Uba Kontrovasie

Deconstructing Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry (Steve Forrest for The New York Times)

I’m really liking StephenFry.com, he has turned into a celebrity Social Media Evangelist.

The only thing that I question about his whole concept is the use of his own video content? Why is it not being hosted on a platform like Vimeo, Revver or Viddler? If people could embed his video content onto their own blogs and websites it would travel so much further, enabling him to gain more attention from the blogosphere and social video websites such as the ones that I have mentioned above.

I keep seeing various websites self hosting video content, personally think this is an expensive solution in comparison to all the free, community enabled, social video websites that are available.

In addition to cost the efficiencies of using social video websites, the marketing and distribution benefits exceed what can be achieved through self hosting.

Tags: social media, stephen fry, video communities, video distribution, video hosting, video syndication

BBC moves to embrace remix culture

I discovered today that the BBC are behind a project called Masher. Masher essentially enables people to splice and mash their own video’s with content from the BBC Motion gallery.

This is the second move the BBC have made to recognise how people want to view and use content.

The launch of the iPlayer was monumental because it enabled people to watch BBC content when and wherever they liked. The BBC recognised that they couldn’t beat pirate culture so instead they launched a service, which enabled people to watch their content on demand at their own pace.

The launch of masher I believe symbolises the BBC’s recognition of remix culture. There are so many people on youtube using illegally ripped video content to make their own remixed and mashed videos, like piracy, remixing is a movement that the BBC or any other broadcaster will not be able to stop. The BBC offering their archive for this project symbolises a degree of acceptance towards the remix movement.

I am sure this will be the first of many UK broadcaster’s stepping up to accept the movement and I hope in time they make the embed codes for the mashed videos available and allow users to download mashed videos and distribute them however they like.

Let’s watch, wait and see what happens next.

Tags: bbc masher, masher, pirate culture, remix culture, Video Content, VJ

Obama won because of hip-hop

I saw this interview live whilst I was eating my supper, other friends who also saw it said they cringed.

I’ve got all of Dizzees’ albums and I know for a fact he’s not stupid, some of his lyrics are quick witted and quite clever. Part of me thinks was he playing up to the camera?

Judging by the comments on youtube his views, combined with Jeremy Paxman selecting him for the interview did not go down too well with the public.

Did Obama win because of hip-hop? Er…No!

I do however think that rap superstars and I mean real rap superstars like Jay-Z and Puffy endorsing Obama definitely worked in his favour. Obamas’ political campaign was executed in a close to perfect manner, endorsements from key celebrities showed that he understood or at least was trying to understand youth culture and I believe this helped him secure a lot of crucial votes from younger 18-25 year old voters.

Who did McCain get backing from? Arnold “Hum-Vee” Schwarzenegger (I can’t believe I spelt that right the first time) and Sly Stallone, hmm…who do you think made the smart the move?

Either way if you were ever looking for a good example of word of mouth marketing try Jay-Z bigging up Barack Obama at a packed Glastonbury headline performance.

Tags: advocacy, McCain, Obama, US election 2008, WOM, youth culture

Night Photography

Smashing today produced a nice post with 60 examples of really good night time photography, a couple of weeks ago I did a little experiment of my own.

My recent investment, I mean bankruptcy, sorry investment into a new DSLR body has got me experimenting again.

Heres how I took that shot:

- Wide angle lens, set the focus to infinity
- Set white balance to shade
- Aperture f11 or higher (you can play with this, you’re aiming for a fuller focus)
- Balance the shutter speed
- Use a tripod
- Set ISO to 100 (don’t worry…no bluring if you’re using a tripod)

I know the M4 off the Ford Bridge isn’t exactly the highway’s of Tokyo but like I said, just me playing.

Tags: Digital photo, low light photography, night photo

Digging Bookmarks

Soo every other brand or website is dying to be on-trend in regards to “social media” and “web2”. This has sparked a number of webmasters and developers to add “add this” or “tell a friend” buttons to their blogs or websites.

It’s a good move, and a quick win that I would certainly recommend, however, brand owners fail to realise that adding the little social bookmarking widget to their webpages only equates to half a job being done.

Social media evangelists and Brand Marketers should use social bookmarking websites to build social relations, I will illustrate how to do this with an example:

If I owned say…a shoe website and I added a social bookmarking widget to it, I would be sure to have people “digging” some of my pages. Aside from a few Digg’s and traffic from Digg itself I wouldn’t receive any other significant gains as result of adding the widget.

So…how do would I utilise Digg more effectively?

Well if my own website is all about shoes and fashion, I would scour the web for good content on these very topics and submit them to my very own branded Digg account.

This activity serves two purposes it would allow me, the brand owner to find out more about my trade and industry and it would also make my brands presence on Digg legitimate.

With this in mind I would be able to build relationships and communicate with other people who have shared interests. The good thing about using this approach to social bookmarking is that it is completely transparent and although my account would be branded, people would still engage with me as I have been harvesting information which is of a shared interest.

It’s not rocket science really, it’s merely using a platform for its intended purpose, however, the early days of “social media optimisation” saw a rise in spammer’s trying to game the system with alias accounts etc.

Like other types social engagement activity, if it’s done the right way and by this we mean the ethical way, it will work!

What’s the key ingredient? Just a little bit of graft

Tags: bookmarks, digg, social bookmarking

Big Words

Ever stuck in the middle of a sentence and not sure what word to use? If you’re anything like me you probably haven’t done an english degree or swallowed an dictionary recently, thinking about the right words to use in sentences doesn’t always come naturally.

The problems don’t stop there as reading tech/design/marketing blogs and magazines do not improve your vocabulary either.

So as nerdy as it sounds I’ve gone back to using a tried and tested method of expanding my vocabulary, good old “word of the day”.

Merriam-Webster have a good word of the day page on their website and if you’re using a Mac running Leopard you can use Safari to create a web-clip and dashboard widget.

Tags: Apple, language, vocabulary, webclip, widget