Un Posto al Sole: Finding My Place in the Sun

Colorado sunrise this morning (yes, I was up very early).

download for iPod

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...

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

What's videoblogging?

Pre-Production

Equipment: My Upgraded Videoblogging Rig

Arrangements to make in advance:

• prepping the speaker(s)

• When You're in Front of the Camera

• Filming Engineers (video)

• 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!
  

• Capturing Good Sound for Video
  

• Getting Good Sound at a Conference (video)
  

Shooting

• Shooting Presentations

• 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!

^ 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.

Recently realized that a dumb spreadsheet error (mine) was causing a serious undercount in the total views of my videos. My video stats for 2009 now read:

• 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...