The Internet wasn't invented for business, or banking, or email, or communicating with loved ones, or blogging.

It was invented so that I can watch videos of Lykke Li singing in the back of a black London cab.

Our 2008 session at the Allied Media Conference with Dean Jansen last month covered the use of open source tools to create professional-level multimedia content. We explored the benefits of shooting in the RAW file format if you're printing a 'zine, used Audacity to create an audio podcast, put together a stop-motion slideshow from photos taken at the conference using command-line tools, and created some video to share on the AMC site. Then, Dean showcased Miro and explored different ways to distribute your content.

Most importantly, though, we all got to know each other. Depending on the audience, I like to pass my camcorder around during my sessions so that the audience can interview each other (the AMC audience is fully and completely awesome, as always). Here is the video that we all created so that you can get to know us too. Spread the word!

This is already a year old, but somehow it fell through the cracks and I missed it until now.

It's a brilliant little musical number that pokes fun at the whole "Support Our Troops" yellow sticker sickness, masterfully done by the Asylum Street Spankers - great fucking name.

During one of my trips to Cuba just over a year ago, I recorded several hours of interviews, scenery and other footage. Along with the web project it was supposed to complement, it was a casualty of prioritization. It got left on the backburner, a victim of someone's attempt to do too much by himself.

... he was a damned fool - arrogant, ambitious, and very much in need of seasoning.

Doing some more video work now, I unearthed some of the footage that I had taken, and rather than let it collect dust here, I've put it up in three slightly edited clips over on my Cuba blog.

You can also download the full (captions are deprecated now, though) version over at the Internet Archive.

Finally, unlike the rest of my blog, I've decided to put all of it not under a Creative Commons License, but straight into the Public Domain. You can take the video, remix it, edit it, use it for your own purposes, etc. It belongs to the Public Domain. It would be cool if you could drop me an email or a comment if you do decide to use it for your own work, though - just to satisfy my curiosity.

National Conference for Media Reform - Owning our own Media Infrastructure introductions. (Right-click to download - 13MB)
Extremely, unforgivably late, here's the session introductions from the Owning our own Media Infrastructure in Memphis this past January, that Josh kindly invited me to be on (and moderated).

The sound's too low and we had some technical difficulties with the camera, but it's still awesome to go back and watch this and recognize people from the session.

I'd love to think I'd invented the whole "pass-your-video-camera-around-to-the-audience" shtick - but I probably didn't.

It's a whole lotta fun though.