Thursday Jan 21, 2010
Saturday Dec 12, 2009
A conversation about LISA, conferences in general, open source communities, Solaris, OpenSolaris, Sun culture, Sun personalities, the value of video, social media, the old days on CompuServe, supporting customers online, why video instead of text blogs, measuring online impact, Facebook, Twitter, bit.ly, the next big thing in social media, technical education...
Friday Dec 11, 2009
Many of the posts on this blog are tips and how-to's, originally published in no particular order, that add up to the beginnings of a videoblogging manual. So here's a table of contents, along with some notes which will eventually be developed into posts of their own. I'll update this one from time to time as I have time to write more coherent material.
Why Video?
GHC09: Deirdré Talks Video on Ed & Ashley's 5 Minute Show
Pre-Production
Equipment: My Upgraded Videoblogging Rig
Arrangements to make in advance:
- prepping the speaker(s)
- Slides: should not be too dense with text (they'll be hard to read in a video window, or from the back of a conference room), and please provide them to me in advance!
Shooting
- Filming Engineers (video)
-
Camera Motion (video)
Tip: Don't use HD - just gives you a lot more bytes to deal with (35GB/hour!) that will be thrown away in compression.
Post-Production
Download from tape to computer
Edit
Compress
Host
Embed/Syndicate
Advertise
Measure
...yes, these topics need a lot more development!
Sunday Nov 22, 2009

^ attendees filling in surveys
As sponsors of the SC09 Broader Engagement initiative, and because we gave such a great party last year, we were asked to sponsor a party again this year for students attending SC09. For a number of reasons we weren't able to commit to this until the last minute, so thanks to Tiki Suarez-Brown and Tony Baylis of the Broader Engagement program for their patience and considerable effort in making sure this took place.
Because it was so last-minute, this year's party was much more low-key than last year's, but seems to have been appreciated by the ~250 students and educators who attended. They arrived around 7 pm after a full day of other activities, and were mostly glad to relax, eat a good dinner, and chat.
Everyone who attended had the option to fill in a brief survey in return for an OpenSolaris t-shirt and the chance to win an iPod in a drawing later in the evening. No one minded doing the "work" - we used up almost all of the 250 surveys we had printed.

For entertainment, we had two rented Nintendo Wii systems, which many enjoyed.
The event was also an opportunity for Sun folks to meet and talk with students and educators (potential future collaborators and colleagues!). The Sun folks introduced themselves from a small stage at the end of the room, and, as last year, stayed busy all evening conversing with our guests.

Above, Sun's Josh Simon's plays Wii archery with students. As you can see, some people put on their OpenSolaris t-shirts immediately.
Tuesday Nov 10, 2009
- 100 hours of video shot to date (and more to come before the year ends)
- 35 hours of video edited (mostly by me) and available (some of it only internally)
- ~16 events/locations shot
Total cumulative views on all "my" videos through the end of October is 88,672.
Technologies & topics covered have included ZFS, open storage, community, Java, open source & the law, e-discovery, HPC, Solaris cluster, high availability, virtualization, performance...
This blog copyright 2010 by Deirdre' Straughan

