So this little ‘engagement’ thing has been floating around in my head for the last week and while I’m excited to talk to Nathan in the next few days about what he see’s as engagement and the big plan for the next few years as far as dtube is concerned I kinda just wanted to maybe put a considered vlog this morning about what engagement looks like to me, what a vlog helps me to do if you will.
tip of the day, look into the camera lens, not at the version of yourself you think you are via the phone screen, talk to the remote person, imagine the person on the other side of the screen watching.
vlogging originally started for me around 2005 — I was one of the first 100 strong video bloggers on yahoo video groups — you can go back to that time and see some of the messages I put up there, I’m sure it’s still around and it was a super exciting time — it was slightly pre youtube firing up and the majority of the vloggers were using blip.tv to host videos — that had an interesting start and I loved meeting the team in nyc on a trip and I felt like it was at a time when ANYTHING was possible, it felt like the early days of the AWARENESS gold rush — people were getting connected and sharing their lives online.
it was super raw, nobody knew the right way to do it, some people were just naturals, directors even, we would share codec information and encoding advice, different platforms, topics, discussion, use early platforms like seesmic and I even won a trophy for my part in the node666 global collaborative project where we all submitted a part as if the world had got sucked into a time slip and we were all communicating from our basements — I wish I could find that video, I hope I have it somewhere saved, it was pretty epic.
I went to the vloggies, the one and only ever event to celebrate the big group of video bloggers in san francisco — I had just sold my house made a bunch of money on it, sold my flat, paid my debts and bought a bunch of kit (I remember you canon hf20) and lenses and went vlogging around san fran, I’ve got the content on Vimeo somewhere — maybe over the weekend I’ll put it up here.
The point is that I’ve been through this before — I got a bit jaded by the people that I ended up meeting through the ‘socials’ — I’d say 1 in 10 was actually who they said they were through video, it was a sad time to see people just squeeze the life force out of the medium at the end of the ‘life’ of that vlogging period — I’m sure that’s how the hippies of the 60’s felt when the 70’s came along.
And yet, here we are again in 2018 and vlogging (especially decentralised) vlogging is exciting — I get it. It feels like freedom right, it feels like we can achieve anything right, we have a voice, we are looking to find other voices, we are trying to self identify and build resources between each other, showing a little bit of life in the hope that we can find equilibrium with another human on the other side of the planet — that’s really powerful, when you mesh it together properly it’s an incredibly powerful statement.
Which is why next week I’m gonna put together something that I’ve been wanting to do for ages and will finally have the time to do and that’s a little collaboration project in the cloud — content that can be put out daily/weekly that can be an activator just passed the outreach to say hi and to ‘engage’ — what do we even mean by that anyway? Impact? Resources? Connectedness?
There are some serious day to day topics that we all live that I think would certainly bring the existing disenfranchised communities across to dtube — I certainly feel the same kind of love from vloggers trying to tell stories and wanting to feel like it’s worth doing, we can do more and we will, I personally can’t wait to get your feedback on this project next week ;)
As for the title I put today. . . my perfect engagement on the dtube platform would be a follower, maybe a comment with a similar life story, a recommendation of something I should find, see, read or eat maybe — a perspective even, even just a wave or a hello and what’s the weather like, it’s when we create these micro exchanges that substance can form way passed the quick fire one hundred forty character quick fire decisions and onto the next thing….
… if you want to engage with another human being and your doing it from a place of love and compassion for other human beings then obviously the next step is how do we package that, how do we amplify that, how do we make that into digestible daily media pill that just broadcasts through the galaxy, I think together we can work that out for all of us, I think we all have a piece of the puzzle.
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