A 7-minute video interview with Raya Ribbius, program officer of the European Cultural Foundation, about youth media. Conducted at the Participatory Media in Vaxjo, Sweden, September 2006.

I shot this video borrowing a high-definition video camera from Swedish public television, SVT. Unfortunately, the conversion from PAL to NTSC required me to compress the video twice to fix the frame dimensions. (Ourmedia page | watch video)

Cross-posted to  Real People Network

Julia Ralund of Denmark’s publish broadcasting network dr.dk discusses how young people interact with media in Europe. (Ourmedia page | watch video)

Cross-posted to  Real People Network

I spent a couple of hours today experimenting with the new breed of online video editing websites. I figured this would be a good way for me to post the video clips I’ve been taking with my Nokia N-90 smart phone.

Alas, the experience wasn’t what I had hoped for. (Disclaimer: I know — and like — the people who run all three of these sites.)

My first stop was at VideoEgg. Their partnership with TypePad — the home of all three of my blogs — makes them a perfect candidate. Unfortunately, my video interview clocked in at 6 minutes 30 seconds, and VideoEgg still imposes a 5-minute maximum for all videos. I would have been happy to cut it down to 5 minutes, but couldn’t upload the video in the first place to do so.

Next, I returned to a site I like a lot: Eyespot. This week they released version 2.2 of the online software, with great options such as stats, comments, tags, ratings, embedded codes, hi-res downloads, contextual browsing and the like.

I uploaded my video successfully. I wanted to trim a few seconds just from the beginning and the end, but didn’t at first glance see the option for trimming a clip. (It’s there, but I missed it.) Instead, I opted for beginning and ending transitions and hit mix. The average time for others today was 23 seconds. Mine was a longer video, but after 15 minutes, I just gave up.

On to Jumpcut. Yahoo! bought them a few months ago, and I could see why. Nice, simple interface (as with the other two), and commands (like Slice and Delete) that were plain and simple. I successfully trimmed the video, but couldn’t figure out how to add a title to the beginning of the clip (my original attempt overlaid the title over the entire clip, blackening it out).

I published the final work, and a few seconds later, voila! There’s my interview with Jonna Anderson. (See above.) I intensely dislike the fact that the site gives the media creator no option to let users download the video instead of just stream it. It’s the YouTube phenomenon.

I’ll probably return and use all three sites at various times. But not for my everyday videoblogging. I’ll continue to use Ourmedia to host my videos.

Here’s the 5-minute music video I put together for the Idea Festival called Flavors of participatory media. It shows the wide range of citizen media — videoblogs, podcasts, citizen media sites, place sites, photo sharing sites, mash-ups — and carries a message: There’s far more to this revolution than lip syncing on YouTube. (Ourmedia page | watch video)

Here are a few photos from my trip to Louisville’s Idea Festival. That’s author/big thinker Ray Kurzweil, above.

I spoke this morning at the Idea Festival in Louisville, Ky., on the panel The New New Media, with Debbie Galant, Kevin Smokler and Buck Ryan. Talked about the changing media landscape and showed off a new video, Flavors of Participatory Media, which I hope to post online next week. 

Great to spend time with Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices and the Berkman Center (we ate at the Bristol Bar & Grille); I’ll be conducting a citizen journalism interview with him in a few minutes. Also great to dine with Debbie Galant (at The Pub yesterday for lunch) and Peter Sulyok (at Joe’s Crab Shack) and to share drinks with Kevin Smokler, Elizabeth Spiers and Rob May at the Red Star Tavern.

It’s always a pleasure to attend conferences with Ethan, who does the heavy lifting of blogging the panels. Here’s his recap of the New New Media panel.

Some other takeaways from the festival:

- Of the 150 people attending our session — business people, educators, marketing professionals — only 10 had ever blogged before. All had heard of blogs, however, and two-thirds had heard of podcasting.

- The citizen media site Barista.net, covering Bloomfield, Montclair and Glen Ridge, NJ, has had 4,400 editorial posts and 72,000 comments since it launched in May 2004. It charges about $200-$300 for an ad to run for a month, and site co-founder Galant is making twice as much as she did writing free-lance for the New York Times.

- Best company name: Elizabeth Spiers’ Dead Horse Media.

- Ethan Z. on virtual worlds: "This technology sucks, even with a fast broadband connection," because of the demands an interactive game places on the servers. Of course, Ethan often jacks in from places like Zimbabwe (two weeks ago), where the entire country’s broadband connection was cut off because someone didn’t pay the ISP bill, so they had to use dial-up out of South Africa.

- More Ethan: A billion people now have Internet access, and a billion more will come online in the next five years — chiefly from places like India, Russia, China, Brazil and South Africa. "We’re suddenly going to be having conversations with a billion people that we’re not used to listening to."