TV

Bob Garfield surveys the media wreckage in this new AdAge article. This piece has been drawing multiple onlookers – as you would expect for any calamity. I first discovered the piece on Delicious‘ trending links last night, as if to offer further evidence that things have changed.

Meanwhile, Paul Dailing of Huffington Post gleefully surveys the scene – of bloggers surveying the scene, in How to Become a “Death of Newspapers” Blogger. With all the violent metaphors for a wounded industry that entails.

BBC News and Sport are beginning to enable you to embed their videos on to your own site.

Below is an example of an embedded video. It’s hosted by the BBC, who also take care of the streaming too. (The story happens to be about cybercrime, I’ve included it purely as an illustration of the technology - the range of embeddable videos is still small while the scheme is being rolled out.)

Technically it’s always been possible to embed BBC videos elsewhere (in a cheeky fashion – you just grab the code).

But this change of policy is a good move – by actively encouraging and helping people to embed the videos and discuss them it will increase the BBC’s presence around the web, including on blogs like this one.

In order to embed a video, you go to the original story page. Let’s take the example I embedded above. If you click share, you’ll be presented with the following code which you then copy and paste into your website/blog. (You don’t have to understand every tag in order to use it.)

<object classid=”clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000″ width=”512″ height=”400″ codebase=”http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0″><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true” /><param name=”allowScriptAccess” value=”always” /><param name=”FlashVars” value=”config_settings_showUpdatedInFooter=true&amp;playlist=http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/emp/7930000/7938900/7938949.xml&amp;config=http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/emp/config/default.xml?1.3.105_2.10.7938_7967_20090310160409&amp;config_settings_language=default&amp;config_settings_showFooter=true&amp;config_plugin_fmtjLiveStats_pageType=eav6″ /><param name=”src” value=”http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/emp/2.10.7938_7967/player.swf” /><embed type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”512″ height=”400″ src=”http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/emp/2.10.7938_7967/player.swf” flashvars=”config_settings_showUpdatedInFooter=true&amp;playlist=http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/emp/7930000/7938900/7938949.xml&amp;config=http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/emp/config/default.xml?1.3.105_2.10.7938_7967_20090310160409&amp;config_settings_language=default&amp;config_settings_showFooter=true&amp;config_plugin_fmtjLiveStats_pageType=eav6″ allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true”></embed></object>

Of course, other video streaming sites have allowed and encouraged this for years. Seasoned bloggers and webheads may quip that “BBC embedding 2009 = YouTube embedding 2005″. But to be fair to BBC, they have had “a huge number of tricky little issues to sort out and most of these have been complex business issues around rights, terms and conditions, etc.” (quote).

This also illustrates a good principle. Making a success of the web means not only having a good destination site but also having a good web presence.

It’s now considered somewhat precious to want to “own” visitors and insist they come to your website first. You will spread awareness of yourself and and actually drive future visits to your site by giving stuff to other sites.

In practice, you may not have your own video player like the BBC. But if you’ve uploaded video on sites such as YouTube, Vimeo, Blip.tv or Viddler, then make sure embedding is enabled. It will multiply the potential audience by several factors of ten AND probably bring more people to your site anyway.

I cannot think of a single good reason not to allow embedding on a video. Universal Records, the largest record label in the world, appear to have disabled embedding on their official YouTube videos. If you can explain this decision, feel free to comment below or contact me.

Even if your primary focus is not video, the more general principle is engagement with other sites. I feel another blog post emerging, mmm. I’ll explore it more next week.

(As it happens, YouTube have been in the news this week regarding a separate issue – their disagreement with PRS, who represent song publishers and composers. Robert Andrews at paidContent summarises the complexities of such deals, while Rhodri Marsden at the Independent gives an insightful view from a songwriter’s perspective.)

Barack Obama’s inauguration as President of the USA takes place on Tuesday 20th January.

Techcrunch have a wideranging list of a plethora of online sites and applications related to the event. These cover where to watch it, where to respond to it, approval ratings and more.

My favourite is probably the Obameter which tracks the status of 500 promises made by Obama during the USA election campaign.

I’ve previously mentioned Obama’s use of social media to gather supporters and communicate. If you’d like to read about that, here’s a good start.

So online media can assist politicians in gathering supporters. Can online media assist the electorate in holding politicians to account – and thereby improve the democratic process as a whole? It’s a huge question, I know. We can but hope. Actually it’s not just about hope – people have to USE these tools.

I hope you find these links useful. Although Native is based in Cardiff, Wales, I’m very guilty in this blog of being US-centric in my link recommendations. Although I will continue to reference useful US-based pages where relevant, I’ll also make an effort to redress the balance from now on!

In the meantime, if you’re interested in online tools related to politics and democracy in the UK then check out the various projects of mySociety. Game-changing stuff.

This is an extract from a recent interview with the US band Animal Collective, or rather one of their members, Geologist.

With the whole downloading thing I suppose it’s easier for people to have an opinion immediately after they’ve heard, like, half of a 128kbps vinyl rip or something like that. What are your views on leaks?

We take whatever minimal steps we can to prevent it, but we know records are going to leak. It’s not even about whether it’s free or not free, I mean the day you release it it’s free to the world anyway, what with the technology these days…

I have a lot of strong personal feelings about how people consume music these days, even myself. That’s why I have these feelings; because I can see how my own listening habits have degraded over the years with the advent of the internet.

Like, when people tell me about a new band that I should check out, before I would have gone and bought the record but now I go to Myspace and listen to 20 seconds of their song through my laptop speakers and I’m like ‘whatever’ – I think that’s disgusting on my part to form an opinion that way. I’m trying to break myself out of the habit. People ask, ‘why do you give a shit about a leak, it’s going to leak anyway, it’s such an outdated, antiquated way of approaching music’ and I guess that’s true, but I’m unapologetic about it, in a way, growing up in a time when the internet wasn’t around.

I always think back to when I discovered Will Oldham’s music… at first I bought the record because it was on Drag City and I was like, ‘Well, I don’t get this, is it country music or is it Americana music? It doesn’t sound like Pavement, I don’t get it’. Y’know, I was like 15 years old and if it had just been MP3s on my computer that I didn’t buy or have a physical copy of I’d probably just have deleted it and never listened again. But because it stayed on my shelf I put in effort to get into it, I kept going back to it. And there’s just one day, I don’t know if it’s because the weather is right or you’re just in a different mood, but it suddenly clicks for you.

Personally, I don’t have that many experiences like that anymore because I’ve been taken in by the accessibility of music and I’m disappointed by what that’s done to _my_ music. That’s why I’m not into the whole leak culture or digital music in general. I don’t want to take part in it by being, like, ‘Leak our record’ or whatever. Even streaming it before it’s released, that goes against my views on how music should be listened to. Doing that or putting it on iTunes first, it’s giving people another option from which they can hear your music for the first time. That’s my feeling, it’s very personal and it has nothing to do with the industry war that’s going on right now or anything like that.

Full interview at drownedinsound.com

If you’re unfamiliar with them, Animal Collective are perhaps best described as an avant garde psychedelic folk band. Although they are sounding a bit more polished these days. What does it matter? Hardcore fans will probably disagree with my descriptions.

You can judge for yourself by listening to their official Myspace page, presumably maintained by one of the other members, judging by Geologist’s views on music streaming.

I’m inclined to see his point here, but I disagree that this view holds in every case.

Certainly though, the fan’s experience is important.

What do you think?

You could also explore this debate in a video context. Which reminds me – Monty Python have a view on this issue. They recently launched a free and official streaming channel for Monty Python highlights on YouTube, partly out of disappointment with the poor quality of unofficial uploads. In their case, official DVD sales through their official site increased by 6,800 percent over the first three days, as a result.

Lawrence Lessig is a well known proponent of copyright reform. He is perhaps best known as the founder of Creative Commons, an organisation which posits alternative ways of licensing your content.

His observations are astute. If you work in the creative industries, his recommendations for the future of copyright law may provoke, dismay, shock, delight or inspire you. It really depends on your point of view.

I’d like to mention Lessig here because, whether you like him or not, you cannot ignore the remix, mash-up and reappropriation mindset which totally pervades our culture right now.

If you’re a writer, artist, musician, photographer, record label, song publisher, book publisher, production company or TV channel, his work will in some way already intersect with what you do.

Here’s an interview between Lessig and presenter Stephen Colbert, originally broadcast on US television on 8th January 2009. If you’re not familiar with Colbert, his signature deadpan style can be an acquired taste. It’s better to view this whole clip as a stunt, for reasons I’ll describe below.

Certainly Lessig has a lot of insightful things to say but, in among the joking from Colbert, you won’t get the subtleties here. You get a mere taste of what’s in his new book, simply entitled Remix.

It’s somewhat ironic that an early copy of this video stream was removed at the request of Viacom, who – despite what Colbert or Lessig might say – are the actual owners of the footage. If you’ll recall, Viacom fought an expensive legal battle with YouTube to assert just that, with regard to hundreds of other clips.

So if it has been taken down by the time you read this, in the clip Colbert repeatedly tells us NOT to remix the clip.

Of course, in keeping with his affected comic personality, Colbert is in full knowledge that he’s baiting the bedroom video editors and remixers around the globe.

These are people familiar with music sampling (whether via hip-hop records, Fatboy Slim or Kylie), copying, parodies, re-edits, homages, music mash-ups, LOLcats, Banksy… and much more. Oh, and Sleeveface.

Original is best right? Well, not always.

Besides, what original version? Back in my schooldays I originally heard the tune Can I Kick It? by A Tribe Called Quest years before discovering the original source of the bassline, Take A Walk On The Wildside by Lou Reed. This was my first awareness that digital sampling was taking place in music – which blew my young mind. (I learned about the intricacies of copyright law much later.)

Back to Lessig and Colbert – and it wasn’t long before the remixes did appear.

Here’s one unofficial remix of the Colbert clip with Lessig. At the time of writing, YouTube alone has 17 search results for “colbert lessig remix”.

I can’t vouch for the quality or content of any of these DIY remixes. That’s a job for the vociferous YouTube commenters. But we do know that the remixes are reaching people who would never have seen the original programme. People who had never previously heard of Colbert or Lessig.

Marketing people, take note.

All this may explain why rap artists often put out acappella versions of their tracks, usually on the official release. Remix-friendly stuff! Let’s face it, hip-hop is a genre of excellent marketers and self-promoters.

We live in a world where a large section of the population feels that they “own” their favourite songs, books and shows. Of course, when copyright law is taken into consideration this is technically mistaken. And there are huge problems with this. Copyright is not only a legal structure which allows revenue generation but one which protects moral rights.

But what happens if we forget about the problems for a moment? There are opportunities here.

What if we could get the marketing department and the legal department to trade places? If only for one day?

Actually let’s forget about monetising, owning or controlling views of a particular piece of content. Again, this is just for a moment and just for a thought experiment. Let’s imagine one of the best items of work from your catalogue being deliberately released in a different way.

What if the ONLY thing we cared about was having people consume and spread that piece of content? And then to adapt it, re-appropriate it or engage with it? Imagine it. Colbert did, can you?

I have so many more intriguing examples to share. But let’s leave this open for now.