It is easy to see, if you’ve been following my posts over the years, how meeting up with other podcasters, vloggers, and bloggers is a very important activity for me. From these meetings come ideas, inspiration, constructive criticism, and more. Madge and I talk about under-reported issues and what deserves more attention in the media. When I’m in Berlin, Tim and I always spent hours talking about what works and does not work for a smooth and usable blog/podcast. Over in DC, John and I always discuss audience participation and our different ideas in how to address the public.
And so this week, two people with enormous impact on how I do my work, Jay and Ryanne, are here in Amsterdam. Just like with each conference, visit, or drink at a local café I’ve enjoyed with other vloggers, their presence has sparked all kinds of new ideas, while also reenforcing what is truly important about the work we do.
One of the big thoughts they’ve helped me consider, is how my work is presented within this site. As part of their presentations this week, they’ve been explaining Show in A Box; their wordpress hacks to help videobloggers present their work in a way closer to their own wishes. What does that mean? For one thing, the blog structure, although convenient for many things, over time buries our work. If I made a good video in March of last year, or a podcast worth your time in April of 2005, you wouldnt notice any sign of it on my front page. If you searched my archives, even then it would take you quite some time to get to it. By putting the last post at the top, blogs bury anything that happened before, even though items that were posted before are still very relevant and should be there for anyone to click and listen or view.
The answer we seek is a way to have a site, some form of blog, where people who create multimedia content can have it featured or accessible relatively easy on the page. If my post tomorrow is about the arctic, next to that post you should see any videos, audio, or text that is related.. regardless of how long ago I produced it.
Of course there are more ideas than just this one, but this is the one – as you can see – that Ive been working on at some level. Still far from the desired result, spending time with these two people with whom I share so much culture and so many goals has set me on the right path. Together, it seems almost inevitable that we can solve these problems and develop even better ways to do the work that we are so committed to doing.