Taking a break from writing for a moment and checking out Ryanne’s latest post.  It’s great.

I used to want full screen video, bit of late I have been enjoying getting up close to the screen to see that little 240×320 window.  It’s sooooooooo personal.

It feels kind of like someone is whispering in your eye.

I must finish my big Spinflow post before renegade posts her new vid.  I’m sure it will be inspiring and then I’ll want to start yet another project.

But first Spinflow, then help a few friends who are setting up vlogs, including my wife Alicia.  I think she’s ready and she’s got some cool vids of the new house that she took with the new Xacti.

After that I want to turn my attention to some of my own vids from the E3 trip, plus it’s time to make some interesting SpinXpress screencasts.

I got this postcard at an "antiques" store in Ventura on Saturday.  I definitely feel this way.

It also got me thinking about all the great old material out there that might be out of copyright.  Well, lots of the smaller boutiques are definitely hip to digital rights and are very happy to license image use.

Made me think about what one might find at yard sales.  I used to go to them a lot a few years back, but dropped out of the habit.  I like hunting for old hand tools.  I’m interested in traditional Japanese woodworking techniques and tools and sometimes you find a little gem or something that you can make into something special.  Same now for digital art.  Lot’s of old magazines, postcards, artwork etc.  Some very kitch.

Interesting questions about the copyrights on these things.  Some of the publishers are still around and some aren’t.  Then, of course, there is copyright laws.  I brushed up on what Wikipedia had to offer and that alone is enough to make any creative person cringe.  Especially in the US.  I’ll never think the same of Sonny Bono again.

Antiques road show and eBay has both ravaged the yard sale selections and increased the online ones.  And prices. 

Are many other people out there already looking for all the lost, long-tail, digitizable items?  There’s a woman in town who has a biz where she gets up early and trys to buy up all the good yard sale furniture items and then cleans them up and sells them in her store. Seems like the same thing can be done with digitalizable stuff if you know your rights.

Addendum: It just hit me.  I’m supposed to be taking a break from writing. Ha!  Ok, well I finished this little post and so now I’m scanning.  I like the back of the postcard.  Look at that stamp!  It’s a greenthing.

I mentioned that my friend Dave Toole has started posting videos on his business blog (business vlog?).  Recently, we went to LA to video creative professionals talking about their passions at E3.  On the way, we stopped to take some intro vids.

It’s funny how things happen.  Just before we stopped to shot a vid up against a cool sign, Dave had been tring to connect with a long time friend who lived in the area.  He had called the home and office numbers and had just said to me "I sure hope we can hook up with him". 

Then we started this shot.  Small world.  Dave’s friend just happens to waltz in to the shot on the way to a fitting on Rodeo Drive.  How’s that for syncronicity?

Blew my shot though.  It was worth the moment.  We were all laughing at the incredible odds of running into each other on one of the many, spread-out and busy, LA streets. 

Click here to see Dave’s vid.  Dave’s blog post is here.

I’m in a particularly inspired mood and am putting the final touches on an important spinflow.org post on "collaborative video".  It’s got me all fired up, my music is blasting.

I read an old statistic today: 13-24 year olds spend more time watching vids on the computer than on TV.  That was 2003.

I looked at the TV and thought about how dead it was.  How apropos.

Give me vlog, or give me death.

I was talking with someone when this little piece of arithmetic came up:

If a picture is worth a thousand words and my videos are shot at 15fps than a one minute video is worth 1000 x 15 x 60 = 900,000 words.

I’m probably not the first to do that calculation.

Now what’s interesting to consider is how long it takes to post a video to your vlog.

Of course, editing the video can take up the most time.  But some can go up "as is" or with just a few quick edits.  Soundtracks and special effects present more issues.

But for some simple messages, stories and rants, I just have to capture, review, edit, export/compress, name, upload, test, capture snapshot, crop snapshot and save, upload snapshot, link to movie and image, tag, title, write a message and post to the blog and then tell people about it.

On a good day, this can easily take 10-15 minutes and just one or two simultaneous phone calls and chats can really make the process fun.  Usually, this is when a server or connection goes down, but only if what you’re doing is important.

So that’s a rate of about 6000 words per minute (wpm) output.  Not bad, definately faster than my typing and speaking, but I’d still like to accelerate the process a bit more.

One-click videoblogging would be so cool.