July 31, 2006Video Comments for Online Dance FeedbackOne of the newest features added to online video sites is the ability to leave video comments. On the Grouper video service, you can watch a video and then follow-up with a video of yourself commenting on what you just watched.  I came across this story in a post in Techcrunch. I couldn't find a good example of video comments on Grouper itself - maybe the feature is too new. But Techcrunch points to a good example on the Grouper Networks Blog that illustrates how embedded video comments works. You'll see on the bottom left side of the video screen (image right below) that there is an image of a webcam with the number of video comments. If you click on this link, you can watch the comments.  I think that this type of embedded video comment capability would be a great tool when dancers begin to put video from their on-going rehearsals on the web - preferably in the form of blogs. Visitors to such a dance blog could watch clips of a work in progress, and then leave their video commentary. And if viewers are inspired, their video comments can be in the form of movement recommendations as well. Posted by Doug Fox at 11:12 AM - Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) July 21, 2006Link Within Your Google Dance VideosOn Digg, I came across a story about Google's Wednesday announcement that their popular video hosting service now supports direct links to specific points within a video. This new feature is very helpful for dancers who upload videos to Google. First, here's how it works: Say, you're watching the "Dancing Around the World" video that features Matt Harding dancing at each location he visits on his global travel tour. You come across the section where Matt Harding is dancing in India and you want a friend of yours to see this specific section of the video as opposed to having to watch the entire video. What you do is configure the web address for this Google video so a person is taken directly to the India dance scene:
So, as described on the Google VideoBlog, you first cut and paste the URL for the video from the top address bar. The URL for "Dancing Around the World" is: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1609134961558581805 Then you add to the end of this URL the time information. In this case, we want to take people who click on this link to the 0 minute and 48 second mark in the video. So now we'll add this time information to the end of the URL: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1609134961558581805#0m48s Actually, I found that Google takes you to a point about five seconds before the point you specified, which isn't a bad idea. But you can adjust this if you want simply by adding about five seconds to the time section in the above URL. The reason why I like this feature is because it gives dancers a way to write about and explain their dance videos in a more meaningful way. Let's say you upload a dance video (maybe a performance or class) to Google and then you want to write about the video on your blog or website. Now as you write about each portion of your dance, you can include a link to the specific part of the video that you are currently discussing. These time-specific links will make it much easier for your readers to understand what part of your dance you are explaining and will help them visualize the points that you are making. This approach, I think, would serve as a good educational tool for teaching dance moves, providing a viewer guide for an upcoming performance, or showing the evolution of dance styles or choreographic influences. Posted by Doug Fox at 8:55 AM - Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) July 20, 2006The Local Dance Scene on TurnHereTurnHere offers video clips of things to do and see in neighborhoods and cities around the globe. It's essentially a video travel guide that's part a tour of the local scene and part a promotional opportunity for local stores and attractions. It appears that the largest video collections are for San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles. I've been visiting TurnHere for the past month or so and I've enjoyed watching a number of the videos on their site. Here are two dance-focused videos from Turn Here that highlight Argentine Tango and Belly Dancing in San Francisco: 
 Posted by Doug Fox at 8:35 AM - Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) July 18, 2006The Winger Dance BlogKristin Sloan is doing an excellent job expanding her dance blog, The Winger - both in terms of content and contributors. Kristin and I Skyped last week and she gave me an update about her blog.  From the time she started her blog, Kristin made extensive use of pictures that she posted via her cell phone. To post digital snapshots with a mobile phone, you need 1) a blog, of course, 2) a cell phone that has a built-in camera and 3) an account with photo-hosting site Flickr (or another online application that will automatically send pictures to your blog.) So, once you take pictures with your phone, you send any pictures that you want to post to your blog to a Flickr email address. Then you can configure Flickr to automatically send the picture as a post to your blog. Flickr supports most blog software programs - Kristin uses Movabletype. Samsung just gave Kristin a video camera. So soon Kristin will be uploading video clips to her blog. I didn't realize that The Winger also has a message board, The Winger Board, an online community where users can post their questions and thoughts about different aspects of dance.  In terms of contributors, you'll see on the left-hand navigation bar that The Winger now features a number of dance bloggers who dance with the New York City Ballet, The American Ballet Theater, Amy Mashall Dance Company and Pacific Northwest Ballet. It would be nice to see more dancers blogging as well as adding multimedia content to their blogs. Most cell phones sold today have built-in cameras and there's really no additional cost to posting pictures to your website. And in the case of video, camcorders are fairly inexpensive and there's easy to use software to edit and upload your videos. Posted by Doug Fox at 3:40 PM - Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0) July 17, 2006Building a Comprehensive, Historical Dance Video LibraryTwo comments on a post I wrote last month, Global Historical Dance Video Project, inspired me to write more about this possible online collaborative dance project. (You can read Liam and Lauren's comments.) To recap, the idea behind this project is to create a categorized video guide to all contemporary and historical dance forms and styles. So, ideally, if you went to this website, you would be able to access a navigation tree that would take you to video clips of any style of dance and you would be able to see which other dance styles influenced it. What would it take to actually create this project? I think the best approach would be to use a WIKI so that anybody could contribute to this on-going project. It's simply too big of an undertaking for a few people to manage this effort. I was just looking at a couple of hosted wiki applications: PBwiki and Wetpaint. An alternative, would be to find a free-standing application that I could install on my server. In terms of the basics of this project, I imagine a simple hierarchical structure so that visitors could quickly find the style and type of dance they are looking for based upon its geographical location, cultural identification, time-period or other distinguishing characteristics. Then, in each section there would be links to videos that highlighted each form or style of dance. In addition, we can also encourage contributors to add text descriptions of each style of dance along with information about the key dancers/choreographers of the dance and the key influences that led to the specific style of dance. I think to start this type of project, it would take about 20 people or so who wanted to start collaborating on this effort. We'd have to decide what software/application to use, how to structure the periods and types of dances, what guidelines - if any - for the types of videos that would be linked to and many other issues. Is this a project you would like to participate in? Please email me if you'd like to discuss. Posted by Doug Fox at 7:06 AM - Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0) July 12, 2006The Art of Community Tagging for Dance EventsIf you are involved in a dance performance where you expect and want audience members and dancers to take a lot of pictures and post them to the web, then it's important to make sure that Internet users can find this multimedia content. For example, in my new Dance That Matters blog, I just wrote a story about a recent community dance project called "One River Mississippi." This type of site-specific performance that takes place at multiple outdoors locations is ideal for taking a lot of pictures and videos and putting them on the web. But an important question is: Once people upload their pictures and videos to multiple websites, how can Internet users easily find this visual recap of the One River Mississippi dance performances?  Flickr Picture of "One River Mississippi" By Bob Morrison Photography The answer is the use and promotion of a consistent tagging system. If you are promoting a dance performance and you want people to take pictures and videos, then you want to encourage everybody to use the same tags to identify their multimedia content. For example, in my post about One River Mississippi, I provided a link to the photo site Flickr where there are some pictures of this dance program. The Flickr link I included was for all photos that matched the keywords "one river mississippi." This is not a very precise way to conduct a search - especially if there are a lot of photos on Flickr that for one reason or another have these keywords but have nothing to do with this series of dance performances. As you'll see on the search results on Flickr, after the first seven matches, the pictures do not have anything to do with this program. What would be better is if everybody who took pictures of this event simply used the same pre-determined tag for all their relevant photos. The tag might be "onerivermissdance2006". This way anybody interested in this event could search Flickr and other multimedia sites for pictures and videos of these dance performances. There is also another important benefit to promoting on your website this common tagging scheme before the start of a dance event. If you encourage visitors to your website to take pictures and videos of the performances and then upload them to various websites, you'll get a lot more exposure and publicity for your event - all because you're promoting a standardized approach to tagging. Then during and after your performance, you can add links to photo and video sharing websites where user multimedia content of your event is uploaded. You only have to create a single link for each site because all users will be tagging this content with the same keyword. Posted by Doug Fox at 11:00 AM - Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) July 6, 2006New Dance Blog Coming Next WeekI'll be launching a new dance blog next week - probably Monday or Tuesday. If you'd like a preliminary idea of what this new blog will be about, you can read these past posts from Great Dance:
I'm taking this week off and I'll be posting to Great Dance on Monday. Posted by Doug Fox at 8:45 AM - Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) |
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