Future Forum 2009

I will be at the future forum in Sydney, Melbourne & Brisbane in November 2009.

The future forum is Australia’s only one day seminar on the global, social, technological, environmental and economic trends.

Sydney: Friday 6th November – Hilton Sydney

Melbourne: Thursday 12th November – Hilton on the Park

Brisbane: Thursday 26th November – Hilton Brisbane

For more information, visit www.futureforum2009.com

Feel free to ask any questions via the comments below, or download a brochure by clicking here.

Or, watch this video that I put together for the Event…

I hope to see you there!

Dave

The answer depends on a number of factors:

1. how much control you want over your video
2. how much bandwidth your server has, and
3. what you want your video player to “look” like…

So let’s drill down into each of these categories…

Why would you want to control your video? There are two reasons why… The first is that if the content is proprietary to you, other people can reference your video on THEIR site, and YOU are paying for the bandwidth. The second is – even worse – people can “steal” (read: save) your video, download it, and then “claim” it as their own.

Not good.

Having a video file (such as a .mov or .mp4) file embedded into your web page is not usually ideal, and is server intensive and usually slow to load as the end user has to wait (often) for the FULL video to download before it starts playing… (yawn).

The other common way for video to show when it’s self hosted is to have the file converted into a .flv file, (which are usually smaller in size), then reference that file using a player such as that found at longtailvideo.com . It’s usually way better to do this compared to the .mov or .mp4 versions, because a) more people will be able to actually SEE your video in their browser (without installing a plugin first), and the video will start playing much faster.

Most websites are on shared servers (with up to 700+ sites housed on the same server) – if one of these sites just happens to get the front page of social bookmarking sites Digg, the traffic could be rather taxing on your site. So if your video is housed on your site – it might just have trouble playing!!! (buffering… buffering… buffering…)

So… Whats the work around?

FREE: One way is to host your video on sites like youtube, metacafe etc – this is great if you want other people to (potentially) see your video, and you can easily embed your video from within youtube, just as others can take your video and put it on their sites…

PAID: You can host your videos on sites like amazon’s S3 servers. This is great, as you pay (very little) for the bandwidth you use, and it’s infinitely scalable. The drawback is that it actually requires a little bit of technical “know how” to organise your account. S3Fox is a cool plugin for firefox that I use, (and is available for free).

One service I use a lot is the paid version of vimeo called vimeo plus – it’s awesome for ten reasons:

1. It’s easy. Easy uploading. Easy interface. Easy embedding.
2. It allows me to prevent others from downloading the source video.
3. It allows me to only show the video on specific sites, so that if people use my source code it won’t work on their site.
4. It allows me to password protect videos (if I want)
5. It allows me to upload 1Gig files.
6. It allows videos longer than 10 minutes.
7. It allows you to embed and play amazingly high quality HD videos.
8. It’s fast to convert once online.
9. It’s fast to play.
10. It’s not run by google.

Oh – and it’s only about $60 a year.

So there you have it.

Not an entirely unbiased review at all

Got a question?

Make a comment below…

A Fad?

Or here to stay?

If there is one thing that has existed since the dawn of humanity… It’s that

People Crave “Belonging” To A Group.

It’s just now those groups can be joined 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and by any nationality or religious background…

Here’s an excellent video explaining the Social Media Revolution:

Web 1.0 – is quite simply an extension of all other traditional media formats, being “one way”, or a “push” type of media, where the creator of that content publishes it for the consumption of others.

Web 2.0 – is just an extension of technology that allows both the syndication of content across multiple channels (a twitter badge for example), and the ability for the end user to interact, thus becoming a “two way” or “pull” type of media.

No longer can you control what is published online about you or your company.

That said…

There are two ways your business can think about web 2.0 media…

1) Be Reactive – and try to address what people are “saying” about you,

2) Be Proactive – and actually encourage people to talk about you & your business.

Web 2.0 properties can give your business a powerful means of really engaging with your target market, and for the first time ever, the savvy business owner/marketer can really capitalize on this instant “feedback”.

Giving your target market a “voice” (they’ve always had one remember) gives them more control over their content – allowing them to tell us how they want to be sold.

Web 2.0 to a business is about giving the visitor something they want when they visit your website, rather than serving up what you think they want…

(I’ll elaborate on exactly how your business can do this in a future post).

When you spend so much time sorting out other people’s websites, it’s your own that you sometimes need to fix!

That was true in our case!

It’s the “builder” syndrome:

Builders/carpenters houses are almost never completely fixed – because they spend so much time building/fixing other peoples houses.

Stay tuned here (subscribe to the RSS feed on the right) – for loads of free information on how you can improve your marketing efforts using web 2.0 strategies (and more).

Thanks for visiting!

Dave