Babel On, Babel Off: Blip.tv Videoblogging! (The Vegas Twins play like idiots)

... and I test out Blip.tv!

Blip.tv is another video-hosting service, only this one is more videoblogging-centric than YouTube or Google Videos. It's basically a videoblog host. You sign up and you basically get your own vlog there, though it comes with a feature to cross-post your vlog entries to:

your own blog (or whatever "other" blog you may already have)
Flickr (it sends a thumbnail to flickr)
del.icio.us (Blip.tv gives you the option to tag your posts, and it will bookmark them with those tags [though they are not also Technorati Tags])

The cross-posting seems a bit buggy (Blip.tv is still in Beta):

cross-posting is kind of slow (they sort of hint at this by giving you a page to check the status of your cross-posts), so it's clearly an asynchronous task
the status page doesn't work, since it said "completed" immediately, but the cross-posting to This Blog and to del.icio.us took about 10-15 minutes
as of 25 minutes, the thumbnail still hasn't shown up on Flickr

The cross-posting to another blog is also implemented as kind of an after-thought. Which may be deliberate. At least, they don't provide you with a way to embed your video in your "real" blog the way Youtube et al. do. They just generate a boring href link. But again, this may be a feature, not a bug. Maybe they are trying to encourage you to let go of your old blog and embrace the Blip.tv vlogging way.

I discovered Blip.tv through Zip Zap Zop, a videoblog that kind of has to be seen to be believed. It's produced by a very extroverted and exhibitionistic guy in the latter half of his 30s living in New York City who calls himself Clark Saturn. (It's kind of too good to be true to imagine that this is his real name, especially since he often pronounces it "Clark of Saturn" - though he sometimes seems to spell that "clarkovsaturn".) I definitely learned some interesting things from Zip Zap Zop:

You don't need to rehearse your "performances" - you can hem and haw and go "ummmm" a lot and basically think out loud.
In a sense, in fact, from the above, you might say that it's easier to vlog than to write regular blog postings. At least, the way I write them. No correcting yourself, no editing out mistakes, no efforts to achieve good grammar. It seems thoroughly liberating!
If you buy the right equipment, you can mix all sorts of things into your blog like bulleted lists or presentations or really anything that you can display on your computer.
You can be completely, utterly, and totally devoid of any spec of sanity, but someone will marry you anyway.

In the unlikely event that Clark reads this, I mean all of the above in the nicest way. Honestly. [Insert Smiley-emoticon here]

Actually it was one of Clark's postings that pointed me to another Vlogger's site, the one belonging to a professor in Missouri, called The Richard Show (in all my life I never thought I would hear the place-name "Rolla" again since moving away from Columbia). ZipZapZop pointed me to a post here where Richard's wife is wished happy birthday by vloggers from here to Kathmandu, including the people who do Blip.tv. They make copious use of the word "awesome". The name Blip.tv caught my attention, so I checked them out. The happy birthday post is very cute and sweet, by the way. And Clark appears in it. Inexplicably, with a Japanese fan. And, also inexplicably, naked. Well, at least what you see (basically just the shoulders).

Anyway. This is another video taken with my

Nokia 6256i (and uploaded to my laptop via Bluetooth) - note however that unlike my earlier videos which I uploaded to YouTube here, this video was not in any way "processed": it is still a 3g2 file. It plays for me in QuickTime and in Real Player. I'm not sure how it will play for you, but if it doesn't play automatically, QuickTime will definitely do it, though you may need to make sure that it is associated with the 3g2 file type.

OR: Go to Blip.tv to watch the video

The description I gave it at Blip.tv is:

Circe and Prospero rough-house at the new(ish) Off-Leash Recreational Area in
Somerville's Nunziato Park

I failed to mention that Prospero is trying to climb on top of Circe. Not to hump her at one end or the other, but actually to climb up, on top of, or over her. It's ... just weird.

So which video-hosting site will I go with? I'm not sure. (And I bet there are others besides the ones I've identified so far). If they get the bugs out, Blip.tv looks very cool, which its cross-posting and tagging and automatic bookmarking on del.icio.us. On the other hand, YouTube and Google Videos have huge communities, à la Flickr. I doubt I will go for Google Videos, given the rather irritating waiting period you have to undergo as they decide whether to approve your video or not (presumably they want to avoid porn and stolen copyrighted material). I'm an instant-gratification kind of a guy, so that's just probably not going to do it for me.

Some more videoblogging/vlogging stuff I picked up since my last post on the topic: