P2P Audiovisual Net Beginner's Guide

Beginner's Guide to the AudioVisual P2P Net

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Using the net's P2P audiovisual infrastructures can be seen as connecting oneself to a collective mind - an intelligence much smarter than each individual.

Here is how it works:

Tools and Platforms A blog (basically a dynamic homepage, last entries show up first) is an individual's or an organisation's virtual home in the audiovisual P2P net - here a review of blogging tools, providers and some basic blogging introduction: Time to check: Are you using the right blogging tool? (www.ojr.org, 14.07.05). Popular is the free and open-source WordPress platform: http://wordpress.org/. (*) New blog entries can be tagged (keywords describing the content) and then be found via blog search engines like Technorati http://www.technorati.com/ or smaller but more specialised ones like Blogdigger http://www.blogdigger.com/. While images can be uploaded directly to most free blogging services, there are many specialised image sharing sites. This review gives an overview about the most important photo sharing services like Flickr, Photobucket or Zoomr: The Web Photo Sharing Site Faceoff (www.readwriteweb.com, 05.09.06). An important tool for bloggers is the RSS feed, readers can subscribe to a blog's feed (like to a channel) and will be notified automatically about all updates. Feedburner http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/home is the largest feed management provider and offers a very useful free basic service. There is a vast choice of "free" services for media hosting - important in this context is the question "Who owns the content?". Since those "free" services all want to make money somehow they all have a "terms of service" or "terms of use agreement" that should be read and understood before uploading media. In many cases "free" means that the service retains the right to alter the user's media and to use it for advertising. Some of the more recent "terms of service" agreements from some of the better known providers seem to be very bad for the users/creators. See also (in this P2P Wiki section): * Summary: Where To Publish What...? Possible Solutions * Licences, like the popular Creative Commons licences http://creativecommons.org/ are important for an unbureaucratic online distribution: instead of restricting a user's possibility by reminding him of the copyright, online audio and video gets distributed because users are encouraged to share e.g. a podcast under a certain license. For musicians/DJs specially interesting is ccMixter http://www.ccmixter.org/ - featuring Creative Commons licensed samples/remixes and making it easy for artists to focus on the creative part of their work. The Creative Commons Search http://search.creativecommons.org/ finds Creative Commons licensed media. The open-source Miro http://www.getmiro.com/ and Broadcast Machine http://www.getmiro.com/create/broadcast/, as well as Videobomb http://www.videobomb.com/ - all from the Participatory Culture Foundation http://participatoryculture.org/ - are very interesting options for distributing/promoting independent online film and video. Mefeedia http://mefeedia.com/ (web-based) "is the best place to find videoblogs and podcasts", while FireAnt http://fireant.tv/" (software) "is your personal connection to the online media universe!" More about videoblogging and its platforms at Freevlog http://freevlog.org/. This Open media projects list at Ourmedia http://www.ourmedia.org/about/open-media-projects is a starting point for exploring a variety of other alternative/participatory media projects on the web. A good general resource for audio/video web related topics is the Wikipedia: e.g.: Podcast http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast or RSS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_%28file_format%29 An overview about more online video services, including some of the better know mainstream ones like YouTube http://www.youtube.com/, gives the online article The 17 Most Talked About Online Video Companies and How They Differ (splashcastmedia.com, 08.02.07 - with video about, incl. promotion of article writer's own service, and blog entry). See also (in this P2P Wiki section): Online Video from the Related Online Articles list. (*) While http://wordpress.com/ offers free blogs this service appears to be somewhat limited at this point: CSS style sheet editing is disabled in the for free version, use of any kind of JavaScript code is not allowed for security reasons and for posting videos currently only Google Video, YouTube and a few other selected services are supported. Another popular and free blogging platform is Google's Blogger http://www.blogger.com/ that does not have those limitations.

* How-To * Online Audio/Video Basics Make Internet TV http://makeinternettv.org/ is a site from the Participatory Culture Foundation that offers "step-by-step instructions for shooting, editing, and publishing online videos". The Freevlog Tutorial http://freevlog.org/tutorial/ has "everything you need to get started videoblogging" (also called Vlogging). The Ourmedia Learning Center http://www.ourmedia.org/learning-center/ is "a rich educational resource for everything you wanted to know about user-created video, audio, and other forms of citizens' media". It also features an Open Media Directory http://www.ourmedia.org/learning-center/open. See also these podcasting tutorials/introductions: HOW TO - Podcasting for educators (www.makezine.com, 08.12.06) Podcasting in Education (chatt.hdsb.ca) Video Production Basics Video Toolbox http://www.youtube.com/t/video_toolbox is YouTube's video making guide. Very good for beginners - not just for YouTube users. Make Better Video for YouTube http://www.videomaker.com/youtube/ (where YouTube's "Video Toolbox" tutorials come from) offers more quite useful video making tutorials for the advanced beginner. The Wikipedia iMovie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMovie and Windows Movie Maker http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Movie_Maker entries are good starting places for basic video editing software. A basic DV video editing software for Linux is the open-source Kino http://www.kinodv.org/. Another very interesting resource (in the making) is the Filmmaking course from Wikiversity http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Filmmaking that attempts to offer a full (and free) film making online course.

See also (in this P2P Wiki section): Tour 1: Indie Film Maker's (Editor's) Tour Tour 2: Online Audio, Media Publishing & Online Media/Art Communities Tour How-To Sites/(Pro) Tutorials and Media Aggregation/Management

Theory The so called "digital revolution" at the end of the 20th century was often exclusively described as a technological revolution - it was going to bring consumers a new "digital" quality (CDs instead of LPs) and advanced productivity to almost every industry. Ten years after the web went mainstream a different picture evolves: consumers turn into producers, we blog about a Participatory Culture and Citizen Journalism and we share our media - recommended online article: We Are the Web (www.wired.com, August 2005) by Kevin Kelly. Or in short: what was "Power to the people" in the '60 of the last century today is We Are the Media http://www.ourmedia.org/node/9237, "this is a Video Mash-up about the Vlogging movement".

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