learning the ropes

Fixed the player settings to better live on a black background blog.
A second upload test so I can retry cross-posting to my blog. The custom player settings should be adjusted for a smaller size (perhaps 400 wide) and also to hide the playback controls a bit more.

This is a test of uploading a video to flickr for hosting.  Unfortunately, Flickr only allows two video uploads per month in a free accout.

I’ve been trying to find a “workflow” that will make it easy for Wendy to post videos into her blog.  There are a couple of considerations:

• Wendy prefers to keep the videos private right now (avoiding video services such as Youtube, Viddler, Vimeo, Blip.tv).
• The posting process should be easy as adding an image to a post (or a youtube video) — hand-editing “embed code” snippets is probably not going to make the cut.

So far, these considerations mean that she will probably need to host the video files on her site.  In the past few days as I’ve been researching how to do this, I was focusing more on the WordPress side of the problem: finding an integrated workflow that makes the posting process easier.  This research has turned up a few WordPress plugins:

• Stream Video Player looks promising — and the interface for adding the video is typing a special tag that WordPress recognizes when the plugin is installed.  The backend of this process (encoding the videos) will be a bit complex, though.
• WordPress also has its own built-in video player, but again, it doesn’t handle the encoding portion of the process.

This morning, I took a slightly different approach to figuring out how to solve the video posting problem we’re having.  I searched for “host your own video”.  Michael Martine’s post on whether to host your own videos offers a concise summary of the considerations.  My inclination would be to go for a video hosting service (perhaps Flickr… which seems to allows the content owner a good degree of control over the reuse of uploaded content) to keep things simple.

I think that part of the “meta” conversation of this aspect of documenting our work is Wendy’s exploration of public/privacy.  We’re also putting out “private” conversation (or somewhat edited versions of private conversation here), but at the same time want to control how it’s used.

Spot lights shining on tables, illuminating the text. (text will be the halves of cell phone conversations. BTW last night when I told DK the idea for title “Half the Conversation” said, “Half the Story.” ) Anyway, maybe the text should not sandblasted on glass. Maybe we want more modest materials. Maybe all cardboard. Choices of materials will be very important.

When I draw, I get different ideas than when I write.

good place to draw and think

Several sketches of simple rope&pulley interactions as a warm-up for things that could be built.

Here I began to think about the notion of conversations colliding in a space.  How could this effect be made physical?  My first thought was that some sort of braking mechanism could provide resistance to moving the pulley.