Tag Archives: video

Olympics, Video, And Stuff

General, , ,

The Olympics have definitely taken over my life in the evening. So far I’ve been really happy with NBC’s coverage, but more particularly with all of the video that they’ve put on their website. For instance, yesterday an American medaled in judo and the match won’t be shown on regular TV. But, it’s on the NBC Olympics website and it was great to watch her toss around her opponent, then talk about it, and finally talk about her family and mother. The evening coverage is on again this evening, meaning that this blog entry will take quite a while to get written, proofed, and finally published.

Sony DSC-T20
Sony DSC-T20

Speaking of video, I have a little Sony DSC-T20 point-and-shoot camera that has the capability of taking video clips. I’m not particularly happy with the video that it produces … it’s very difficult to edit and combine with other video clips as it’s in an unusual format with interlaced audio. However, YouTube knows how to process the video. I haven’t done much with YouTube for quite a while, so while watching the Olympics tonight I uploaded four short videos to YouTube.

My new iPhone doesn’t take video, but it does have the ability to upload pictures directly to one of the photo sites on the Internet. Since I have a Flickr account, I’ve taken a couple of pictures and put them onto my Flickr account. The capability works reasonably well, but I’ve had to fuss a bit with settings to get the pictures to be in the right orientation when they get uploaded. I think there’s an change to the picture album software coming up. Flickr has an interesting computer interface (called an API … meaning application programming interface) and I think it might be possible to link the picture album with photos on Flickr. The pictures would be on Flickr and the photo album would have the text and put the pictures into the desired sequence.

Hummingbirds at Sunset
Hummingbirds at Sunset

It’s also possible to link to pictures in my blog from Flickr, as I’ve done with the hummingbird picture. I’m sure it’s possible to do the same from Webshots, SmugMug, and others. That opens up the possibility of not having to resize pictures before putting them on the blog. However, it also means the pictures are on some other server and it’s possible that sometime in the future the link may disappear (such as if I don’t renew my annual subscription to Flickr?)…

So, on this Friday evening, I’m enjoying the track 1500 meter heats, men’s beach volleyball, and swimming (meaning Michael Phelps) is coming up soon. I love the Olympics … as does Heather as evidenced by her blog post!

Video Anyone?

Computer Stuff, General, ,

I managed to snag an invitation late last night from Loic Lemeur (one of those seriously type-a business people) for his newest web venture Seesmic. This morning I got everything setup and recorded my first Seesmic video. It’s a short (53 seconds) first attempt and I’m blown away. The website can get access to the webcam and microphone on my computer and record as a video whatever the webcam sees. That gets packaged as a video on their site and immediately sends a tweet to my Twitter account letting anyone following me (or tracking Seesmic) know that I’ve posted a video. It is amazingly easy to do.

Loic (it’s kind of funny using his first name … I’ve never met him!) is one of the people I follow on Twitter. He’s in the startup mode on this new company and each day records a video about what happened that day during the startup. That is what got me interested in him to begin with. Well, he also hobnobs with all the important people … such as dinner at the White House with President Bush and the French President a couple of days ago. After flying back to France on the French President’s airplane, he mentioned on Twitter than he had a few invites to give away. Being johnny-on-the-spot, I replied and got an invite.

Almost immediately after finishing the video, Seesmic sent out a tweet in Twitter (I didn’t know it was going to do that). Within seconds, I got a tweet from my son James in Missouri about the video. That’s when I looked at Twitter and saw the notification. A few minutes later, I sent a tweet: “Well, Seesmic is pretty dang cool. I just recorded a first brief (thankfully) video on Seesmic and within seconds all of Twitterland knows!” One minute later, the man himself replied: “loiclemeur @rolandksmith thanks for your feedback ‘Well, Seesmic is pretty dang cool.'”

I’m impressed. Another minute of my fifteen minutes of fame….