Videopress

Videopress

Video hosting is always a bit of a bother, as no one service does it all, as far as I am aware.

I did a fair bit of social reporting last week, and am already running into difficulties in finding a hosting solution that can cope with the size of the files I am wanting to upload; and which is accessible within the organisations that need to see them.

It turns out that my usual favourite choice, Vimeo, is blocked in a hell of a lot of places.

Well, VideoPress looks like it might be worth looking into. It’s been created by Automattic, the guys behind WordPress and various other cool things. It’s a video upload and hosting service that uses WordPress.com as its back end, as far as I can tell. But you can embed your videos wherever you like.

Here’s a video explaining more.

Catching up

Has it really been two weeks since I last posted here? Well, I’ve been busy, doing stuff. I promise.

Here’s a quick roundup of some of the stuff I would normally have been writing about here during the whirlwind of the last fourteen days…

DIUS and BERR are no more, and will now be called BIS. BIS already has a corporate website set up, within days of the creation of the department, all thanks to WordPress. Steph explains how. Neil Williams also played a big part as the other half of the BIS digital dream team

A bit of work I have been doing with Neil at what was BERR and now BIS has been involved with the Digital Britain report, and some of the online engagement around the development of that. This included the live blogging at the Digital Britain Summit a little while ago, and now incorporates a whole host of online stuff to do with the launch of the report next week, as I wrote up on the DB blog.

Following the fun of the PSFBuzz event in Manchester, another one is now planned in Newcastle in July. Once again, it has a stella array of speakers, and as no one else has volunteered, I’ll be chairing again. All the details are on the PSF events page.

More PSF news comes in the form of the PSFBuzz Government Web 2.0 Awards, a gloriously bonkers idea to reward the best in interactive government web stuff at a ceremony in December this year. Sounds like it will be a lot of fun, not least because I’ll be among the judges!

Very sad news that Tom Watson has resigned from his position as Minister for (amongst other things) Digital Engagement. He pushed this agenda much further than any of his predecessors, perhaps because he was the first to truly understand the brief, and what was required. Am sure this will not be the last we hear from him, though, and I’m excited to find out what he will be doing next.

The fact that Sir Tim Berners-Lee is helping out on ‘public information delivery’ has got to be a good thing, though.

LocalGovCamp is now exactly a week away and to say that I am feeling excited about it is something of an understatement. We have a full house of delegates, a load of interesting ideas for sessions and now a gang of people are organising social events for the Friday and Saturday night. Thanks, guys.

Even more exciting is that fact that Google have offered to support the event, and will hopefully be sending some of their guys along to help out with some of the sessions which involve their stuff.

Finally, if you are interested in how press offices can incorporate social web stuff into what they do, Emma’s post is essential reading.

Bookmarks for May 17th through June 1st

Stuff I have bookmarked for May 17th through June 1st:

LocalGovCamp group

Much planning is afoot for LocalGovCamp, the unconference for local government which is taking place on 20th June in Birmingham. All tickets are technically sold out, but if you are desperate to come, email me.

I took a wander around the venue – Fazeley Studios – last Friday and have to say I am really, really impressed. Plenty of space, light and airy and lots of blank white walls for projectors or post-it notes!

Remember – what is keeping this event free, and ensuring it is happening at all, is the terrific sponsorship we have received from a variety of sources. Check out the supporters page for more information on who is involved.

Anyone wanting local information about where to go and where to stay can find it on Jon Bounds’ excellent post.

To get some more discussions going around various issues at the event – including people putting forward ideas for sessions – I’ve created a Google Group for email based conversations.

All those with a ticket should have received an email invite. If you would like to join in the group – even if you can’t make the event – sign up below. Everyone is welcome. Well, not everyone. But you know what I mean.

Google Groups
Subscribe to LocalGovCamp
Email:

Visit this group

Even if you don’t fancy joining this group, I’ll still be pinging the odd email to the attendees list on Eventbrite and adding updates to the main blog, so don’t worry!

Wave power

Google have announced something really rather interesting called Wave.

(Warning: looooooong video)

Essentially,

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

Lots of people are very excited about it. Take TechCrunch, for example:

Wave offers a very sleek and easy way to navigate and participate in communication on the web that makes both email and instant messaging look stale.

What is really interesting is the way that Wave will work as an open standard, with APIs available to developers to make it possible to embed the way Wave does things into other applications.

Of course, before we get too excited about Wave, we need to remember Knol, Sites (which I actually quite like, but no-one else seems to) and Base. Google gets a lot of stuff wrong.

But when they get things right, such as with Gmail and of course search, the results can be devastating. For that reason alone, it’s vital to keep up with Wave and its development.

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