Media Content

After Bumbershoot a few years ago I had so many photos and videos with nowhere to put them or share them so I decided to pay for a flickr account.

I'm quite happy with flickr, it was an early adopter of the "expose a link/embed URL via UI" feature that I'm fond of for putting photos in my blog. Like this:
I just renewed for my 3rd year and I have 15,744 items, mostly photos with an occasional short video. I used it a little for videos, but it only allows short ones.
For photos it works fine, though.




I like to take videos and pictures of the shows I go to and then blog with them. YouTube is my current favorite tool for videos. My account supports longer videos too, although I usually break longer chunks of video down into individual songs. Mostly.

Sometimes I get lazy and leave things together and that's not all bad. Breaking the songs apart into separate videos gets rid of the overarching "show" element to some degree.
I've been much more rabid about getting shows taped since I got my second flip. I have well over 500 videos on my YouTube channel, over 31 hours of mostly music. A bit more than 6 hours was recorded at the Vera Project.

I got my 20,000 view of my YouTube videos in October when the channel is 10 months old.


I use flickr for the photos and YouTube for the videos and embed them in my blog, VirtualSoundNW.blogspot.com. I've got somewhat over 6,000 views of 94 or so blogs.


I'm pretty happy with flickr and YouTube, although organizing tools aren't that good so flickr is kind of overwhelming when you have more than 10,000 pictures.


What would I like to add on to my bag of tricks?

I record sound at shows using a field recorder on occasion. The web didn't offer great integration options until recently, but with HTML 5 that should get better quickly. Posting audio of songs on occasion would be fun.

Being able to use multiple audio and video sources and edit them down to a single video would be cool, but it requires tools and expertise I don't currently have.

Delivery options are interesting. I have 6+ hours of Vera performances on YouTube with a play list that includes all of them. I can build an app that launches that, but a more interesting variant would be to store my preferences for the list - I can mark individual tracks as don't ever play, rarely, occasionally, or frequently play, for example. Now I can run a random selection tailored to your preferences and let you adjust on the fly and add new tracks as they show up...

I interviewed a couple of members of the Knowmads, a local Seattle hip hop outfit, and saw and recorded them 3 times and posted blogs with videos. I've gotten to know them a bit and I plan on checking in at upcoming shows to record them again. With any luck they'll add me to the guest list so I can see them around town, not just at the Vera Project. I'd like to get to some of their shows and I'd like to build similar relationships with other local bands.

The Vera Project has live sound and sound recording classes, I plan on taking those with Ben and perhaps his siblings and my wife if they're interested. I ran sound on a house party and enjoyed getting to twiddle knobs and feel like I was contributing. Producing and recording sound is something I plan on getting better at, too. It's easy to get better when you're starting with no experience or skills!