place and use it on many sites. Sounds great to me. Todd wrote about it a while back too. Google is looking to regain some of the goodwill it's lost over the last year. Much like its involvement in creating an app platform with OpenSocial , it will embrace OpenID in the same way. Unlike OpenSocial though, OpenID already has a small following (if you call AOL, LiveJournal, Technorati, Wordpress and Vox small). Google will resist the Microsoft-like urge to copy the OpenID idea and pull together a competing platform and will instead join, support and improve on OpenID. (3 months)
 
9. The Blu-Ray and HD-DVD camps will start collaborating and the price of Bu-Ray and HD-DVD media will be sub-$20.
Blu-Ray definitely had the edge, but with el-cheapo HD-DVD players available over the holiday season and Paramount's exclusive HD-DVD deal, HD-DVD will still remain very much alive. This will force both camps to consider working together. In the end, this is the only thing that really makes sense. Sony's CEO made comments recently that allude to this being more than just a possibility. As far as media prices go, you can currently get a Blu-Ray movie on Amazon for about $24. For some reason Best Buy et al are still selling these at $30 or more. I'm thinking $18.99 is the sweet spot and that we'll hit that in the not too distant future. (6 months)
 
There you have it, my wacky predictions for the coming first part of the year. What do you think?

Disclaimer: these predictions are based purely on my hunches and accumulation of publicly available knowledge, not on insider information or any other type of institutional knowledge. Full disclosure: RIM is an ImpactWatch client.

On Saturday, MSNBC launched a redesigned version of its website (via Cyberjournalist). You can view some reader reaction here and take a tour of the new site here.

I’ve never been a fan of the MSNBC website. While I think the new design is an improvement from a design perspective, the site has a long way to go before I’ll be converted into a regular visitors. Here are my specific criticisms of the new design and the overall site strategy.

(1) The navigation on the new site isn’t very user friendly. For me, the banner at the top of the page is useless from a navigation perspective. Instead of just providing me with a nice breakdown of the content of the site in the header, MSNBC uses the entire thing to advertise the sites of the Today Show and Dateline. The actual site navigation has been de-emphasized and placed at the bottom left area of the page, meaning many, many users will be scrolling to find the Health and Weather sections on the homepage. (more…)

Yesterday The Bivings Group launched our latest client site Living Conversations, a community-based website for breast cancer survivors. The site encourages survivors to submit their stories via video and the written word as a way of providing strength and support to anyone coping with the disease. We’re happy of the way the site turned out, and to be associated with such a cool organization.

Working on the site also gave us the chance to try out a few things we hadn’t attempted before. Given that, I figured I’d give a little look under the hood and explain how the site was constructed.

The site is built using using the open source Content Management System Drupal. As mentioned previously, we pretty much build all our website these days in Drupal or Wordpress. We chose to use Drupal for this site due to the community features that were required and the varied content types on the site. We also wanted to leave the Living Conversations folks with the ability to quickly expand the functionality on the site should they choose to.

Working from Drupal, we added a great deal of additional functionality to the site through a combination of custom coding and the use of Drupal modules and plugins. Here is the breakdown of the ones we used:

(1) Video Uploading. A central aim of Living Conversations is to get breast cancer survivors to tell their stories via video. This required us to develop a way for users to upload videos to the site and then to display dynamically in various spots on Living Conversations. We did this using a combo of the Video module and a plugin that allows for the uploading of videos to a Blip.tv account. So basically users can upload a video on Living Conversations and it will FTP directly into their Blip account and show up on the site. Cool stuff.

Note that the Video module in Drupal is very easy to use. If you want to use the Blip.tv upload plugin, you are going to need to have some developers around as it is a bit tricky.

(2) Content Rating. The site allows registered users to rate content using a five point start system. This was implemented using Voting API as the backend and Voting to control the methodology used for the rating on the frontend. They work together.

(3) User Profiles. Out of the box, Drupal has a powerful Profile module built in. This allows registered users to create profiles on the site. Administrators to add just about any fields they want to capture to this profile field. We supplemented this with Buddy List, which allows users to add other users as contacts and track their activities on the site.

Those are the big ones. We also used Flag Content and Syndication to add some minor functionality to the site.

Anyway, check out www.livingconversations.com if you get a chance. Let us know what you think in the comments.