Random 60: Are you camera shy? | Favorite on Viddler.

Do you find yourself shy around cameras? Maybe you have no trouble chatting with your friends at bars but the second someone takes out a camera, you find yourself hiding?

Today, we explore why that is with Donna DeMarco, Vice President of Viddler, because she is camera shy and would know best why that is. She says it is because “it is permanent, and she can see herself on the video”.

If you’re camera shy, share why in the comments!

I’ll spare you from boredom. Here is my day in under two minutes.

I haven’t done a MeToday video, or any video for that matter, in many months so I was happy to use the Board Meeting as an opportunity to just bring along the Flip camera and take miscellaneous shots to stitch together. The music I chose for this particular MeToday was Happening by The Supremes.

Some blogger I am, I didn’t even mention that I was going to go to the New Media Expo in Las Vegas.  Well, I did. And it was great. And you should have been there.

But now onto my point and why I used the above photo in this post.

Las Vegas is like Podcasting.  Sure, it is pretty well established.  There are very professional, glamorous, and dare I say elegant examples already in place. There are, of course, some “not so good” examples too – we’ll call them coolers – which inevitably show themselves in such a place.  But there is a fact which rings true and ever clearer in my ear now that I’ve attended the New Media Expo this year; it is still getting bigger.

Both Las Vegas and Podcasting are continuing to grow at a rate that seems fairly hard to calculate with any metric other than potential.  I was really happy to hear Gary Vaynerchuk say in his keynote speech on the first day of the Expo that people need to exercise patience and work hard to achieve their goals in podcasting.  And that mantra ran right through until the very last day.

People were very, very excited about the new tools, gear, the growing community and seeing each other’s faces – but more importantly they see that they can build a viable commodity all on their own, so long as they’re willing to work at it.

I was there, of course, with the Viddler team including Rob, Donna, Kyle, and Brandice.  We all had a great time sharing a booth with TubeMogul, meeting up with tons of Viddler members, and helping people set up their customizable Viddler players.

For weeks prior to the Expo we helped the New Media Expo team by setting up the video portion of their official site.  It ended up being a big hit for both the Expo and Viddler, and anyone not able to attend the Expo.  We consider video at these types of events to be the most powerful form of media for a backchannel. If you’re going to a conference, organizing one, or would just like information on how we put this together, be sure to drop me a line.

On the very last day Kyle, Brandice, and I created a show on-the-fly called Two Minutes at New Media Expo.  We did this by doing 2-minute interviews with as many people as we could on the last day of the Expo (which only went until 1 o’clock).  In that short amount of time we interviewed nearly 30 different expo attendees, companies, and even Kings. We have a bunch more episodes coming out so stay tuned! How did we do all of this? I’m planning on writing a post called “How to build a video podcast in 24 hours.”.  If you don’t see this by the end of next week yell at me.

I think I can speak for the entire Viddler team when I say that we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves at the New Media Expo this year and that we’re looking forward to the next one.  Viva la New Media Expo!

Having a teleconference with ten people in Pennsylvania, New York, and Crakow, Poland.

Donna, Rob, and I are having a strategy meeting today. Kyle is on his way from Boston. We’re all Macintosh all the time at Viddler.  Actually, I think the entire US team has a Macintosh now, while our team members in Poland need to “upgrade” soon.

Today at around noon I left my house with my wife who dropped me off at the airport. The airport that I like to fly out of is close, small, offers free wifi, and is pretty much the calmest airport I’ve been to yet. I arrived just about one hour before my flight which gave me plenty of time to pick up my boarding passes, get through security, and grab a coffee near the gate.

The gentlemen over the PA said something to the effect of; “Flight 5052 is being delayed until 2:45.”. My departure time had been set for 1:30 and I was trying to make a connecting flight in Philadelphia, where I was supposed to meet up with Donna, which was set for wheels-up at 4:05. Being that the flight from the Scranton/Wilkes-barre International Airport (AVP) to Philadelphia International Airport (PHL) is typically around 30 minutes – the delay didn’t concern me in the least.

No more than five minutes pass and the very same gentlemen that had announced the delay proceeds to tell us that the flight has been cancelled ‘due to a maintenance issue’ and that everyone who was to be on that flight should report to the US Airways’ ticket desk for instructions on boarding a bus to Philadelphia (a ride that takes about two and half hours). Maybe I should say that again; a bus to Philadelphia.

At this point I was rolling with the punches. I’m a fairly easy going guy and I had no real reason to be in a hurry. If I was going to miss my connecting flight, and not be able to travel with Donna, surely this wasn’t the end of the world and I would just catch a slightly later flight from Philadelphia to Phoenix and all would be well. The other passengers weren’t so accommodating, more on this in a second.

The only problem was that there was only one more flight leaving Philadelphia directly for Phoenix on this day – and it was ‘oversold’. I’m not even sure what the term oversold means in airline language – perhaps every seat was sold and there were people on standby too.

This is when the only good part of this trip happened; the woman behind the counter helping people to rebook their flights based on their current circumstances, who had at this point helped at least 40 people before I got to the desk, decided to ask me for my phone number (no, she didn’t want a date) so that she could ‘do some digging and see what she could do for me’. I hopped onto the bus with a new travel itinerary that took me through Philadelphia, Las Vegas, and ultimately Phoenix, Arizona with a touchdown time of somewhere around 2am local-time (or 5am for me).

The first bus left Scranton around 2:30 and headed towards Philly and I was on it. The 4:05 flight was no longer on the radar and so I was aiming for a 6:10 flight to Vegas. The bus ride was typical; uncomfortable and slow. About 2 hours into the trip I fell asleep with my ear phones from my iPhone, which was playing a random selection of Bayside, in my ear when I was awoken abruptly by my ringtone blaring in my ear. Looking at the caller-ID I didn’t recognize the number and being in my current mood I nearly didn’t pick it up. I still don’t know why I answered but to my surprise it was Doreen (I have no idea how to spell this woman’s name). Doreen said; ‘I’ve got good news. I got you on a direct flight from Philadelphia to Phoenix that leaves at 6:15, do you want a window or an isle seat.’. I had told her before that since I was traveling alone, and I’d rather not go through Vegas since I’d been in that airport before and wasn’t fond of it, that I could care less if I had to sit on the toilet in the plane – I chose window.

Reinvigorated by the fact that Doreen ‘hooked a brotha up’ it was only a few minutes before, after going through security again for the second time of the day, I was at Gate B7 in Philadelphia sitting between a man that looked exactly like Ted Danson and an older woman that represented, perfectly, the capital letter ‘O’.

Looking directly above my head there was an LED readout that was flashing “Flight 192, Phoenix, San Diego, 6:35pm”. The flight was twenty minutes delayed but I was okay with that since I didn’t even have my new boarding passes yet. Once a man was stationed at the desk in the Gate I approached and said I needed a new boarding pass, presented my driver’s license, and was given them immediately.

At around 6:15 the would-be passengers of flight 192 were beginning to get a little restless. I hardly noticed yet because I was still trying to figure out if the dude next to me, who was reading a fairly well worn copy of a Biography about Eric Clapton, was indeed Ted Danson. The woman directly to his right was not Mary Steenburgen – but I still wasn’t completely convinced yet. I turned around to look out the window, half seeing if I could get a better angle on this guy’s face using the reflection in the window and half to see what was going on with our plane.

Our plane. It wasn’t at our Gate yet and our flight was set to leave within the next 20 minutes. Then the gentlemen that gave me my new boarding pass began to speak over the PA in a Jamaican accent “Ladies and Gentlemen we are being told that the plane is ‘within range’ and should be touching down shortly. At that time we’ll get everyone off of the plane that had come from Phoenix, clean the plane and cater it, and then allow you to board the plane.” Straight forward enough and, even though this plane was already delayed by 20 minutes, I felt I was ahead of the game since I no longer had to go through gambling-country in order to make it to Phoenix.

The excuses as to why the plane had not made it to the Gate yet had continued for about another hour. An hour. I guess ‘within range’ in airline language means ‘somewhere in the air’. Philadelphia’s airport is, from what I’ve seen, completely over congested and my guess is that once NASA is able to release its findings, we might see an entirely different schedule of flights coming out of these troubled areas.

The very last issue prior to boarding came from a young woman’s voice which said that “there was a maintenance issue that would delay boarding for quite awhile”. The smell of riot was thick in the air. The gentlemen came back on the air again within 30 seconds of this announcement and began to ask everyone with ‘Zone 1′ on their tickets to begin boarding the plane. The breakdown in communication was evident.

Upon boarding the plane the pilot came on and said that nearly every passenger was in their seats and “we’re just waiting for them to get the bags on downstairs”. Ten minutes or so pass and we began to feel and hear the bags being loaded underneath our seats. One hour and twenty-five minutes later the co-pilot gets on to let us know that the captain had gotten off the plane to hunt down “the manager of this airport for US Airways to get to the bottom of the problem regarding the loading of the luggage taking well over an hour”. There was not another word about this before, about 20 minutes more had past and the pilot told everyone we were scheduled to take off.

You might guess what is coming next.

I am not sure how much time had passed between the pilot saying we were scheduled for take off and the flight attendant going into the bathroom in the coach section of the plane and discovering that someone had “ripped apart the toilet” – but we weren’t “going anywhere until the technicians can come here to fix it for us”.

The gentlemen sitting in 14c, two seats to my right, who is in the Pharmaceutical business flies about once or twice a month on US Airways because “the Pharmaceutical industry really cracked down on the spending it has been doing regarding employee travels and so I’m stuck with them”. Each and every flight he has been on over the last 6 to 8 months has some “some sort of issue” that has delayed him at least several hours each time.

An older couple en-route to Franfurt, Germany who I had spoken to a little earlier in the day swore that they’d never fly with US Airways again but that they wanted to take advantage of the miles they had built up. They too have had several different types of issues which had led to “all types of delays” during their travels with US Airways. From what I could tell this couple had flown to various parts of the earth very often throughout the year.

A younger couple sitting near me on the bus and who nearly missed their plane to Paris, France, were going through their troubles they’ve had with US Airways like a grocery store receipt. One problem after another was thoroughly detailed with the other backing them up by providing even more detail. When I asked them why they were flying with the airline again, they said the same thing as the older couple heading for Germany; they wanted to use up their miles.

Ted Danson, I mean, err, the gentlemen sitting next to me in Gate B7 in the Philadelphia International Airport who was reading a worn out copy of a Biography about Eric Clapton, while telling his wife that George Harrison had originally wrote a few of Clapton’s songs (I am still not sure I overheard this correctly), began to speak his disgust with US Airways after waiting a little over an hour at the gate for the plane to arrive. This was the straw that had broke the camels back for him and his wife. Man that guy looked like Ted.

I was reiterating these stories to the man in 14c when finally the pilot said that we were ready to “get the hell outta here”.

Fast forward through 30 minutes rolling around to find a runway and about 2 and a half hours of some horrible ‘complementary in-flight movie’ and here I sit, about ~1000 miles east of Phoenix charging my nearly dead iPhone with my nearly dead Macbook via USB so that I might be able to call my wife when I touchdown in a few hours.

I’m hoping that my trip home is the polar opposite of this experience.

9:30am – Woke up around 6, left at around 7:30, arrived at Viddler HQ – hit up Starbucks for Rob to get his “fix”, and now we’re at the office.

The first order of business? Update the featured videos on the explore page for the week. These videos are hand picked by internal staff so if you see a video highlighted there, you know we all really like the video and the use of Viddler.

10:00am – Donna just got here and now it is time to go through some community strategy.

10:09am – Before we head off to the conference room, maybe any of you could leave some suggestions.

12:37pm – Great strategy meeting. Hopefully some of the ideas we generated during it will be put into play pretty soon. Exciting things not only for Viddler but anyone that wishes to promote their video online.

Rob, Donna, and I at the Viddler HQ

1:09pm – Rob just ordered some lunch (I’m starving). I’m getting a “huge salad”.

Donna is sitting next to me on a brand new HP laptop running Vista. Donna is no slouch when it comes to computers and she’s spent about 30-minutes trying to get a printer running. I think Vista is showing its true colors for sure right now.

Maybe I can get the Viddler team, since Andrew and I are already running Mac OS X, to switch? Oh wait, Rob needs the nipple (more on this later).

Be sure to check out the new featured header I created for this post.

2:26pm – Lunch was good! I’m actually really full. Now back to writing today’s blog post!

4:09pm – Finished today’s featured videos blog entry (look for it on the blog after it is reviewed). I can’t wait to be able to create those types of posts much quicker with some of the tools I envision…. more on this later.

For now, enjoy a photo we got right before lunch. It is the serious version of the one you see in the new header promoting this post.

5:06pm – The featured video post for this week has been published. It is nice to have all of the featured videos in one location to quickly flip between them.

5:36pm – I’m on my way home. Good day.

[tags]viddler, bethlehem, pennsylvania, live, video, photos, windows vista, donna demarco, colin devroe, rob sandie[/tags]
[slug]live-viddlerhq-again[/slug]