Transcript

Jen

This is The Web Ahead, a weekly podcast about changing technologies and the future of the web. I'm Jen Simmons, your host. This is episode 76 I believe, right? Yes, 76. Our sponsor today is lynda.com. Thank you so much to lynda.com for supporting the show.

Today I'm going to do an episode of... there's a little series inside this series that if you're a long time listener you'll know about, but we haven't done in a very long time. That is The Web Behind. Back in September 2012, Eric Meyer joined me on the show and we did, I don't know, half a dozen or so, episodes of this Web Behind series. Where Eric really took the lead and interviewed a bunch of people who were there at the beginning of the web, who helped invent a lot of the technology. I have not done a show with Eric in quite a long time. If you know anything Eric, you know he's got a lot going on. But today I wanted to have on, I have 3 guests, actually, to talk about... not the very beginning of the web, but to talk about something that happened 10, 12... nah, 10 and a half years ago. Kind of halfway in to the history of the web so far. Which is the video blogging movement. Which I think a lot of people haven't even ever heard of, they don't know what that is. But we'll talk about that today. So my guests today: Jay Dedman. Hi Jay.

Jay

Hi Jen.

Jen

Ryanne Hodson. Hello Ryanne.

Ryanne

Hey.

Jen

And Michael Verdi. Hi Michael.

Michael

Hello.

Jen

Michael's been on the show a couple of other times, most recently talking about customer experience. But originally talking about video. So we actually had a long show talking about video technology. Today we're going to really talk about video, well, video blogging. So, who wants to jump in and answer the question of, "What the heck is that weird word, 'video blog'? And what happened 10 years ago?"

Jay

I'll go ahead and just get started and just give a quick run down. I think we're here because, yeah, it's been 10 years since me and another guy started this Yahoo! email group called the video blogging list. And that list brought together a lot of people from, basically, kind of across the planet, that were trying to figure out how to put video on the internet. It's really weird talking about it now because video online is so much a part of the internet experience, it's so easy, it's just everywhere. It's hard to think of a time when it wasn't, you know? I guess for me what it was, was, I was a kid that grew up in the 80s and my big thing is, I wanted to make a movie and it was really kind of an impossible dream. At that time, it was, go to film school and spend a bunch of money and max out your credit cards and try to make a movie and then even if you made something, how would you get it played? I guess there's a dream of going around to film festivals and try to get it sold. It was crazy, you know? So what I ended up doing was, I started to work at public access television because at the time, that was the easiest place to get your hands on equipment and make something and then put it on television.

Jen

And you were in New York, right?

Jay

Right, yeah.

Jen

Where public access is very popular. But there was a movement across the US, back in the 80s and 90s, to get public access TV stations all over the place.

Jay

Right, and even the time I'm thinking about was 1996, I was in Cincinnati, Ohio and I was at the public access there. That was when, around that time, the late 90s, was when digital equipment started coming out. Digital cameras, iMovie, the first Final Cut, it was a really exciting time. But the tools were really limited. Even if you could make something, there was really no where to put it.

Ryanne

Yeah, that's true.

Jay

No distribution at all. So when I ended up in New York, this guy rented a room in our apartment, this guy named Peter VanDyke. He is a very cool guy and he's into the web and he's a coder and we would just have these long conversations on hot New York days about what we wanted to do. I would tell him how I wished I could put video on the internet and he's like, "Well, let's try it." So we just sat down, I got a Typepad blog, he didn't know anything about a video. So I was a video guy and he was the coder and we took a video clip off of my digital camera and we got it on the computer and we compressed it enough so it seemed that it would fit and we put it on a blog and then that was it. There it was. It was a video online. [Laughs]

Jen

That was 2003, 2004?

Jay

Yeah, it was early 2004. Correct.

Jen

I remember it being very hard to put video online. It was a time when bandwidth was very... a lot of people still used modems to dial up. Or maybe you had a broadband connections but it was way slower than many broadband connections today.

Jay

Yeah, and I'll just take it up to the point where we all became a group. So I was like, "This is so boring," and Peter was like, "Well, just make an internet group," and I was like, "What's that?" because I didn't know a lot about that stuff. So he started a Yahoo! group. I emailed everyone I could find on the internet that had ever tried to put a video online and I found about 20 people. About 12 of them joined this Yahoo! group. It was like, Adrian Miles from Australia, Andres in Denmark, Steve Garfield in Boston, some others that I forgot about. And we just all started talking. The group was really about problem solving. As Michael and Ryanne can jump in here, the big things were how to compress it, how to embed it, how to deal with broadband.

Ryanne

I joined the group because Steve Garfield and I worked at a television station together. I remember early on, too, he was like, "You have to join this thing! This video blogging thing!" and I was like, "What are you... I don't know what you're talking about." And I ignored him basically for, like, 4 months. [Laughs] Then he actually showed me a video of Jay's on a blog so that was the important part for us, too, was that it was on a blog. Because I'd seen QuickTime videos on webpages before and I was like, "Yeah, that's not really that big a deal." But because it was on a blog and it was easily updateable and there was a RSS feed, that was the golden combination that we were looking for.

Jen

Right.

Michael

I had done, I had applied to... remember Current TV? That thing that Al Gore started, right? Their original plan was they were going to hire video journalists that were going to write and shoot and edit their own stories on the fly all over the world. They were interviewing people for that and you had to make some demo videos and stuff. A bunch of people who applied started an online group, I think it was a message board type thing. On there I met Chuckles, who was, you know, "You should check out these video blogging guys, they're also doing something like this." And I, too, sort of, I think the first things I saw didn't make much sense to me. And it was later, it was things like some of Jay's videos that made it click for me and I joined the group and, yeah. Took everything I had done previously online, off, and started all over. I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I need a blog and this is how it's going to work."

Jay

I think the fun part about it was that we weren't trying to make TV shows or movies, it's more about just making these little short videos, kind of about our lives. Or, honestly, a lot of it was just kind of really arty. But because, as you said earlier, broadband was barely existing at the time and you had to really compress everything down, I remember we were trying to get everything down to...

Ryanne

1 megabyte.

Jay

Like 1 megabyte was huge at the time. We were really trying to get it to half a megabyte. The videos had to be small. So it turned out that people were making really quirky, funny, weird things. That was also part of the excitement.

Ryanne

I think part of it was that interactivity, where there were so few people that in one day you could watch everyone's videos and that was the most exciting thing.

Jay

Right. You could watch every video that was put on the internet [Ryanne laughs] in one day. [Laughter]

Michael

For me, that was actually what really hooked me. My original idea was to make short films. For me, right? Like you, Jay, I wanted to make films. My original thing that I thought I would do is make these short films and put them on the internet. But quickly watching other people and the conversation with video back and forth between people, I was like, "Oh, I get it. This is totally different and way, way better."

Ryanne

Yup.

Michael

And I abandoned that, like, 5 minutes in. [Laughs]

Ryanne

I think part of it, the reason why Michael and I joined together as a team, we were trying to figure out better compression for the videos. Because the compression that was coming out of Final Cut would make things too big or it would make them so small that it would look terrible. So we were really looking for the in-between, it looks good and it's small and it does quick start, which means it plays right away while it downloads. We had all these things. And we wanted to embed it in a blog so it played on the page, you know? All these things we wanted. I think both Michael and I are the type of people where, we just sit down to solve a problem and we'll just do it for, like, 8 hours and just like, do every combination of possible settings on the compression. Which I think we both did.

Michael

Right.

Ryanne

And we were like, "Ok, these were the settings that worked for me, these were the settings that worked for me, let's combine them and make a tutorial."

Michael

Yeah. The thing was, the software that you had on your computer, the defaults, the compression defaults, no one had... they didn't build the software with the idea that you would make videos and put them on the internet. [Laughter] That wasn't the use case, right? So it was for like, local playback or on your television or they were for sending by email. They basically compressed them like, so tiny, for like a mobile phone, like 3GP, super tiny, tiny, tiny videos. There wasn't this video of like, oh yeah, you would actually, where you'd want to put this is on the internet. And I remember, Ryanne, you found this Codec3 DivX and you did some experimenting with it and then I did. I remember, like you said, spending days just... because there not a lot of documentation about how the things worked or you didn't really know what things did. Like, I didn't know, in compression, what are B frames? Or something. So you would play with a number and you go, "Ok, oh, Q value. What if I put a 60 in here? Let's see what happens. Ok, that didn't work. Let's try 70. Let's see what happens." Until you got something that worked, you know?

Jay

I think that was the cool thing about that time because there were the technical people that were solving problems and then there were guys like me that was more about, like, just trying to have fun and get people to think of ways of making video that they had never thought of before. When Michael and Ryanne would come up with these settings, they would then tell everyone how to do it and it would solve everyone's problem. Then everyone's quality automatically just would go up overnight. That was the cool thing about the group. Then someone, they would say, "Well, how do I do this?" Like, "How do I embed it in the screen?" This is a time when you didn't have a...

Ryanne

Oh yeah, like Flash or JavaScript or just anything like that, that was ready for video.

Jay

Right, Flash existed but JavaScript really didn't exist back then, so it was weird trying to solve these issues.

Ryanne

It is really funny talking about this now. It seems so insane because now you just are like, upload any video to YouTube, does not matter what size it is, and you just embed it and it's just, no one thinks twice about it. But, man, we were really struggling back then. [Laughs]

Jen

Yeah, there were no video hosting services really anywhere, and everybody was, at first, putting all the videos on your own server. That was back in day when servers would charge you for bandwidth going out and so you had to make sure that your videos were tiny, because if too many people watched them then you'd have hundreds of dollars of charges...

Jay

Or they're just cut you off.

Ryanne

They cut me off a couple times, yeah.

Jay

I mean, that's why archive.org is such a wonderful place. Because we found out about them and they seemed very open to people putting their personal videos on their servers and they didn't care about traffic and hosting, so they were great, the archive.

Jen

Yeah. I'm really glad that that was one of the things that everybody did back then. Was put all their videos on archive.org because now many, many, many of these video blogs are gone. The original websites are just not there anymore. It's very hard, I was looking... we probably all were looking this week to, like, watch a bunch of the old videos and get ready for the show and they're just not there. But they are on archive.org. So I'm going to drop a bunch of links into the show notes, people can go and check them out. Because really, you have to see these things to understand what was happening. [Laughs] But at least they're somewhere. At least they're on archive.org. Even though they're not, you know, they're separate from their websites, they're separate from... the order has been lost, the comments have been lost, the context in which they were played has been lost, all the links to other people, the back and forth conversation, was happening a lot because of links. Someone would write a little blog post and they'd say, "So-and-so wrote this video," and they'd like to that other video. "Here's my video," and then "Look here somebody else wrote this video." So all that's lost but at least a lot of the video are online.

Michael

The thing about the archive that reminds me of how crazy this early part was, was a story of my daughter, Dylan, making this video. Because that was the first time I'd used the Internet Archive. She had made this video, she was, like, 11 years old. There's a billion kids in the world that have made this same video since then. It was her talking to the camera about things that she likes and touring her bedroom, kind of stuff. We put it on her blog and Jay told people about it. What was so bizarre was, somehow that was such a novel thing that she ended up on the ABC News at the end of the year, when they do "People of the Year" and they were doing a story on blogging and so they interviewed Xeni Jardin from Boing Boing and my daughter. [Laughs] So she got so many, at the time it was just unfathomable amounts of traffic. It was something like, I lost count at about 30,000 views of her video. Which was like the today equivalent of 30 million or something. We had to move it to the archive because they were shutting down all of our blogs because my web host was like, "What? This is crazy." That's the kind thing that for me was so strange that, like, an 11 year old girl makes a video tour of her bedroom and that was national news worthy. [Laughter] You know? It seems totally stupid now.

Ryanne

It's funny, we didn't actually say this yet, but this was before YouTube. I think YouTube started in February of 2005. Very rudimentary, like they just got the URL in February. And this was like the middle to late 2004. I actually think they were on the video blogging list in the beginning.

Jay

Yeah, they were. The video blogging list is where we're all kind of anchoring this just because I think the list just attracted a lot of people that had been thinking about online video for a long time and everyone had ideas about it but that was a place where we could all talk about it and then we had a lot of people that were doers. So people would actually try things out and show each other. It was a real good mix of, like I said, coders and video people. It was a really good mix of people coming together. We would do fun things like, we would do these video blogging weeks. Where everyday you had to post a video about something going on. It was just really kind of a neat community because you could just see what everyone's doing in their life. As we all know, video just adds such a dimension that you don't get through photos or audio or text. It was just really neat to see into people's worlds.

Jen

Well and there's, someone should describe... there was a game that went back and worth where somebody recorded themselves playing a musical instrument, right? And then put that video up. Part of this was happening at the same time as Creative Commons and this idea around copyright and letting copyright go, just put you stuff out there and let other people use it and remix it. So people were labeling their stuff or at least the understanding was just clear for that email list that, like, "Take my video and do something with it." So somebody else also played a musical... like, they played the video and then recorded themselves playing another musical instrument and they cut that video into the first video. It ended up being a video of 4 or 5 or, I don't remember how many, different people at the same time playing instruments but they'd actually played them separate, in separate countries, on separate days, making this collaborative art together.

Jay

Yeah, I think that was the Squeeze Game it was called.

Ryanne

There were a few games.

Jay

There was definitely this sense of, "Let's see what we can do with this." Our group definitely was not into like, "Let's try and make TV shows" and stuff like that.

Ryanne

Yeah, it was very creative.

Jay

Let's just see what we can do with a video that fits in this format rather than just try and copy what we see on TV and in movies and then put that up online.

Ryanne

Right.

Michael

Well, we got into fights about that kind of stuff. [Laughter]

Jay

Yeah. Actually Rocketboom started, Andrew Barren was part of this group and Andrew's a crazy, good guy, but he was doing something, it's different. He had a vision at the very beginning of creating a web show.

Ryanne

The Daily. I mean, daily. Everyday.

Jay

Like a daily show. Yeah. We would always get into fights with him about it. [Laughs]

Jen

Yeah, because his show is kind of like MTV News type format. Or like E! TV type, kind of... for the internet world. Like a different version of that.

Jay

He had a vision.

Jen

It was familiar. It was very familiar. It was sort of a familiar format while some of the other things that were happening were kind of more... weird or whatever. More experimental, more pushing the envelope of communication.

Jay

Yeah, like we were all artists and punks and, I don't know... I don't think, I mean, I know I didn't have any vision of what we were doing beyond what we were doing at the time. I've got to hand it to the guys that started YouTube, like, they saw what it could become, they sold it for a billion dollars.

Ryanne

Yeah, they won, basically. [Laughter]

Jay

God bless them. [Laughter]

Jen

Weren't the founders of Vimeo on the list as well? And the founders of Blip? Blip.tv.

Ryanne

Yeah, so Blip and Vimeo both started very early on, before YouTube, and they were our first video hosting services.

Jay

And we even had a little... I guess to call it a conference might be overstating it. But we had a little gather called VloggerCon back in...

Ryanne

It was January 2005.

Jay

Yeah. That was in New York and actually I remember one of the guys that started Vimeo came and gave a talk and it was just all very exciting about what we could do. So that was a point where we were all talking about, "How do we take all of this stuff we've been hacking together and how do we actually make it a part of the web and make it easy for other people?" So everyone can join in these games we're having.

Ryanne

Yeah, those sessions from the first VloggerCon are all on the archive, too. So it's really funny to watch how far the technology has come. Even just on Vimeo. He presented Vimeo as a personal interactive movie, basically. Like you would put up 10 second clips and you could put them all together and make your own video. That's how he originally intended it and then it just became, like, high quality video hosting after that. But it's so funny.

Michael

I love that original version.

Ryanne

Yeah, the original version's awesome.

Michael

It was a lot of fun.

Ryanne

Yeah. Jakob. That was Jakob Lodwick.

Jay

I think the other interesting thing to me was when I had started that Yahoo! group I went to BloggerCon, I think it was the third one out in San Jose. Run by, who was it? Weiner?

Ryanne

Wasn't it Dave Weiner?

Michael

Dave Weiner?

Jay

David Weiner. Who I really looked up to because he was big into bloggers and the people and having an original voice and he was starting podcasting at the time. We were really kind of borrowing a lot of the ideas that they were having as far as distribution because they were really big into RSS. And so we started incorporating that into videos. Like, how do you make a RSS feed with a video enclosure and then how could you make a little player that would subscribe to these RSS feeds so you could play them? Because at that point there were getting to be too many videos to watch online and we were thinking we would just download them. That's where you guys came in, because we had to, like, hand code those RSS feeds for awhile.

Ryanne

Yeah, actually that's funny, because I think Josh Kinberg was hand coding RSS feeds. I think we were literally just like, enclosure equals this, you know? You'd have to put that in your code somewhere or something. Because, whatever, RSS didn't have enclosures or something. [Laughs]

Michael

Well, there was the RSS 2 spec but the blogs wouldn't, they didn't do a RSS 2 to begin with, or something. Or they didn't automatically pick up the video file for that. So you had to tell it that this was the thing to make an enclosure. And then Feedburner came along and so you could take your feed from your blog and run it through Feedburner and they would make sure it all worked well and everything. That was a big deal.

Ryanne

That was a huge deal.

Michael

Yeah.

Jen

I mean, FireANT. There was actually a little video player that you could go and download. It was sort of like QuickTime on steroids or something, and you would just drop all your feeds in there. This is, of course, long before iTunes did podcasting, which is perhaps how a lot of people are listening to the show right now, is through iTunes or maybe on your phone. The technology that's driving this auto... like, you can subscribe and get the audio automatically... that's the same stuff we're talking about but for video. I guess the little bit of that that's sort of, kind of left... because a lot of what we've been talking about is still totally around. Teenagers hanging out in their bedrooms, recording videos and uploading them to YouTube, there's millions of those happening everyday. But sort of subscribing to a show that's not a mainstream big television show or famous well-known whatever and then having those videos load on your device automatically? That didn't take off. It was a little bit of that, like with an AppleTV...

Jay

TED Talks.

Jen

... A video podcast section of their website. Yeah, I guess like TED Talks. Or the New York Times videos, you can subscribe through the video feed, they sort of co-opted the name and took it. Apple sort of said, "We like this, let's call it video podcasting." Change the name. But it never really took off. That stuff is still around and you can use it if you're geeky enough and know about it.

Jay

I think YouTube kind of solved those problems because they had endless bandwidth, they will play at whatever quality people can handle, and they really kind of solved that problem. Because I guess we were trying to solve the problem of, the idea was downloading overnight just because speeds were so slow, you'd download overnight and they'd be on your local computer so you could play them fast and they wouldn't stutter.

Ryanne

And they would be linked to the actual blog post. That was really important to us because we were really into commenting. So we were like, "You have to be able to have the permalink so that you can go back and talk about the video and send it to other people." Basically FireANT, Jay and Josh Kinberg built FireANT because iTunes didn't do it yet. That's kind of like an overall theme from the beginning, was like, nobody built it yet so we basically have to build it. Somebody, please, on this list build this thing. And that's just what we had to do.

Michael

One of things I remember at the beginning when YouTube started. I think I saw somewhere on our notes here, they did everything we didn't want to them to do, sort of. [Laughter] But it all turned out. In the end, it was actually... sometimes I think, "Man, they just saw way further than we did." They had things like... the problem we were trying to solve with the RSS feeds and the downloading the videos, like Jay said, overnight. One of the things that YouTube did at the beginning was, they were like, "We're going to make sure that the videos play automatically right away no matter what." So the "no matter what" meant it had the crappiest quality in the world. It was like, a huge step back in quality and that was one reason why we didn't ever want to use it at first. Because it just made your videos look like crap. But also to help remembering this time, I remember the end of 2004, there was a couple of things that happened, too, that also helped spur this video on the web along. This is when, in the United States at least, broadband penetration crossed 50%. Even though, like Jen said, it was pretty crappy, it still by the world's standards we have pretty crappy broadband in the United States but it's way better now than it was 10 years ago. And then in December was that huge tsunami in the Indian Ocean and just tons of people putting video of what happened online all at once. All of a sudden, there were all these people who had never even thought to watch a video on the internet. Like, why would you even try to do that? They now had a reason to see video on the internet and they were like, "Oh, I need a Flash player. I need a QuickTime plugin. I need a whatever plugin I need to see this stuff."

Jen

Windows Movie something.

Michael

Yeah, Windows Media plugin or whatever it was that they needed to be able to see the videos, they went out and did that. And then it was a thing, to expect to be able to see a video on a website. It wasn't even an expectation, really, before that.

Jen

And at some point the triangle with the circle around it became a thing. That was something that was debated hotly for a long time. How do you let someone know there's a video? Because if it's just a word, like a light regular link, then they think it's going to take them to a webpage and then instead normally what would happen is you click on it and a little popup window would show up and the video would load in the popup window. Because there wasn't a way to get a video to load inside a webpage. You couldn't look at a webpage and see a video. The video had to be, like, looking at a PDF or something. You were actually looking at the file. So we were putting them in popup windows. Then it became a thing to, like, "Let's put a still frame, we'll put an image from the video, so you can see that it's not a link, that it's actually a thing, it's a picture." So the thing that you guys came up with and everybody was doing for a long time is that you would take a screenshot of the video in a video player, like in QuickTime, so you were basically taking a picture of the QuickTime application playing the video and you'd stop it on whatever frame you wanted and then you'd put that on the page. Then when people saw that they'd be like, "Oh, I know that's a video," and they would click it. Now, it wouldn't play, because it still wasn't embedded in the page. [Laughs] Until later.

Jay

Imagine what you just talked about. I remember, again... this all happened, it felt like a long time but it's only about a year and a half, two year period. When the Apple store opened in New York, down on Prince Street, we were doing these events down there where they were asking us or we asked them if we could come and talk about video blogging. And they were like, "Yeah, sure, no problem." So we would try and explain what we were doing to people and we would have a whole crowd of people off the street, they all had their Macs, everyone seemed interested and excited but it was so complicated trying to explain to them how to do this. I mean, everything that you just asked about.

Ryanne

Yeah.

Jay

Film it on your camera, import it into iMovie or Final Cut, you have to edit it, you have to export it in this certain way, you have to take a screenshot and you have to embed that, you have to link this, you have to hand code this RSS feed. I mean, it was just so crazy. That's when Ryanne and Michael made a site called Freevlog. And that really I think was the point where video blogging started really spreading fast.

Michael

I was thinking about that as you said it and I pulled it up. Which, I went back and made it, it should mostly work now, but you can see how many ridiculous steps it is. [Ryanne laughs] Besides making the video, like, making the video, we didn't talk about that part. Just the parts about getting it on the web. It's like, 7 ridiculous steps. Well, I guess 6 steps and then we had some extra steps, but yeah.

Jay

And you know, that's compared to how it is now, where I pick up my iPhone, I hit "record," I stop it, and I say, "upload," and it's on my feed and people can see it on Facebook or Twitter.

Ryanne

We dreamed of the days of now. We were like, "When the hell are phones going to have good quality video where we can just email it to ourselves?"

Jay

I didn't even think it was going to be possible.

Ryanne

Yeah, well..

Jen

Well, you weren't thinking about phones, you were thinking about little cameras, those little flip cameras, and you were saying, "Someday we'll be able to just push a button and put this online."

Ryanne

Like Wi-Fi camera.

Michael

Right.

Jay

Can you guys briefly talk about FreeVlogging? I think it was interesting how you guys were always having to update it because things were updating themselves, the technology was changing so fast.

Michael

Yeah. Well, I mean, this idea came out of... I know Ryanne and I are just natural teachers and I had a group of teenagers that I had worked with and I wanted to teach them how to video blog. But them being teenagers I thought, two parts. One, they weren't going to spend any money on their own server hosting account or anything. And two, they weren't going to take any notes, so I'd better write all this down for them. So the first thing I did was take all of the stuff that we'd learned on the video blogging list, really, and I made a free Blogger blog and used all the free services that I could find to make it all work. So hosting the videos on the internet archive and the thumbnails on your Flickr account and stuff like that. Because I think even at the time you couldn't upload the photos to Blogger. You needed BloggerPro to upload photos, you had to pay, that was before Google bought them. And all of that. Then after VloggerCon... well, I guess I made that after VloggerCon in New York. But then I went to go visit everybody, it seemed like everybody was in New York, so I did some freelance gigs in New York and slept on couches for a few weeks. That's when Ryanne and I redid FreeVlog and we made all these screencasts and we got it localized. We got people to do new voiceovers for the videos in other languages and translate all the text for us. We did it in, like, 6 different languages or something. It was crazy.

Jay

I think it's, too, it's just you kind of... breezed over it, but the idea of a screencast was really... I don't think anyone had ever really done that before. You guys actually were kind of pioneering the way of capturing the computer screen. I know that you guys were finding some weird software to do that.

Ryanne

What was it called? It was called Screensnaps Pro or something like that.

Michael

Yeah, Snapz Pro X or something. Which I still use for things.

Jay

Because it was so, kind of, complicated that we actually had to show people which buttons to push and what numbers to put into the compression box.

Ryanne

Yeah, I mean, if it was just like pictures on a PDF... which I think we made PDFs of them, just 'cause, like, developing countries would be like, "Just print out the PDF," you know? It was so complicated that you had to record all the steps so people could pause it and go try it and do it. [Laughs] Just so crazy.

Jen

It's just, I feel like I just got in a time machine. Like I'm remembering 10 years ago and then I'm trying to describe today and then go back to 10 years ago. Video on the web is actually really powerful.

Jay

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the reasons why you wanted to do this show from what you told us is that, sometimes it feels that the web is kind of set. Here it is, this is what it does, or just kind of do it. I think it can always change and I think what we're talking about was an example of just, we wanted video on the internet so we figured out how to do it and a part of that was also trying to teach other people how to do it. I really don't know if our group had any influence on the wider world. We might have just been a little tiny corner, but I think, if anything, maybe we were helpful in showing companies or whoever the kinds of things that people wanted to do and then suddenly, all of this technology and all of these tools just started popping up really quickly. So by 2006, video on the web was becoming kind of a normal thing.

Ryanne

The fact that Google bought YouTube for a billion dollars in 2006 was like, unheard of. That amount of money, I remember just seeing it in the newspaper and just being like, "Well, obviously they know it's a thing now." [Laughs]

Jen

I wanted to play a couple of these videos because I feel like... I've seen them, I've seen some of them many, many, many times and yet it's just, it's such a weird time machine. So I'm just going to play one that you made, Ryanne, that was really early called "Excited." And this is, it's weird because we're only going to have the audio right now, and if people want, they should go watch the actual videos. I'll put all these videos in the show notes. Which are at 5by5.tv/webahead/76.

Michael

Do you want to set up the scene of what the video looks like?

Jen

Oh, what the video looks like?

Michael

It's like Ryanne at her desk at work, right?

Ryanne

[Laughs] Yeah.

Jen

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ryanne

It's really funny that you said that, because I completely forgot what that video was about. I cannot believe that you're like, "This video called 'Excited'," I'm like, "I can't remember..."

Michael

"What was that video..." [Laughter]

Ryanne

It's like my first video.

Jen

Yeah, it's one of the first ones. So, right. So the point of view is basically that you're talking into the camera on your computer. Like a webcam. Which today every computer has but back then that was weird, it was weird that you were sitting at a desk looking into a wide angle computer webcam, talking. Then halfway through you look off to the side and it's pretty clear from watching the video that you're talking to somebody else. So there it is.

Ryanne

[Start of video audio - ragtime music plays in the background]

I'm so excited about video blogging. 'Cause I can say whatever I want and the FCC can't do shit. [Bleep] you, George W. [bleep]. You [bleep]. [Pause] Hey. Yeah, you need that Excel document? Uh huh. Yeah, I can have that done by 5. I'll just put it on your desk. Ok. Yup.

[End of video audio]

Jen

And then it says, "I (heart) the internet." I just, I just... I think it just captures. One, it's just funny. But also I think it captures something about the spirit of the time, of like, "We're going to be so punk rock, we're going to change everything." And then, there you are, you've got to, I mean, clearly it's staged, but you have to turn in the Excel document to your boss. [Laughter]

Ryanne

Right. Yeah, at that time I was working at WGBH, the PBS station in Boston. I was actually working overnight as an editor for a kid's TV show and that's when I would do most of my video blogging. [Laughs]

Michael

And, you know, there's another one and it's the type of thing that I really loved about some of these videos that people made. There's one that you made. And then I made one in response. I think a lot of people did. Where you kind of just showed us what you do all night. That was one of the cool things, to see what different people did. "This is what my day is like." That's a very visual one, I don't know if that would work on this show.

Jen

Yeah, I pulled it up, but you can't, because it's like you rolling around on a scooter through empty halls. [Laughter] Like, you start out saying something about how empty your work is. And then you don't say another word through the whole video. [Laughs] One of the things that I think was interesting about that and just felt so fresh and weird and new 10 years ago is that, you know, I would watch that video, it's, whatever, 5 minutes. I spent 5 minutes of my life watching something that didn't matter. That was so unimportant. That was not a hit NBC television show in a primetime slot on Thursday night. It was not designed to get 40 million people to watch it. It was, like, you were going to show it to your 4 friends. Today, in 2014, it's like, "So what? Duh." But back then, that felt so radical and weird. That you could actually make a video, it didn't have to be precious, you didn't have to spend a bunch of money or a bunch of time making it, and then you could actually have an audience and they could watch it and it meant something. It did mean something. It was a kind of conversation on a small level that was intimate, that mattered.

Jay

I think that's exactly what video blogging was to all of us. Because, remember, back then there was no Facebook. Friendster had come out but it didn't really affect people that much. We were using video blogging like everyone uses Facebook now. We were trying to communicate to each other and have little small conversations with each other and that was kind of what was exciting about it.

Ryanne

I think we were very, very hungry for social networking. Because that stuff did not exist or it was clunky and Friendster fizzled out. I think that, eventually, for me, these conversations started happening on Twitter. In 2007-2008, I slowed down on video blogging because of Twitter. Before that, I think people were very hungry to connect and this is how we were doing it, in a very visual, very personal way.

Jen

It's interesting comparing it to a Facebook, a Twitter. Because there's something about Facebook and Twitter that is so even way faster. Ten seconds, I've written a tweet. Done. Out the door. Where these videos weren't quite that throwaway. They were constructed with care and art and thought and they did take several hours or a couple days. So there was something else happening that was, I don't know. That is, in a way, lost by that kind of quick-quick...

Michael

They were like the handwritten letter of social media, you know? [Laughter]

Jen

I want to play another one. Which one should I play?

Ryanne

Where's "Vlog Anarchy"?

Michael

Ugh. [Laughter]

Jen

Yeah, I'm going to play "Vlog Anarchy" and then we're going to... if anybody's listening live and you have a child around, maybe you... because we're on 5by5 and because this is tagged explicit it's going to get bleeped later.

Michael

[Start of video audio - punk music plays in the background]

Alright, listen. I've been on the video blogging group now for, like, 3 months. Off and on there's a discussion about what is and what isn't a video blog. Probably the person who's written the most about it, probably has thought a lot more about it than any of us, is Adrian Miles. And, you know, I'm going to pick on him because he wrote "A Vog Manifesto." He said, "A vog is a video blog where video in a blog must be more than video in a blog." The thing that pops up for me when I read something like that is, "Why do we want to try to define something like this right now?" What's the rush? What is the rush to define it now? It would be like trying to pick a career and a mate for a newborn. Right? It's absurd. We're at just the very, very beginning. As soon as we sit down and decide what it is, we automatically kill off all other possibilities. We don't know where this is going to go. I bet you right now nobody knows what will happen. Nobody knows. You can't say. In fact, I'm pretty sure that when we look back on today 10 years from now, what will have happened will totally astound us. Adrian's not the only one, ok? Other people, too, have written that a video blog needs to have this interactive element to it, right? Where the viewer is not just a passive viewer, where they help create the story. Listen, [laughs] believe me, I think that's freaking cool and I would love to see more of it, right? But to say that that kind of stuff is better or truer or a real video blog? Bullshit. I think to say that misses the whole point of what is cool about video on a blog. And that is it breaks down the barriers to access to media. Right? Up until this point, to be on television, to be in the movie theater, right? To publish a book, to whatever, there was a barrier to entry, and people like, most of the people in the world, don't get to participate in that. But no more. Right? So, Hollywood, [bleep] them. They can't say anymore, "You can, you can't." We get to say, "How about all of us can do it?" Why not? Why does it have to be just this person and not that person? Why not all of us? That's what's cool about video on a blog. Francis Ford Coppola, his quote that one day the next Hollywood masterpiece would be made by a 10 year old girl with her dad's video camera, right? I think we all know [laughs] that she's a video blogger. Behind her are going to be a thousand more. And then a million more, just like her, and they will change the world. So I say, let's hold off on manifestos for video blogs. I think it's way too early. Let's stop trying to type about what a video blog is. Let's stop trying to talk about what a video blog is and let's experiment. Let's play with the medium. Let's let it breathe and live and grow for a little while, you know? Before we try to constrain it with a definition or a manifesto. And you know what? Don't write me an email about it. Don't leave a comment on my blog about what you think a video blog is. Make a [bleep] video about what you think a video blog is. You know, the cool thing about video blogging, it can be as punk rock as we want it to be, right? I'm here, in my house, with my computer and my whiteboard and whatever and I'm making stuff up. And I'm putting it on the internet. And you can't do shit about that.

[End of video audio]

Michael

Oh lord. [Laughter]

Ryanne

"Who knows what will happen 10 years from now?" Well, that's today. [Laughter]

Jen

Right, so that's my question. Here we are 10 years later and I feel like there were a lot of different ideas about what video blogging would be and a lot of different people who wanted a lot of different things but there was definitely a group in that group that wanted exactly what Michael just said, that, you know, power to the people. Like, we get to make media. We get to determine what the web, through the web, through broadcasting, we get to change power dynamics of how the planet works. So here we are, 10 years later. Has it changed? Has that vision come to be?

Jay

I think that... I find it very incredible how much more connected we're all becoming and video has really been a big part of that. If you just think about that last couple presidential elections, I feel like video has been a big part of that. I feel like you kind of get to know people a little bit better. There's a war going on in Russia, it's Ukraine right now. Everyday I'm interested in that and these places I go, I look at videos where I'm seeing a war happening almost in real time. If we think about the... what is it, that thing in the Middle Ease? The Arab Spring, you know? I feel like that kind of political event couldn't have happened like it did without a video and social media. It was interesting.

Ryanne

I really actually do feel like everything we wanted to happen, did happen. The fact that people can just film something happening and put it on YouTube, like you said, and Twitter and Facebook and it's there in less than a minute. That's what we wanted and it exists. So I feel like it was inevitable, those things were inevitable once it got started.

Jay

But, you know, at the same time, there's a lot of noise. It's always hard to express. It's yourself and every generation has to learn how to re-express themselves and figure out what they want. The technology itself isn't going to solve any problems.

Ryanne

Right.

Jen

One thing that wasn't talked about but does come up now is just the volume. Just the sheet volume of stuff. You start to get a bit calloused, or a bit, like, "Oh yeah, I guess there's a war, whatever, I don't have time to watch that," you just start to block... [Laughter] Because there's just so much information, you just have to start blocking it out and getting... yeah.

Jay

This is really, it's mundane stuff, but I find it amazing. YouTube is amazing in the sense, like, there are all these how to videos on there and I just love it. We had a broken vacuum cleaner and we just typed in our particular one and some dude in his basement made a video about how to fix it. And we fixed it.

Ryanne

That's the beauty of the volume of it, it's pure DIY heaven. You're just like, "How do I fix my plumping? Well, ok, YouTube." [Laughs] You know? I love that.

Jay

It's not glamorous but it's neat.

Jen

It has gotten under the skin so much it just seems like part of the air we breathe these days.

Ryanne

I think the fear, too, is like what recently happened with Blip TV where they got bought out and they took down all the videos. So you can't access any of those videos anymore unless you had downloaded them before. Which I did, but there were some things on there that I wasn't able to get off. There is always that fear. I mean, Google is so huge and they own YouTube but, like, what if, for some reason, they block that off or it went away? This massive human data is just, like, gone. That kind of scares me, is like, when you're just relying on one thing like YouTube.

Jen

Jeremy Keith talks about this quite a lot, where we really should each maintain our own websites and maintain our old websites. I'm really glad to see that freevlog.org is up, people should go check it out. It's a moment in time and it should just stay here for as long as possible as this moment in time.

Ryanne

As long as you pay for the servers.

Jen

Right. The upside with YouTube is that it's super easy and now it's integrated straight into iOS. But the downside is that's Google and Google is scraping all that data to sell to their advertising companies, their clients, which are advertising companies and corporations wanting to design new products that want data about consumers. We're giving them an awful lot of power. Not my one little video, but all of us together, by making these choices, have given YouTube an incredible amount of power. In some ways, the "Vlog Anarchy" is describing, you know, sort of, like, let's get rid of... that power's going to go away. It's like, well, yeah, now the TV dish is not nearly as important but the video hosting service is. You know? It's shifted. Or the net neutrality with two different speeds of bandwidth that maybe Hulu and Netflix can get through because they paid the big toll but if you are hosting your own videos on your own website then you're not going to get that kind of benefit and your videos are going to be slow. I shouldn't get too pessimistic but there's definitely a way in which the landscape has changed where in some ways it's not so different but... I don't know.

Ryanne

There's that corporatization of YouTube. I mean, every video you watch has a goddamn commercial in front of it, you know? [Laughs] And that's annoying. But then at the same time it's bizarre because there are just regular people making videos who are actually making a living on that and I find that amazing and cool, that that can be possible, that someone can just make their own little video blog almost and be YouTube famous and be able to send their kids to college because of that is pretty amazing. It's a weird feeling to have when you're anti corporate but you're like, "Yay, creators can make money from just their webcams," you know?

Michael

I'm also interested to see what new things come along. I have two daughters. Dylan, who made that video so long ago now, is nearly 21 and my younger daughter Lauren will be 18. They don't use video the way we do. For instance, Lauren is forever using Snapchat to send videos back and forth with her friends. It's a whole different idea, a whole different way of doing a lot of the same things that we were doing, though. She has no desire for these things to be archived somewhere on the internet. [Laughter]

Jen

Or sent out to 300 million people?

Michael

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Jen

I think one of the things that I hope people listening get from this is just that, like, Jay, you and this other guy started an email list and you did all the work. Which is a tremendous amount of work. To reach out to the planet and say, "Who else is interested in this?" And with no permission and without really special skills, necessarily, started this movement that really was, kind of, really amazing and cool. And I don't know if... in some ways I feel like this group deserves credit for everything that came after having anything to do with video on the web. But then you're also right, that there's no way to know that. And maybe if this group had never existed, everything else would have happened exactly the way that it did and this group didn't have any impact whatsoever. [Laughter]

Jay

Yeah, I think that sometimes.

Jen

And there's no way to know. But something crazy happened. It was really kind of magical and interesting and those... I guess it was about 2 years, 2 and a half years.

Jay

I think it's one of those things where, I guess it doesn't really matter what affect it had. If it did, cool, if not, that's cool, too. I think just for everyone involved, I know I keep in touch with a lot of people that were core members of that group. Everyone's kind of gone off and is doing kind of cool things based on that experience, you know? I think that's why the web is so wonderful. Because when people get together and are doing something cool and helping expand what is possible, it's that experimentation that helps in our own lives. I know I would not be where I am now if we didn't go through that period, you know?

Jen

Yeah, I feel the same way. Sometimes I'm like, "Why do I already know all of this stuff?" And then when I was getting ready for this group, I was like, "Oh, I've already thought a lot about business models in this podcast," and blah blah blah. But right, that's right, the video blogging group came up with, "Have money, will vlog," long before Kickstarter as a way to try out a business model and how might it make sense to... how could we make some money to have more time to make work.

Jay

I think that we see that nowadays where it just seems like anytime someone wants to do something on the web, people feel like it's got to come through a filter of, "How this going to make money and how will this become a company?" And god bless people for doing that but I just think that there are times when you just want to try something online just because you want to try it. It comes from a different place. I think it's just as valid and important, too. Because I think a lot of the important things on the internet have been not because they were trying to make a billion dollars from it but just because they were bored or just were so frustrated in their daily life they were using the web to enable themselves to have more empowerment.

Ryanne

I mean, isn't that what the internet was in the beginning, too? I mean, they were just like, "Let's make this, Let's give it away. We're not going to corporatize it right from the beginning. Let's just give everyone a chance to use it."

Michael

I think that's really important and I think it's the... the culture of just making things, you know? Using what's available with the restrictions of the time and money that you have to do the things you're capable of doing. To spend your time creatively. That is something that I think was really important about it and I love to see when that stuff happens. Like you said, it doesn't have to be... sometimes it is a little depressing to see that everything that gets talked about is so much in, like, "Well, is that going to get some VC funding and become a company?" What about just for fun?

Jen

It is true that the barriers came down and those barriers are still down and in some ways I feel like the thing that stops people from doing cool experiments or inventing something new is not a gatekeeper anymore. It's just their own imagination or it's their own decision and that any of us... I could just decide right now that I'm going to make a video blog right now and go make one and see what happens.

Well, thank you all for being on the show.

Jay

Thanks Jen.

Ryanne

Thanks for having us.

Michael

Super cool.

Jen

Yeah. Thanks to lynda.com for sponsoring the show and I think that's it. Until next week, thanks.

Jay, Michael, Ryanne

Bye!