I’m going to claim this might be the best resource for explaining Web 2.0 communication platforms to newbies ever! See my post below about CommonCraft, and if you’re someone who would like a better understanding of stuff like blogs, RSS, social networking, podcasting, Twitter and more, there are easy to understand and remarkably clear and enjoyable CommonCraft videos about each of these subjects on the CommonCraft YouTube channel. Enjoy!
OK. I’m someone who has been doing his best to “span the Grand Canyon Gap between people and technology” for quite a number of years, so when I say this is impressive, I at least have some vague idea of what I’m talking about… 😉
I was trying to explain Twitter to my associate and went to Twitter.com and clicked “Watch a Video” Ta-da! A simple, cleverly animated, and impressively clear (and that’s the main thing) explanation. What a concept! No kidding. As I once wrote, “making it look easy is the hard part.” The creative production company is CommonCraft.com They say, “Our product is explanation.” I love that and I love their work.
I’ll let their work speak for them and maybe you’ll agree it’s impressive. Here’s “Podcasting in Plain English”:
I fooled around with the social video site Seesmic–you might think of it as a video chat portal–some time ago, and I found it boring. But now that the likes of Steven Spielberg, Karen Allen and Harrison Ford are posting video clips there too, maybe I should take another look?
And here’s a thread you can view (without signing on to Seesmic) from a UK Guardian Journalist who dialogged via video with Steven, Karen, Harrison & more: Spielberg Pops Up on Seesmic
I caught wind of this from a TechCrunch post: Don’t Screw Your Partners Over A Marketing Promotion which explains more background and some related technical issues. Most interesting to me, they refer to the appearance of these celebrities as a “promotion” without explaining that deal. Jemima Kiss, the UK journalist says “the guys behind the project” are the Picture Production Company. However, The Industry Standard’s coverage of this says, “Seesmic’s founder Loic Le Meur claims that he didn’t even know it was going to happen until right before the videos went up.”
Still, it’s clear that these celebrities are not just posting. For one thing, they all have the same background (gold curtains) on their videos so they apparently all went somewhere together and recorded their posts. These are hardly the casual, usually at-home kind of chats most Seesmic users post. Just the same, I view this development as an interesting new kind of access to some very interesting creative, innovative people, as well as more evidence of how important “The Video Web” is becoming to more and more people, including top-level leaders in the entertainment industry.
Anyone out there using Seesmic regularly and care to comment?
