Apperceptions

Videoblogging Week 2011 - Day 1 - Herding Chickens

markus@apperceptions.org (Markus Sandy) — Mon, 02 May 2011 10:04:16 PDT

Good friends @joshleo and @ryanne reminded me that today is the first day of Videoblogging Week 2011 and so here we go.

I thought "what can I do to make a fun video quickly?" The answer was obvious: Chickens.

I often make a yearly video showing the grounds at the Ojai Digital Dojo and so this video is in that spirit. We get a 5 minute tour of the grounds from a rather different perspective. This is a video of me herding the chickens from the garden back to their coop. That's a fair distance and usually good for a few laughs if you find humor in herding things like cats or developers.

Apologies for the lack of stabilization, but I think you'll understand that this is a tough job and it's hard to get the helicopter with the gyro-mounted cam in these tight spots ;)

Enjoy.

Download original (MPEG H.264 1280x720), Ogg/Vorbis, WebM and other formats from the Internet Archive:
http://www.archive.org/details/VideoBloggingWeek2011-Day1-HerdingChickens

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

An Internet Archive Cleanup Day on 1/1/2012?

markus@apperceptions.org (Markus Sandy) — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 17:33:12 PST

I love exploring the Internet Archive and building tools to help find media out there in the commons. As with any great collection or archive, there is a need for various kinds of cleanup tasks. Here's a few things that I'd like to help clean up:

* Missing files. Bad uploads. Missing transcodes..
* Missing (core) metadata. I've even seen missing publication dates.
* Constructive reviews & ratings. This may also be good way to add metadata such as tags, shootlists, etc.
* Inappropriate contributions. There is lots of spam and other items that should be darkened.
* Transcodings. Many transcoded videos are missing audio.
* Duplicates. I have a few I could should remove.
* SEO. Promote what you love.

For some time, I've been thinking about trying to organize and promote an Internet Archive Cleanup Day. Yesterday, Lucas Gonze pointed out that it was Public Domain Day...

I did not know that! It occurred to me that this would have been a great day for an IACD and shoved the idea onto the back burner.

Today, Lucas asked for ideas about what to do to celebrate the next PDD...

So let's but these idea back on the front-burner and start thinking about what kind of Public Domain Cleanup Day activities might make sense.

Of course, an obvious activity is contributing to the commons. See Lucas' post "license on my own music" for a discussion about how he licenses the PD music he covers. Lucas organized a fun and thought provoking session at BarCampLA 2006 on best practices for covering PD works. This could be the basis of PDD contribution activities.

I'll post some new search tools to help find media and collections of interest that can benefit from some cleanup help.

What other kinds of things might be good to try during a yearly PD cleanup effort? How can we make it fun, or maybe even a game?

New Year, New Blog

markus@apperceptions.org (Markus Sandy) — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 17:27:40 PST

I feel like rebooting my personal blog for the new year. I'll use it mainly to elaborate on Twitter conversations, political rants, web project ideas, personal photos and videos.

I often find that I want to get deeper into some topics that start with, but just don't fit into, 140 character conversations.

I'll use Blogger for a while and see where it goes. I'll try and import my old posts and videos at some point. Otherwise, I'll move it to something like Wordpress or Drupal. For now, I'd like to keep things simple and hassle free (no upgrades!).