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Can't say I'm super-impressed.

Maybe you're not, but artists and journalists are flocking to Google+. Let me give you just one example of the former: read what Trey Ratcliff wrote. 40.000+ followers on G+ and half as many on his Facebook fanpage. As to journalists - countless examples. This video might explain why: Google Plus on Rocketboom.. Pay attention to the twitter part, or to what Ratcliff says in the interview. Communication is simiply more fun on G+ - and far more effective. On facebook, you can't chose who among your 300 "friends" sees what you want to say. Facebook "filters" (well, censors) your post to a select people based on various past indicators. You have no control over this process whatsoever. On Google+ you are in control. And thanks to control over what you see (direct links to circle streams, the ability to "mute" discussions) you don't have to listen to the flood of stupidity that is overwhelming on Facebook. That also makes it easier to follow others, share content, etc. - as you can see in Ratcliff's example.

Stranger Things is quite good.

Rocketboom is also usually worth watching.

Another interesting one was shown on today's Rocketboom. Direct link to the pumpkin PC page is here.

Most likely the system was trained by an engineer

He's not a nobody anymore - didn't you know that he got interviewed by some popular/unfunny video blogger?

" and that's where the big ad money is"

Well its also extremely badly targeted as in most people don't want to see most of the ads they are bombarded with. Google's ad model is better because it targets the interests of the person looking at them. Internet video could likewise target their audience much better than broadcast can. I for example never buy prescription drugs unless a doctor makes me. I have ZERO desire to be bombarded with drug company ads and in fact find it offensive to sell serious prescription drugs with serious side effect potential like soap, to create demand for them where there is often not need.

Not sure ads are really the only revenue model for Internet video. Google and others are charging a dollar or two to get video on demand, in many cases without ads. I've switched over to watching the Charlie Rose show exclusively through Google video, though granted when its free the day following its first airing on PBS. Charlie Rose is the best show around for intelligent talk. RocketBoom is also doing pretty well though I haven't watched it long enough to be sure its any good. Its kind of an exercise in an attractive blond talking head offering an alternative to conventional news broadcasts.

Relatively affluent people will in fact probably pay small amounts to get shows they like, easily, that they can watch when they want, where they want(on handhelds on a subway or in a carpool) and free of the curse of ads, or at least get targeted ads.

If you can reach a point where a large number of viewers can pay a small amount of money to support content that is interesting to them you could break down the horrors of network programming and TV being dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. TechTV is the best example I can think of programming most geeks loved but wasn't commercially viable in the broadcast model. It might be viable if a half million geeks were willing to pay a buck or two a week to support some of its better shows like Leo Laporte's.

"Good luck paying for all your high-speed bandwidth and priority handling"

Cringely had kind of interesting take on some of this last Friday. He was giving a talk to all the PBS affiliates and he proposed they each put a video server in their local telephone and cable office and target their local markets with video on demand that is cached closer to the viewer. His contention is there is a lot more bandwidth available between the phone and cable company office and homes, than there is between the phone and cable office and the Internet. In this caching model you would only go out over the Internet once to cache the video someone wants. Subsequent viewers would get it faster and without creating the bandwidth crunch on the wider Internet. Its kind of an Akamai caching scheme but geared towards video and much more local.

The biggest flaw in Cringely's pitch was his naivete that the PBS affiliates could just go talk to some guy in the local phone or cable office and drop a non profit video server there. Needless to say the big telephone and cable companies aren't going to just adopt non profit PBS video server, they are going to want their cut, but the idea is still a good one if you could work out a business model the broadband providers would like. It would be a lot better solution than tiering the internet, since the video bandwidth crunch is the rationale companies like BellSouth are proposing for destroying net neutrality.

I recall another Cringely article a while back about a guy who was making a business out of video servers for big apartment complexes I think where he would for example cache every copy of Star Trek on a local server so it was always available to the tenants. I think there is some way to do this which is or at least was legal. At the rate disk capacity is growing you really can cache a lot of video in a local server, maybe we will reach a point you cache more and faster than quality new content is being created that is worth caching.

Tivo has had Rocketboom podcasts since December 2005 at least. It was a promising start, and I hoped for more.

Tivo has had Rocketboom podcasts since December 2005 at least. It was a promising start, and I hoped for more.

See http://rocketboom.com/vlog/ three days ago...

Usually, slashdot beats them by a day or so.

This was featured on Rocketboom on March 23, 2006.
You can view the clip here --> http://www.rocketboom.com/vlog/archives/2006/03/rb _06_mar_23.html
This is old hat.

Obviously the best out there for new music is The Indie Sermons of the Rt. Rev Fischer (RSS).

More seriously there are some from a non-geek perspective (it's good to get out a bit):

Dreadful Snake Radio (RSS
A middle aged former musician turned corporate guy. He mixes his love of folk/blues in with his world travels. It is a little "what I did today" but what he does daily is amazing. Everything from podcasting while doing a 5k with his son, while biking in Beijing, at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, to Church (state sponsored) in Beijing on Christmas.

Rocket Boom
Just great. (actually a video cast)

Earth & Sky (RSS)
A great public radio science show. It is not always just new science, it is a lot of explanations that you have probably always been curious about. And it is the best way to stay up to date on cool science events (eclipses, meteor showers, that kind of thing)

Of course the vast majority of video blogs will suck. The vast majority of standard blogs suck, the vast majority of podcasts suck and the vast majority of web pages suck. When anyone can create content, the majority of said content won't be very good. Some minority, however, like Rocket Boom will be pretty good to great. As far as I'm concerend the more content available the better. The real issue will be sorting through alll of the crap to find video blogs with content you're interested in. iTunes is doing a respectible and Google ... are you paying attention?

The ones that fail as talking heads are the same ones that fail as audio-only material. The secret is to be brief and get to the content straight away. I'm betting I'm not alone in having dropped otherwise-good podcasts and video podcasts just because they had a 10 second intro I had to sit through every episode, or because they ran more than a few minutes and padded things out with too much personal noise. One of the worst is when an otherwise great podcast or video blog has crap audio that keeps getting louder and quieter like the speaker couldn't stay close to the microphone. It hurts to drop those, but it also hurts to listen.

But Amanda Congdon is.

The article is about why talking head webvideo will suck. Not all video podcasts. There aren't that many out there, but there are some gems such as RocketBoom and the risque KitKast

Rocketboom interview by that sexy Amanda Congdon.

Just because it will play on a iPod doesn't mean ~everything about it~ will play nicely with a Mac.

The old TiVo Desktop software that was available for the Mac never supported video.

Pulling video off the TiVo is trivial. The box runs an HTTP server. But it serves already-DRM'd ".tivo" files.

I don't know of any decoder available on the Mac to decode that video format. So, you might still need a PC to recode the video from a ".tivo" file to some other DRM'd format before you can play it on a Mac.

In any case, I'm much more interested in getting shows from iTunes (purchased or vodcasts) ON to the TiVo. People have already been transcoding their .tivo files and playing them other places for a while now.

But there are a lot of good "TV Shows" being produced out and distributed via RSS, and I don't want to watch them on my computer. I want to watch them on my TV (via my TiVo). It's already possible to push video back to the TiVo, but it's not as easy as it should be. I'd **much** prefer to see that sort of feature built into TiVo-to-Go or even iTunes.

For example VodCast TV shows, check out:
http://www.digitallifetv.com/
http://www.channelfrederator.com/
http://www.cerealized.com/
http://www.rocketboom.com/

I bet they're surpirised to hear of this "new" functionality....

I don't have a tv, nor do I want one, but every now and then I want to flake out to some non-interactive entertainment. Here are the sites I've found for free tv and video on the web (that I can remember at 1:48 a.m.)

http://edition.cnn.com/ -News fix

http://www.homestarrunner.com/toons.html -Not tv or video per se, but strongbad email flash animations are a hoot and close enough

http://tv.yahoo.com/feature/supernatural.html -The show Supernatural online, although I haven't watched it yet. Featured on /.

http://www.atomfilms.com/ -Everybody knows this one; marginally good

http://video.freevideoblog.com/ -Alot of crap, the odd good video

http://video.google.com/ -Random

http://www.ifilm.com/ -See also atomfilms

http://www.newgrounds.com/ -Way cool, homepage worthy!

http://tv.reuters.com/ - more news video than cnn

http://www.rocketboom.com/vlog - ???, Profit! Actually, I don't know what to say

http://portal.omroep.nl/uitzendinggemist/ -Dutch TV up the wazoo

http://mediahopper.com/portal.htm -1041 tv stations from all over the world listed and ready to watch (as far as I can tell)

http://video.search.yahoo.com/ -Stuff n' things

http://www.youtube.com/ -People upload and share their videos online... you've been warned!

I should add everything here is "family friendly", as far as I'm aware: no porn, uberviolence or gratuitous advertising (if I've somehow overlooked something, I apologise).

This wired article on vlogging highlighted a number of new video sites including one called RocketBoom. RocketBoom's author, Amanda Congdon, puts up new video content everyday, Monday through Friday, and by all appearances does a great job. Each day is a separate html page providing quicktime, winmedia and torrent versions of her clips.

A typical clip runs about 2-3 minutes and the .mov and .wmv files run about 20-30MB in size. To properly experience the site requires a good broadband connection, which I have. So far so good.

But it begs the question: who's paying for all that server bandwidth? She solicits no donations, and seems to have survived the exposure wired.com gave her. Can sites like these truly be done inexpensively? If so, how?

For the record, I have no affiliation with her, have never met her, but enthusiastically applaud her efforts. If it is indeed easy to acquire the resources, bandwidth and video production tools necessary to create quality vlog content my guess is we're probably seeing the beginning of a true internet paradigm shift. My gut tells me however, that's a big 'if.'

I'll leave the question of whether we should or not for another day.

> Not to sound all doomy & gloomy here, but i
> seriously question the appeal of video clips on an
> ipod.

Agreed.

As I wrote in the comments on the site in TFA:

This thing will be nifty and all, from a geek tech fetish sort of standpoint, but I have to wonder... ...what the hell use will it be for anyone old enough to have a life outside of watching music videos? As noted above, it'll be useless to watch films on, too small and underpowered to be useful for any sort of in-the-field DV watching/storing/editing, and now that broadcast is dead, won't even be as useful as the (never very useful) Sony Watchman back in the day.

Oh, he'll sell a bunch initially to the kind of people who bought the 1st-gen iPod Photo, but unless it has some other MAJOR selling point besides watching short form video (telephone? PDA?), it'll fly like a (beautifully-designed) lead brick.

I'm sure not going to pay several hundred dollars just to watch Amanda Congdon on the bus. I prefer to do that in the privacy of my own home. Heh.

This is somewhat off topic but after discovering the vlog I've come to love their attitude towards adds.
They show the adds at the end of the videoclips so If I don't want to see it, I'm on my way.
However since the adds they show are all pretty funny(Like those who occationally get shiped round the interweb) I watch them anyway.

Can't say if it's effective marketing since I haven't actually bought any of the things adverticed, but the concept I quite like.