The voices of Darfur are almost too horrible to hear.
Category Archives: YouTube
Painting the Mona Lisa with Paint
I’m writing my article for the VEA News and focusing on a random collection of Web 2.0 tools. I have to include Google Maps since I spent all day yesterday creating my first mash up of our Texas trip.
I went to YouTube and checked out my subscriptions. Here’s a very cool video from Eclectic Asylum Art. What if Da Vinci had had Paint? And Photoshop? Talk about media convergence:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk2sPl_Z7ZU]
Race or Culture?
The American Anthropological Association has a new website entitled, Race – Are We So Different? Interesting way of looking at the way race is constructed historically and personally. The underlying argument seems to be that race is more about how we look than how we act. Here’s a paragraph from the About page, “Looking through the eyes of history, science and lived experience, the RACE Project explains differences among people and reveals the reality – and unreality – of race. The story of race is complex and may challenge how we think about race and human variation, about the differences and similarities among people.”
Then, this morning, after I uploaded some video to YouTube, I did a little surfing. (I am, to be honest, procrastinating writing a paper.) I found the video below…an Asian American rapper. I don’t listen to rap on a regular basis, but I am fascinated by the whole phenomenon. And now here is a young Asian man seeming to step completely out of the stereotype. Jin’s video is completely self-conscious; he is looking at his life and his place in the world and moving through them to create something new. This video is called “I Quit” and was supposedly his swan song in rap. Evidently, however, he has reemerged as The Emcee. If I was really procrastinaing, it would be fun to ponder what that means…did he kill off a character only to bring a new one to life? A new “points of viewing” as Goldman-Segall would call it. But now that evoked her name, I need to get back to the paper in which I am using some of her ideas.
In Less Than A Decade
During the summer of 1998, my husband and I drove across the United State in our Tioga Arrow motor home, following in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark. Besides using the web to do a lot of our planning, we used technology to record the trip, too. We took a Macintosh PowerBook and a Sony Mavica camera with us. We used Pagemill to create webpages and then stopped by Kinko’s to upload them and email our friends. We felt very cutting edge.
Now, we are planning a trip to San Antonio and another to Vancouver. I’m using a wiki page to keep track of the itinerary, my delicious account for web resources, and Google Earth to plot the maps. Of course, I also made my flight and car reservations on the web, too, but that seems really old at this point.
I anticipate being able to find wireless widely available. I have become very fond of public libraries since many of them offer wireless. But it’s also currently available at my credit union, too! And, I’ve heard from camping friends, that many campgrounds are offering it just like hotels.
And, the publishing tools are so much easier, too, allowing us to take advantage of the wide spread access. We’ll use our flickr account to upload pictures and put digital video on YouTube or my iWeb site.
Just for fun…here’s video from our last road trip:
The Saga
So, I created a video in about two hours but have now spent almost that much time trying to get it to show up correctly in YouTube! I thought I had solved the problem before I took a break for dinner with a guest. I figured I hadn’t rendered the title correctly. (In fact, I thought maybe rendering was the issue with the graininess of my early video but that’s another story and it didn’t seem to be since I re-exported it, too, this evening.) Anyway, I tried rendering the title and re-uploading but still just got five seconds of a grey screen where the title should have been. Now, back at it, I have tried saving it as a quicktime movie rather than an mpeg-4. But that seems to be causing trouble for YouTube in terms of doing its own converting. YouTube does suggest using an mpeg-4 format.
So, I just went ahead and put it on my own server. And after another 10 minutes have discovered that WordPress doesn’t allow the embed tag so here’s the link: Whimbrel video.
It DOES allow you to embed video from YouTube and Google, but I’ve already given up on YouTube. Maybe I should try adding my video to Google while we sit and watch election returns since YouTube still has not processed my video! I am NOT impressed.
NB: I put it on Google in the mpeg-4 format and lost my titles again! I am trying the Quicktime version now since Google says it will recognize that. Just going to leave this edit window open. This is the last chance and then I am going to bed. Add another hour worth of time to trying to figure this out!
A few minutes later…good news…in Quicktime format, Google shows the titles. So, here’s the embedded video: