Collaborating with Vloggers

When you vlog, you're sure to make some videoblogger friends. How do you collaborate with them if they live on the other side of the world? The answer, of course, is the Internet. Instead of collaborating side by side, some videobloggers are using special sections of their videoblogs to collaborate with other vloggers; others make completely new videoblogs to collect work for special group projects.

Bottom Union, for example, created a short promotional video for a fictional product called Carp Caviar and then invited others to participate by creating their own versions. Over the next two months, 50 Carp Caviar promos were collected from videobloggers all over the world (Figure 8.40).

Figure 8.40. Bottom Union's Carp Caviar project, lives on as a weekly collaboration at http://bottomunion.com/blog/?cat=16.

To celebrate the one-year anniversary of Lo-Fi Saint Louis, Bill Streeter decided to rerun a month of his favorite videos, with introductions by 28 different videobloggers (Figure 8.41).

Figure 8.41. Bill Streeter of Lo-Fi Saint Louis asked fellow vloggers to help him celebrate the vlog's first birthday. View the results at http://lofistl.com/?cat=45.

Videobloggers Raymond M. Kristiansen, from Norway, and Michael Meiser, from Chicago, started Evilutionary Virtual Log, or Evilvlog, as a group effort. The vlog, at http://evilvlog.com, has about 30 contributors (Figure 8.42).

Figure 8.42. Evilvlog, the Evilutionary Virtual Log, is like a digital sandbox where people experiment and try things out.

Sample, Remix, and Mashup

Using one of the Creative Commons licenses that allow derivative works (See "Creative Commons" in Chapter 2), vloggers have the ability to take a piece of someone else's video and create something new with it. In the music world, this practice is commonly referred to as sampling, remixing, or a mashup, and those terms are becoming common among videobloggers too. The Squeeze project was started when Charlene of Scratch Video remixed a video posted on Mica's videoblog, Hello? Others joined in and continued to remix the remixes (Figure 8.43).

Figure 8.43. The Squeeze Archive has a collection of remixed videos at http://publicaddress.typepad.com/squeeze. You can play the vlog-remix game by following the steps on the Web site.

Remixing and mashups are so much fun that the vlog news site We Are The Media, at http://wearethemedia.com, ran a month-long contest appropriately named Remixoff (Figure 8.44).

Figure 8.44. Dozens of videobloggers participated in the Remixoff competition. View the winners at http://wearethemedia.com/2005/12/14/remix-champions.

For the Remixoff contest, contestants published videos on their vlogs and then they "tagged" the videos remixoff2005 (see "Collaborating with Tags"). The people behind We Are The Media were able to collect all the entries simply by searching for the remixoff2005 tag.

Collaborating with Tags

Chosen carefully, tags can act like folders in a filing cabinet. Just as a folder can contain many related documents, a tag can connect many related videos for a specific project. If you assign a unique tag to a group project, it becomes easy for people to track all of the videos created for the project. Last year, for example, Michael made a seminal video about the meaning of videoblogging called "Vlog Anarchy."

"I've been wanting to get this off my chest for a long time," he wrote in the post. "Don't leave me any text commentsmake a video instead and post the link. Also, go to Mefeedia and tag your video 'vlog anarchy' and I'll post the RSS feed." You can see the results of this passionate conversation at http://mefeedia.com/tags/vloganarchy.