TheyWorkForYou.com

I heard that Thom Yorke was supposed to be on the news light night, saw him come up on the Guardian Environment feed talking about reducing emissions followed this to a critical Comment is Free article which led me to their blog on radiohead.com

And onto the bigask.com a site by Friends of the Earth dedicated to getting a Bill passed which requires 3% year on year reductions in Carbon emissions. I watched the embedded video hosted by Google Video.

Its the most impressive use I’ve seen by an NGO of using video on their site to get their point across.  Towards the ends it cleverly deconstructs the press coverage throughout the day, how effectively they used the media to get their message out, very smart.

Thom Yorke’s passion on the topic and statement that it has to come from Government to work inspired me to get intouch with my own MP Angus Macneil, not just with the identikit letter, a personal one with my own ideas of what we should be law to lower our impact.

I don’t think the 3% is realistic, but I agree that if we don’t do it we’re in trouble, and its a smart way of getting people enthused about reducing emissions like An Inconvenient Truth does.

Continually impress by the projects coming from http://www.mysociety.org/projects.php be interesting to build something similar for the Scottish Parliament?

Fon blocking and throttling?

Fon appears to block me uploading videos to Google Video but I appear to able to upload them through YouTube?

Also it throttles my uploads to mp3tunes.com, which I would recommend trying.

I understand that this prevents visitors from abusing it but I bought the router, should I not be able too max it out myself?

Video Messaging

Last weekend I bought a webcam and microphone for my sister and her family. They have broadband in the home and a laptop.

My intention was for her to be able to use it to communicate with the rest of our distributed family. The problem with video conferencing is getting the other person in front of the hardware, setup and with time to chat. So I looked for solutions to enable her to leave video messages which could be viewed later by the rest of the family.

I came across Sightspeed which I knew of as a competitor to Skype specialising in video calls. They have a basic video messaging service with their free service ( 30 second limit and hosted for 30 days, accessible through an unsecured web page viewed through embedded flash player ). Their premium service at $5/month didn’t offer much more length ( 2 minute limit and length of subscription to service hosting ).

Having experiemented with their free service, which is really easy to use with their desktop client, you just add emails ( recipients don’t need to be members of sightspeed ). I’m impressed but the time limit of even the premium service is a major flaw. Fair enough they don’t use have advertising on their video pages, so its hard for them to monetise it.

Somebody like Google which already allows unlisted video hosting the expensive part of the equation. Gtalk already has a voicemail facility which ends up being hosted on your Gmail account I believe. If they offered video functionality in Gtalk they could use Google video as a hosting service, for that matter so could an independent client if you gave it your Google account details.

Is their any money in hosting a lot of videos intended for a small audience?

I believe their is if they offer targeted ads from the information they accumulate through the Google account already plus if the instructure is already in place for hosting videos for a large audience, does it make much of a difference if a percentage of those are have very few viewings, I imagine this is currently the case with many listed Google videos anyway.

I imagine its just a case of waiting for the voip technology and video hosting to mature, before this becomes a big service, although I do note that BT have launched a videophone only available with BT Broadband.

It does remind how good a video device a 3G phone compared to a webcam, even the low quality videos the N70 takes are far superior to the majority webcams and with better sound.

I should use it more with the folks, it sometime feels a bit intrusive and I have to remain a cameraman/director opposed to a fixed camera/mic.