“Much of the sales were generated by the news sites and blogs covering the story. This works great once, but is hard to repeat it. Other comedians, even established ones aren’t going to get as lucky. The publicity was a black swan event. We can’t draw any conclusions from it about how it will play out in the future.”

I agree with this. We’ve all seen it before – in different ways – that when someone is doing something “all new” there is a bunch of news about how they are taking a risk and doing something differently. Notice how most of the news regarding Louis’s video was about how it is new, how it is different, and how much money it made. The news wasn’t about how funny the special was.

I’m not saying the special wasn’t funny. Louis is consistently hilarious anytime I’ve seen him in just about anything. But his act wasn’t what made waves with the media over the last few weeks. It was because he spun this in a way that made everyone believe he was doing something different. And that is, as Mayne pointed out, impossible to repeat.

BTW, what Louis did was nothing different or new. It was new and a bit different for a relatively well established comedian to pay for and distribute their own special via the web – all without charging the customers too much, without putting undue restrictions on the use of the product, and without spamming the people that bought it with email. But this model has worked pretty well for a lot of media on the web including music. (think, Nine-Inch-Nails) But that doesn’t matter. It was new for someone like him to do something like that and he deserves credit for taking the chance that it would have flopped.

I’m fairly certain that Louis is popular enough that, if he should do another special like this, that he’ll sell enough copies to cover his costs within the first few days like he did this time. But it won’t be because the way he’s distributing it is new. It will because people love Louis. It will be because its great and well worth the cost. And those are very good reasons.

So, on the whole, we learned from this experiment something we’ve always known; new, novel ideas that are well executed, inexpensive, of decent quality, and put the customer’s interests first will generally do very well.

Something must have told the Twitvid team that this is a logical direction to take Twitvid but I don’t see it. Broad category social networks have, more or less, been done and will, more than likely, stay the same as they are now for a long time. The best way to compete in social networking is by creating niche communities. Broad category video sharing is simply not niche enough to cut out a following.

Twitvid was and should have been a utility for sharing videos via Twitter since Twitter doesn’t currently allow that. I’m sure Twitter Photos, which all but negated the need for Twitpic and others, scared Twitvid into this pivot. But what would have been even more sensible is to, like Photobucket, make a deal with Twitter to handle their official service in an unobtrusively and mutually beneficial way.

Millions have used Twitvid and I’m sure many will continue to. However, I’ll go on record as saying that not many of those people will use these new features on Twitvid. I think this move sounds the death knell for Twitvid.

There is a lot of talent inside of Microsoft. It is everything that happens above the talent that inhibits that talent’s ability to make really great things.

While the Arc Touch Mouse is very, very interesting and seemingly well done it is still based off an old “mouse” (read: move around your desk and move the pointer) paradigm. The multitouch touchpad from Apple is, in my opinion, much better and more forward-thinking because it is getting us closer and closer to having all touch-based interfaces for our computing devices. It is why I switched from using a mouse. I never want a mouse again.

I don’t want to take anything away from the people that worked on this mouse at Microsoft… but I’d like to know if Microsoft would have let them work as hard and long on creating a next generation touch device rather than only a slimmer mouse. And then actually be able to ship it.

Matt tried to make me look good.

Inkling from Wacom records what you draw on paper and creates vector graphics, complete with multiple layers, that you can transfer to the computer in a variety of formats. It is also extremely portable and well-designed.

WANT. Watch the demo.

/via TechCrunch.

Chilling.

/via Andy Baio.

Today I’ve stumbled across a slew of hidden settings that you can’t find via the UI.

/via Dan Frommer.

If you have any reason whatsoever to use video for your business, website, or yourself – consider using Viddler. It will feed my future children if you do.

Robert quipped that he was happy that he stuck to his guns regarding longform videos of this type. He isn’t alone.

Not too long after the Twitter video was recorded, at Web 2 Expo in San Fransisco, I was fortunate enough to record an episode of LunchMeet with Eddie Codel.

Here is that episode (in the Viddler player because PodTech’s embed no longer works):

You may argue that Viddler hasn’t had the cultural impact that Twitter has had on the world – but you’re not sitting in this chair. Viddler has done amazing things since that day with a meager budget, only a small percentage of the man-power, and from locations that many think out-of-touch.

Many of these stories are about to be told on The Viddler Spotlight. Stay tuned.

These guys are thoroughly crazy. Wow.

/via Devour.

I can not tell you how much this resonates with me. I spent the better part of my childhood trying to move things using The Force.

We’ve set up a special page on Viddler just for Magic Ruby to help let people know some of the things we’re already doing with the Ruby community. We hope to learn a little about Ruby, to let attendees know about Viddler, and to enjoy the weather.

Viddler’s offerings to developers aren’t limited to only Ruby. We’ve got a fantastic API that has been recently overhauled and wrappers for just about every language. We power some of the biggest brands online and our platform has been used to power web sites, applications, iPhone and iPad applications and much more. I personally hope to help Viddler grow in this area in 2011.

If you’re a developer and ever have any video needs – consider using Viddler for your next project.

John Gruber, as he typically does, does a good job asking the same questions as I would. So I recommend giving his questions to Google a perusal.

However, I’d like to comment his 3rd question to Google. When WebM was announced in May of last year it was said that YouTube would immediately begin to encode their videos in WebM. And, according to YouTube’s HTML5 page, they did exactly that. So part of John’s question is answered. But the other parts – whether or not YouTube will drop support for H.264 or not, and why – remind unanswered so far.

My biggest “huh?” to all of this is Google’s “to foster competition” and “web innovation” statements as to why they are doing this. Gruber is asking why the Flash Player plugin isn’t being removed from being bundled with Google Chrome. I’m wondering how removing support for H.264 video playback is “fostering competition” at all. Isn’t it squashing it?

Think about where the competition really happens for video codecs. Users of the Internet will never decide on a codec. They don’t care. Developers and engineers do. Apple will decide what they will support with their devices, Google with theirs, RIM with theirs, HP, Dell, Toshiba with theirs. My mother could care less if a video is in Flash, H.264, WebM, Theora or any other video codec – she would simply want to view the video and would probably download any software it would take for her to be able to watch it. Do you think she really knows that when she goes to the YouTube application on her iPod Touch that the video that is being delivered is in H.264?

So really, the “competition” doesn’t happen at the user level. It happens at the engineering level. Engineers will pit two codecs against each other and see how they stack up. They’ll decide which to use based on the quality of the codec and then they’ll measure that against the install base for that codec. Right now H.264 is comparable on nearly every level to WebM while the install base for H.264 is enormous in comparison to WebM. So the decision is still pretty clear which codec most engineers would choose for video playback. Unless they are open source zealots that think Apple’s approach to things like H.264, iOS and the App Stores is “closed”.

Now, if Adobe removed H.264 playback from the Flash Player – that’d make some waves. That’d change the game a bit.

All of this being said I really don’t care. Even as a team member for Viddler, a company that has millions of videos that we take care of, I don’t mind allowing the industry to figure some of these things out. I side with the end users and so does Viddler. Viddler will always strive to deliver high-quality video to users the way that the majority of them want it regardless of their device. As of today an overwhelming number of the Internet-connected computers in the world support H.264 playback via Flash Player. So we deliver that. The next step down is H.264 playback via the <video> tag. We deliver that too. If we see a strong need for serving all of our videos via WebM to our users – we’ll deliver that too. We’re already prepared for it. Each of our team member’s have very strong opinions about what is going down in this space – but at the end of the day we’re willing to deliver video for our customers how and where they want it.

/via the Viddler Developers Group.

This is a fantastic video. That is all.

I’ve found photos of iPad cases to be very deceiving. What may look like a really great case for the iPad turns out to feel very flimsy and cheap when in use. CrunchGear’s Devin Coldewey has made a video showing off a slew of cases which does a much better job of showing the build quality of these iPad cases.

Now that has changed. Thanks to Viddler’s own Billy Disney (videographer) and Andrew Smith (designer) we’ve got a brand new Learn More page complete with video.

Billy also wrote a nice blog post explaining the new page.

An instant classic in NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series is with Weird Al Yankovic. He covers three songs. I recommend the entire series of Tiny Desk Concerts.

NPR music is pretty much the best place on the Web right now.

My favorite bits are the real story behind the iPhone’s inception (which we’ve heard from various places but it was nice to finally hear it from him), his thoughts on why they are choosing not to include Flash comparing it to choosing to eliminate floppy and optical disk drives and the whole iPhone-theft story.

I’m really proud of some of the stuff coming out of our blog lately and the hits are just going to keep on coming.

A new video for Viddler’s secure video hosting for businesses. We’ve got a lot in store for Viddler B2B this year and this video is only the tip of the iceberg. More tomorrow, next week and for the rest of this year.

“I’m back to Safari. I still love Chrome but Safari’s latest update made it edge out Chrome for speed. Speed, it seems, is the killer feature for me in Web browsers.”

It seems I’m going to follow the speed and it turns out that Chrome is faster than lightning. I’m glad to be back on Chrome as Safari’s address bar is, as Jonathan Christopher put it, annoying but I will miss the Top Sites screen and visual history search.

“(Ironically, Engadget’s video demos are only available in Flash. Why would a website devoted to leading-edge gadgetry continue to embed video in a format that can’t be played on the best web-reading gadget? If your video doesn’t play on the iPad, you’re like Steve Allen mocking the lyrics to rock-and-roll songs — an anachronism.)”

That is an excellent question. Why are they embedding their video in a format that isn’t supported on the iPad, or iPhone, or iPod, or Droid or __________ fill in the blank with many other mobile devices? Because Viddler doesn’t support it yet. We’re late for a variety of reasons – some our own fault some third party – but no one likes to play the blame game. So we’ll just focus on the positive.

We’re working on it. And it won’t be very long until Engadget’s blog posts, all of them, work flawlessly on the iPad.

Jim Louderback, the CEO of Revision3, also provided his reasoning on the matter. I believe his comparison to Howard Stern and satellite radio is apt.

I think this bold move is great for a company like Revision3 to make. I hope there is some dialogue that carries on as a result of this move that, at the very least, puts the Internet into the mix for anyone that does traditional TV and wants something different. It may not be Conan’s choice but if it even makes it “a choice” for Conan that will be a success.

The Boxee Box, a mini-square-ish computer with the sole purpose of running Boxee on a television, is becoming more compelling with every press release. Made by D-Link this little box is being reported to hit the market at under $200 and to have one heckuva remote control.

At that size, with that design, that price point and with a remote control that sports a QWERTY keyboard on the back I see no reason not to get a Boxee Box. I’m still looking forward to details on the way it integrates with the home network though.

Back in June 2008 I added an oEmbed service to Viddler. That means that in the next version of WordPress you’ll be able to embed Viddler videos using a very simple embed code like this:

I’m looking forward to updating the Viddler WordPress plugin to support this new schema and make it even easier for WordPress users (such as myself) to embed videos from their favorite video sharing services.

Read more about this feature on The Viddler Blog in a tutorial on how to get the best quality out of this feature called: How to: Set an image as a video thumbnail.

You can see the results on Eat Weird Episode 5. Gorgeous.

Also, this feature is exposed via the Viddler API’s setThumbnail method.

Go forth, and hack! Oh, and its completely open source too. (More on this later.)

I’m embedding part one “Initial lay in” here. You can watch part two “Laying in light and shadow shapes”, and part three “Finish and refine” on Viddler.

When I saw Quietube I immediately recognized that, well, some people just want to watch videos without distractions. That is why I thought Viddler should wholeheartedly support Quietube with their project.

Thanks for implementing Viddler guys. Keep up the good work.

Quietube. Great name too.

Update: I figured I’d provide an example link.

So if you’re looking to get the best quality video out of Viddler’s settings, take a look at the article.

Source: How to: Encode high quality video for Viddler.
Suggested: via Skribit.

This comes courtesy of Jason Kottke, so if you subscribe to his site – you’ve already seen this. For those of you that haven’t - meet Willard Wigan, an artist who specializes in micro-sculptures. Willard manages to sculpt the world’s smallest pieces of art that reside inside the eye of a needle or on top of the head of a pin.

His method is indeed madness. He uses a single hair off the back of a common house fly as his paint brush. He keeps his hands steady by working in between the beating of his heart. He once inhaled an Alice from Wonderland piece he was working. Which, in and of itself, would have been frustrating, but it turns out his works of art are rather valuable. He recently sold his entire collection (which at least count was somewhere between 12-15 separate pieces) for $20,000,000.

ABC News Video: Willard Wigan micro sculptor.
BBC Article: THROUGH THE EYE OF A NEEDLE.
Official Site: Willard Wigan :: Micro Sculptor.

I’ve shared the video here because I think this is an incredible video. The visuals that we are getting back from the space program lately are incredible. And now that they are taking photos in a time-lapsed fashion, stitching them together and sharing them in HD video format – we’re able to see celestial events in ways no other age of mankind has been able to. This is a trend NASA has set over nearly the last half-century.

Here is the description of the video from the HubbleSite Web site:

“This movie shows Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon, as it ducks behind the giant planet. Astronomers combined a series of images taken with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 aboard NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to make the 18-second movie. The 540 movie frames were created from Hubble images taken over a two-hour period on April 9, 2007.”

Source: Hubble Catches Jupiter’s Largest Moon Going to the ‘Dark Side’.
Credits: NASA, ESA, E. Karkoschka (University of Arizona), and G. Bacon (STScI)

My goal for this season is to cook a dish native to the area of each episode. So, as it seems that January 5th’s season premier will be centered around Mexico, I’ll be looking through our recipe books for a Mexican dish!

Source: No Reservations – All New Season – Jan. 5th – Mexico!

I think I should start featuring a “you may not have seen this video” video here on my site each and every day.  You see, it isn’t always the most popular videos that are worthy of attention. Yeah, I think I’ll do exactly that.

Source: Gary Vaynerchuk at Threadless on Viddler.

I really think I just like the idea of creating dolls that “cheer you up because they are so sad looking”.  That and I think these would make great gifts for kids because they are cheap, made for each person you’re giving them to, and get away from the normal dolls that we see today that are all about high-fashion and bull crap.

PDF: Download the PDF for the doll.
Source: Make Your Own Sympathy Doll on Viddler.

Hugh Jackman reprises his role as Wolverine in X-Men Origins – Wolverine, coming May 1st 2009. Here is the trailer for this movie (the first I’ve seen it online) and unfortunately it is only available in a rather junky format on DailyMotion ((When the high-def trailer is available on Apple Trailers I’ll link that up too.)).

Guess who makes an appearance? Gambit. Win, win.

Source: Trailer: X-Men Origins – Wolverine.

Speaking of Bob Ross, you can watch a ton of his episodes online. Not all of the videos are complete episodes, so you’ll have to watch the duration closely. But, there are some gems.

I blame Troy Rutter for me taking a stroll through my memories and wanting to watch a ton of Bob Ross videos.

Source: Google Video Search “Bob Ross Videos”.

My long-time friend Chris Fehnel has launched a new video blog called Eat Weird. The premise is simple; Live well, Eat Weird. You see, many times us Americans (and perhaps many of you reading this that are not Americans) tend to think certain foods taboo. That is, you think they’re weird.

Maybe you grew up in a “normal” household eating meat and potatoes. Perhaps you grew up in a “modern” household where you either ate at a restaurant or you warmed something up in the microwave. Or, worse yet – all you’ve ever done is snack in front of the television.  Regardless, I believe we can all agree that the culinary and food-loving pedigree present in most households of this 21st-Century are poor.

I’m as guilty as any. Or at least I was. Since striking out on my own and getting married my diet has consisted of, well, whatever I can get my hands on.  Growing up with a father, born in Indonesia and raised by well-traveled Dutch parents, who loved to cook – I was often treated to what some would consider extremely exotic meals. Rattle snake, shark, cow’s tongue, and countless Indonesian dishes were on the table every night. And I mean every single night.

My wife wasn’t so fortunate. She and her single-mother would rarely cook anything of consequence. Make no mistake about it, Eliza is an excellent cook now in her adult life. When she hits the kitchen and I hear pots and pans smashing around – I get all together excited at the prospect. But for the first few years of our marriage – we were married young – we ate like Americans in every sense of the phrase.

That is why Chris’ show Eat Weird strikes so close to home for me. It is because his show is a direct reflection of where I am right now in my food-eating journey. As I travel around the world to locations exotic and otherwise, I try everything I’ve never had before. This spirit of willingness has always been inside of me, lurking. But it has only shown itself through motivation to actually work towards its end – rather than passively allow life and opportunity to pass by – within the past 4 or 5 years. That is, I’ve always been willing to eat anything but I have only recently begun to seek these delicacies.

I had the privilege of helping Chris shoot his first two episodes using only Eliza’s Flip video camera. The quality, content, mood, and overall feel of the show will mature overtime – that much Chris knows for sure. But sometimes you just have to start. Sometimes that is the most challenge part. Now that he’s got his feet wet – ideas, circumstances, and opportunities are flying in from all directions. The road ahead looks promising both for his own food-eating diversity but also for his fledgling show which, I think, could end up being a huge hit in six months.

Congrats to Chris for launching this new show and I look forward to following his journey in the world of good food while I continue my own. No matter how weird some may think it.

Photo credit: Eliza Devroe.

The music video features The Fray’s new song “You Found Me”.

Source: LOST Season 5 “You Found Me” (link opens iTunes)

Viddler’s current lack of any way to record video on a mobile phone, for instance. More specifically the iPhone. I take a lot of mobile photos (more here) on my iPhone. I’ve wanted to shoot videos on my iPhone too. Now I can.

The first step I had to take was to jailbreak my iPhone. Qik’s iPhone application, while not perfect, allows me to shoot video on my iPhone and have it be recorded, live, on Qik’s servers. In fact, if the connection is good enough you can watch me recording the video only a few seconds delayed.

But I wanted my video on Viddler. It is my player of choice. Qik’s player is great, especially since it allows you to watch the video as it is being recorded. It also has some interesting interactive features like chat. But, like MTV – I want my Viddler.

So my second step was to build a bridge from Qik to the Viddler. Once the live session has been saved as an FLV Qik creates an RSS feed with a link to the video file. I’ve built a dead simple PHP script that reads that RSS feed, downloads the FLVs, and then transfers them to Viddler. I then took the liberty of creating a quick bit of code that then Twitters the link to the video on Viddler. I do this for my mobile photos posted to Flickr so I thought why not do that for mobile videos as well.

After talking with Qik about this bridge we’ve both decided to do something a little bit better than what I have hacked together using nothing more than what I had access to. So stay tuned.  Until then, you may have my script that I wrote in an hour to play with.

Tonight, Eliza is out and I’m home by myself. I’ve had to fend for myself. So, I made some soup from some of the stuff I found in the kitchen. Here is a video, styled after My Day, Yesterday videos, but just making a single meal.

I’ve created a new Viddler group called Making. If you’re so inclined, consider contributing a Making video.

About the video quality: I only have a Flip video camera, which is Eliza’s actually, at the moment. Someday I’ll get my hands on a shiny new HD-quality video camera. Until then, suffer.

Here is a quick excerpt from Wikipedia. If the quoted section isn’t enough for you, I recommend going to Wikipedia to read the full article.

“In footage shot by most television and video cameras (except more recent models which allow a non-interlaced mode), the two fields of a frame are taken at different times, which results in an effectively doubled time resolution as compared with non-interlaced footage, thus enhancing motion perception to the viewer. This remains one of the benefits of interlacing.

However its benefits can only be experienced if the display shows the individual fields in the same timely order they were shot in. At this time, only traditional CRT-based TV set are capable to do so. If correctly adjusted, they need not suffer from any interlacing artifacts, they even benefit from it.

Yet when the fields of the original footage are displayed in a different order than they were shot in (i.e. when two fields taken at different points in time are re-combined to a full frame displayed at once), visual defects called interlace artifacts or combing occur with moving objects in the image.”

It is a long bit, sorry – but it does a fairly good job describing the cause and effect. Now that you know what it all means and why it should be done, run over to Derek’s site and read his tip so that you can save yourself the headache that interlacing can cause.

Source: Deinterlace your online videos.

On a recent rip to New York City my friend Jonathan Christopher mentioned Mirror’s Edge, a video game where you are doing Parkour in first-person. He told me to check out the demo, but I haven’t yet.

Anyway, today I found this video on Viddler. It doesn’t show you in-game action but rather gives you a general sense for the story behind the game. After a quick search I found the launch trailer which does show you some in-game footage.

In other words, I’ll be downloading that demo later tonight Jon.

Me, speaking at Podcamp Hawai’i. Credit: Eliza Devroe

I have an awful lot of writing to do. I figured one of the easiest things to start off with, and hopefully get the ball rolling with everything else that I need to write about, would be the photos, videos, tweets, and much more from both Podcamp and Wordcamp Hawai’i.

Oh, did I mention that I learned how to properly spell Hawai’i while I was there?

If you’ve been following the pch08 tag on Flickr, on Twitter, on Viddler, and pretty much everywhere else, you’ll probably have seen these already.  If not… than I just did you a favor.

The visuals tell only part of the story. You’ll have to be there next year ((There will be a next year, right?)) to experience what type of conference the outstanding people in Hawai’i are able to put together.

Pickles helps out. Circa January 2007.

Viddler’s player is, in my incredibly biased opinion, the best Flash video player available. Especially if you’re of the sort that likes to engage in conversation or put an incredible amount of metadata in your videos.

Using Viddler’s API for various projects has always resulted in some sort of learning experience for me. Not only in using APIs in general, but in how to best utilize Viddler’s platform, player, API, etc. etc. to get the best results. This helps to improve Viddler’s services, but also the Web at large.

One of the things I, and the entire team at Viddler, have learned is that most people want their player to perfectly wrap their video. That is, they’d like their video to be as chromeless as possible while retaining the conversational quality of the enhanced timeline that Viddler affords.

Knowing this we were excited when oEmbed, and its underlying methodology, allowed for this to happen programmatically.  This made it rather easy for developers, such as the team at Pownce, to use this service on Viddler to embed videos knowing only the URL assigned to it, in a way that shows off the quality of the player, and keeping the aspect ratio of the video that the publisher created. Perfect.

That one underlying and undocumented feature of oEmbed, that is, that the response from oEmbed was an embed code with the dimensions perfectly suited for your video based on a maximum width – is what I think will make the following JavaScript useful to developers using Viddler’s API.

The response from the API method of viddler.videos.getDetails includes the dimensions of the original video uploaded.  It does not, however, include the embed code of the proper dimensions given a specific width. You have to either figure that out own your own, use oEmbed (which is yet another call), or do the math yourself.

Included in this simple ZIP file is both the JavaScript and PHP functions you would need to determine the appropriate height for a video given a specific maximum width.  These files do not include the ability to use the oEmbed service. For that, you will need phpViddler or your own homegrown way to call that service.

Happy embedding!