What I learned today.
If you need to record streaming video (Windows Media, Real Player, etc.), use Snapz Pro X.
It’s the quickest, easiest way to grab a video stream off the web and turn it into a Quicktime movie suitable for Blip.tv or YouTube.
When creating a central point for your audio/video podcast or other media content, use Blip.tv to store and manage the files. But post everything to YouTube too.
This was good advice from my friend, Baratunde. Blip.tv is an excellent service that stores your media files (including multiple formats and sizes), quickly and easily cross-posts your content to a variety of different sources (Facebook, MySpace, blog, etc.), provides advanced statistics compared to YouTube, and can help you create branded media players for your website - all for free!
It’s a pretty slick service that I’m just getting into, but so far it’s been great.
Thing is, you still gotta post to YouTube. I know that my friend had some experience using both services. When I asked him, he reminded me that no matter how great the blip.tv tools are for you, the content producer, the audience still sees YouTube as a destination for video.
When people come to your website looking for audio or video, feel free to serve up the blip.tv player. But you never know what will go viral, so you have to have your content on YouTube, too, to reach the widest possible audience.
I haven’t done a mountain of video in my day, but I thought this was solid advice. Consider it something learned today.
Congressional campaigns can’t put video clips of the House floor on the campaign website.
Needless to say, my plan for today was to grab a cool clip from the C-SPAN archives and repurpose it for a campaign I work on.
C-SPAN has no problem with this. In fact, they recently restated their copyright policy to make this explicitly OK. As far as C-SPAN is concerned, the proceedings of the House are in the public domain.
Thing is, we learned that House ethics rules forbid Members from using footage of the House floor for campaign purposes. It seems like a dumb rule to me, but thems the breaks.
Conclusion: The bad news is that number 3 basically made numbers 1 and 2 useless to me for now. But the good news is that I did learn 3 new things today.
wow, you made me sound all smart and stuff. any clue as to the history of the ethics rule. don't tell me its something about how the members didn't want to debase that august house by reducing its noble works to an ad campaign. in fact, i bet that's it.
good luck with the campaign