Re-Vlog

I started Twittervlog 10 years ago

I started Twittervlog on March 29 2007 with this post:

The shocking innovation here was not just that I was sitting on the loo,
but that I could record a video on my phone and post it from my phone straight to Twitter.

(Instead of downloading it from phone to computer, converting it, uploading it, and copying the link into Twitter.)

And I know it’s hard to remember – but in March 2007, that was super futuristic.

Twitter was newish and had only around 100k users.
The first iPhone wasn’t released until 3 months later – June 2007; and it couldn’t record video for another 2 years until the 3Gs was released in June 2009.
YouTube didn’t connect to Twitter until March 2009.  Crazy.

This first video describes the workflow:

  1. Record a video on my phone.
  2. Email from the phone via wifi to my Blip.tv video hosting account.
  3. Twitterfeed.com picks up my Blip.tv RSS feed and posts to my Twitter account.

There were 3 great things that allowed this – all now defunct:

  • The Nokia N93, which recorded 320×240 video, had a great design with pistol grip, email and wifi.
  • Blip.tv, which hosted videos for vloggers, had a user-specific email address you could send files to and an RSS feed of your latest posts.
  • Twitterfeed.com (by Mario) which took any RSS feed and posted it to Twitter to @twittervlog

I then added in a couple of other things:

  • The built in video editor in the N93 (totally amazing back then) – I also created black & white lofi titles which I copied to the phone and added to the start and end of my videos.
  • A blog at twittervlog.blogspot.com (later rupert.how) which Blip.tv automatically posted to – Blip had so many great features, way ahead of YouTube.

I thought it’d be a brief experiment, but I got hooked on being able to post video so easily from my phone – so it took off, and replaced my old fatgirlinohio.org and workingformydad.com videoblogs.

There’s a wiggly path from this video of me sitting on the toilet describing that 3 step workflow, to the job I’ve had since 2010 as a workflow consultant for people like the BBC.

I was all about the lofi 320×240 straight-to-web 30 second video thing.  I rolled my eyes at people wasting time and bandwidth shooting HD, and predicted the death of TV.  Now I help TV people who are shooting thousands of hours of 8K (16 times as big as HD) and shoot nothing of my own.

I disrupted myself!

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My RyanIsHungry.com Mixtape For Change

When Obama wins, it’ll be the result of a great surge of enthusiasm for change. Then there’ll be a short window of opportunity when anything will seem possible and everyone will feel motivated. But it’s up to us to make those changes happen – and most of the time we’re immediately stopped dead by our own fear that change is too difficult.

The thing I *love* about Ryan Is Hungry videos is that they’re about ordinary people showing us how to make big and small changes – environmental, political and economic. It’s inspiring to see how possible it is.

But instead of just sending you off there – knowing that most of you wouldn’t click the link – I thought I’d make a playlist of some of my favourites to give you a taste.

Browse the episodes on the right of the player, and then visit RyanIsHungry.com

Click the TV screen at the bottom of the player to watch in Full Screen.

I created this by making a Playlist and creating my own Show Player at Blip.tv

Podcast/Download

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The Big Shave

I started growing my beard a year ago today. It’s my beardiversary. Randomly, a friend emailed me this morning and said “Love the beard” as a sign-off.

Like the N93, it was just supposed to be a brief experiment. I even shaved it off after 2 months to make one of my first proper little films with my phone (and as a tribute to Scorsese for finally winning his Oscar). I used the same music as his amazing 1967 short The Big Shave. I posted it on FatGirlInOhio – it was pre-Twittervlog. So lots of you won’t have seen it – and really, it also belongs here.

And the original, so you can compare and contrast:

Alternative formats:
Quicktime / Flash

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