Posting Mechanics

I posted about quite a few shows last year, and any passionate hobby starts to become less play and more work as the total number of hours spent on it passes forty in any given week. I'm not exactly whinging well, only whining a little, I suppose. Going to multi-day festivals (Sasquatch, CHBP, Bumbershoot) and taking hours of video and hundreds of photos a day was fun and occasionally grueling, and I built up "media wrangling debt."

Getting 2 or 3 hours of video footage groomed down to identified bands performing one or two numbers, properly uploaded, titled, tagged and licensed on youtube, photos up on flickr, videos off of SLR onto youtube rather than flickr, audio files identified and labelled, backups of audio, video and photos onto local external HD, refs generated for embedding into blogs, all that has to be slogged through before writing and posting the blog. Half the time I needed the videos to remind me which acts I saw when, and what they sounded like. I have now had the charming experience of wrangling files from a performance a semi-missed that kicked my ass in retrospect. I was there to start the recording, but I was busy doing something like making tacos so I didn't actually experience the performance live. Later as I uploaded all of the files I listened to an audio recording and the song was excellent, I was floored by what I had missed. I don't even know who it was, and I don't have a good method nailed down for posting audio, so you'll have to take my word for it - it was a fascinating experience.

I haven't "solved" using audio in my blogs, but using videos with youtube and photos with flickr couldn't be easier (once the content is uploaded, anyway) and I can link anything in that tickles my fancy so the blogging process is mostly pretty good.

In this last week the winter storm and its aftermath made the internet based tools I rely on unreliable and I was reminded how much I take for granted. My camera takes better pictures than I could if I had to do it manually and it's easy to take piles of photos, post them on flickr, and use them in my blogs.
No negatives to mail in, no physical prints to pay (and wait) for, no need to scan for on-line access, they're already digital. Now throw in 60 frame/sec HD video with reasonably good audio that can take high volume situations and still deliver reasonable quality and make that easy to trim, label, tag, upload, and embed. No lab work needed, no physical tapes to send anywhere, as long as the internet is available I can publish word-wide in a few hours. The same week wikipedia and other sites went dark to protest SOPA my internet access went intermittent to unavailable right at the peak of being snowed in and really wishing I had internet access. Nobody was hurt and we kept ourselves occupied, so it really wasn't a big deal, it just brought home to me how thoroughly the internet has ingrained itself into my media production and consumption patterns. It wasn't that big a deal because the internet was back working normally within a day; I do require a functioning internet to publish world-wide for free.