blog research for No Limits Media

What is a Blog?

A blog is a website in which items are posted on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order. The term blog is a shortened form of weblog or web log. Authoring a blog, maintaining a blog or adding an article to an existing blog is called "blogging". Individual articles on a blog are called "blog posts," "posts" or "entries". Blogs can be hosted by dedicated blog hosting services, or they can be run using blog software on regular web hosting services.

How blogs differ from traditional sites

A blog has certain attributes that distinguish it from a standard web page. It allows for easy creation of new pages: new data is entered into a simple form (usually with the title, the category, and the body of the article) and then submitted. Automated templates take care of adding the article to the home page, creating the new full article page (Permalink), and adding the article to the appropriate date- or category-based archive. It allows for easy filtering of content for various presentations: by date, category, author, or other attributes. It usually allows the administrator to invite and add other authors, whose permission and access are easily managed.

Difference from forums or newsgroups

Blogs are different from forums or newsgroups. Only the author or authoring group can create new subjects for discussion on a blog. A network of blogs can function like a forum in that every entity in the blog network can create subjects of their choosing for others to discuss. Such networks require interlinking to function, so a group blog with multiple people holding posting rights is now becoming more common. Even where others post to a blog, the blog owners or editors will initiate and frame discussion, manipulating the situation to their specifications

Digital media

While straight text and hyperlinks dominate, some blogs emphasize images and videos (videoblogging).

Some textual blogs link to audio files (podcasting).

Steve Garfield...Massachusetts own father of the Vlog. An article on the Boston Phoenix

http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/top/features/documents/05145823.asp

http://homepage.mac.com/stevegarfield/stevegarfield/menu.html

RSS

RSS, Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, depending on what you believe, is a method of publishing recent content entries on many contemporary web sites which can be posted automatically to countless sources by a simple aggregation script. In short, stories from NLM have the potential to automatically appear on other sites and computers without contacting the administrator.

Recently the RSS platform has evolved to include enclosures in the published text files so that media, including images, audio and video, can be carried across RSS feeds as well. There are a flurry of video and audio RSS aggregators in development.

This is an interesting feature because it allows automatic downloading of new content (a new video story), but it doesn't necessarily attract people to the site.

An important thing to keep in mind is - whatever you set up to deliver video should consider using RSS so that people can subscribe to the feed. You don't need to have a Blog to use RSS.

Hosting – Free Hosting / Shared Hosting

Free Blog Hosting

http://blogger.com – Owned by Google. A free basic(no media) hosting service.

http://wordpress.com - similar to blogger

There are video podcasts, aggregators, hosting and sharing services appearing at an astounding rate. One of the best video podcast aggregators is Mefeedia

http://mefeedia.com

Many of the video hosting sites are in beta and are quite slow and not always easy to manage. Additionally, many require that you have an existing blog as they don't offer that service. They only provide the media hosting, which again can be quite slow.

http://ourmedia.org/ - I have experimented with an account here and it seems to be one of the easiest to use with many features. Unfortunately it's extremely slow.

http://archive.org/ - a public nonprofit building an “ Internet Library” - works in conjunction with our media(use the same e-mail address to register).

http://videobloggers.org/ - content and blog hosting. again, extremely slow

http://blip.tv/ - seems interesting and not as slow as the others (probably not as popular). They don't seem to have any blog features built-in

http://vblogcentral.com/ -lets you host video and audio content for your already existing blog.� doesn't seem to be as slow

With most of the previous services you have to create a blog with a hosting provider. If you are interested in hosting your own you could, using freely available sotware, create a site that has a custom look and feel, with many of the same features.

Alternatively, you can get fairly creative with different blog hosting services that indeed more flexibility and administrative features - these often cost money

http://typepad.com - Paid service using a modified version of the MovableType software that can be downloaded and configured for free. Created by http://www.sixapart.com/

Summary

Free blog hosts offer an interesting opportunity to experiment with RSS but do not provide enough flexibility to create a site intent on creating and sustaining a community. Blog-like software can be used within the site to add functionality.

Many of the free media hosting services are slow or in beta and I would not recommend using them for commercial or professional purposes. There may be paid video hosting/streaming services available that can be used in conjunction with your site to provide the media content in a speedy fashion.

prince - AB 1980 - HOT

http://www.dvblog.org/movies/01_2006/prince/prince_AB.mov

Media Makers in JP - Node101

such a great group of folks. Steve is starting up a node101 video blogging location at Sweet Finnish in JP(Boston), MA. Check out Steve's blog entry about it. Node101 is about helping people put video on the web using blogs. So much to talk about...but others have already done so, so...

Blog entries from the day

proactivebusybody
Adam's
Steve's

and a list of all the attendees and there respective media outlet sites. Thanks for putting this together! Check out all the blogs and vlogs

Digital Video or DV?

When I refer to Digital Video I could be talking about any number of video formats that store image and audio information in a digital form. Generally it's Digital Video whether it's on a DV tape, DVD or a file on disk.

DV is a specific Digital Video format based on DV tape - where the conversion between analog and digital information is done inside the camera. Most of us know this as miniDV in our pro-sumer cameras. For a longer discussion of this check out What is DV?

What about DVC and DVCAM you ask?

DVCPRO was created by Panasonic in 1995, followed one year later by Sony's DVCAM. The formats sound alike and they basically use the same video and audio encoding format as the consumer DV format. But they have subtle and not-so-subtle differences in speed, makeup and track pitch of the tapes being used. Of course, they also cost significantly more than the consumer models. To "differentiate" the products even more, Sony invented some hurdles which can prevent copying from DV to DVCAM via Firewire.

Let's have a breakdown.

• DV usually refers to miniDV
• DVCAM prints the same DV bitstream to a larger, more featured tape stock
• DVCPro uses a robust tape stock and supports a high-quality mode - DVCPro 50 which digitizes at twice the data rate as DV
• DVCPro HD uses DVCPro tape stock to record a compressed 720:1080 pixel "hi-def" frame at 14 Mbytes/sec
• HDV uses the same miniDV tape stock to record compressed digital video with 1080:1440 frame sizes at a standard DV data rate

Confused yet? well, if not Digital formats compared will do it to you.