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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