Tag: video

YouTube Activism

Here’s some pretty amazing YouTube activism by Greg Hewlett, a blogger, Texan, amputee and, by all accounts, fine blues singer. 

Link for feeds.

Unfortunately, Greg reports that the bill amendment that would have forced insurance companies to provide better prosthetics coverage was stripped from the bill.

While unfortunately not successful in this case, this video is a great example of the sort content activism that can reach a lot of people in a short time.  I probably wouldn’t have read a letter about this topic from someone I didn’t know.  But I watched this video 3 times.

Good pickin’, effective message.  Rock on.

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Exile on Main Street – Video Style

exile

One of the great things about YouTube is all the music videos you can find.  Here’s almost all of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, perhaps the greatest rock record ever made.

Rocks Off
Rip this Joint
Shake Your Hips (w/Bluesberry Jam)
Casino Boogie (by Dead Flowers, a Stones cover band)
Tumbling Dice
Sweet Virginia
Torn and Frayed (not available, which is a pity)
Sweet Black Angel (cover by Jose Butez)
Loving Cup (my favorite song on the record)
Happy
Turd on the Run (amateur music video)
Ventilator Blues (by Smoking Stones, a Stones cover band)
I Just Want to See His Face (not available)
Let it Loose (Lost mashup)
All Down the Line
Stop Breaking Down (cover by The White Stripes)
Shine a Light
Soul Survivor (not available)

Classic REM

OmegaMom leads me to PAgent (now subscribed there) who leads me to YouTube in search of music videos.

So. Central Rain, one of my favorite REM songs, from 10/6/83.

I hadn’t thought of YouTube as a place to mine for music before, but now I do.

Stay tuned.

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About the Video Hosting Services

Dwight Silverman has a post this morning about the various video hosting services. He links to a post by DVguru that summarizes many of the options. I’ve looked at many of these sites as a part of my Web 2.0 Wars series and I’ve uploaded quite a few videos to test them out. Here’s my take.

I have traditionally used Castpost to host the videos I upload, because I am an alpha tester and because it was one of the first services that appeared on my radar. Castpost is still in alpha testing and has fallen behind some of the other services in the mindshare race. I hope it catches up, but in the meantime, I want to talk about the other video-related sites I use.

For finding good (and by good I generally mean funny) content, I start with YouTube and end up with Google Video. If there’s something video-related starting to create a buzz in the blogosphere, 9 times out of 10 it will be available on one of those sites. I like YouTube’s layout and interface better, but Google Video is easy to use and much better than many of Google’s recently added “me too” services.

But there’s another option for hosting video content you want to quickly add to your blog that I like better than either of those.

Stickam is neat because, in addition to uploading video files, you can create a video with your webcam directly from the Stickam application and save it directly to your Stickam account. A link is then automatically generated that will allow you to embed that video on a web page or in a blog post. The main Stickam page is too busy and not quite as intuitive as YouTube’s, but the extra features make it my choice for the creation and/or uploading of video content.

If you want to create, combine and edit videos online, the place to start is probably Jumpcut. One cool thing about Jumpcut is that you can remix other people’s videos to make your own version. I found this excellent song and equally excellent video at Jumpcut.

For me it breaks down like this:

Finding Video: YouTube; Google Video
Uploading Video: YouTube; Castpost
Creating Video for My Blog: Stickam
Editing and Remixing Video: Jumpcut

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