Blogumentary [chuck olsen]

MINNESOTA STORIES in the STRIB

Woo-hoo! I think this will be in Sunday's paper... which will hopefully have a picture. The article now, clearly, has a picture.

MINNESOTA'S STORIES SERVED UP

Video blogger Chuck Olsen has a storytelling sensibility that keeps fans coming back to his website for a daily dose. Chuck Olsen's video blog points cameras at the far corners of Minnesota life.

Jon Tevlin, Star Tribune

They also list a whole bunch of local vlogs, which kicks ass. Now I have to get them to link those up online so it's actually useful. I hope this brings a whole lot of new people to Minnesota videoblogs. The Star Tribune has 650,000 readers on Sunday.

MY FIRST MAC

Wired News: 30 Years of Apple Products
This was the first Mac in our house, the Mac XL, aka "Lisa in Mac clothing." It weighed 700 pounds. It's hard to be cute when you're 700 pounds. It was really the Mac 128k that I first fell in love with. My step-uncle left his overnight. I stayed up all night playing with MacPaint. It's the closest feeling to magic I'd ever experienced.

(Well... until I discovered the "magic in my pants.")

U.S. STATE DEPT ON EMERGING MEDIA

The U.S. Department of State produces an electronic journal called eJournalUSA. Their March 2006 issue is called Media Emerging and introduces most every aspect of bottom-up media. Dan Gillmor has an article about blogging. And what of videoblogs, you say? Check out the popup feature, Videoblogs Online:

Online personal videos—call them videoblogs, vlogs, podcasts, or anything else—are an increasing presence on the World Wide Web. Minnesota Stories, http://mnstories.com, offers a platform for people from Minnesota to post their own chronicles of life in their northern midwestern state. The example shown here, "Family," was created by filmmaker Michael McIntee in honor of the 2005 Thanksgiving holiday.

Pretty freakin' cool eh? Or surreal, at least. The bottom of the page says The opinions expressed in this video do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government. I guess that means the U.S. government doesn't officially endorse my State of the Union Reaction video.

Thanks Kent Bye for letting me know!

STERLING ON ROCKETBOOM

My interview with Bruce Sterling is on Rocketboom today. I tend to forget, that also means it's on Tivo. Cool!

UPDATE: As always, the comments are interesting whenever a correspondent's video is featured...

As someone at SXSW said, Amanda *is* the brand for Rocketboom, and a lot of geeky guys get upset when she's not there. Steve Garfield said today, "Being on Rocketboom is a blessing and a curse." I try to have thick skin, and there were a lot of good comments about the content (i.e. spimes and such). But there were lots of commenters that just couldn't fathom it, one person thought Sterling should be killed (!), and finally someone said "Two men with far too much time, or is that spime, on there hands. Not one of Rocketbooms more interesting vlogs. zzzzzzzzz "

Well, that was a good opening for me to take aim at the malcontents. Probably not a good idea, and certainly Amanda or Andrew would never do it publicly - except for this brilliant Rocketboom video where Amanda lampoons many of the most predictable commenters. Anyway, here's what I said:

I don't think i have as much time on my hands as the predictable commenters with such original thoughts as, "Those guys are weird! Bring back the pretty lady!"

Seriously. If you want sheer entertainment that stays safely within lowest common denominator expectations, shouldn't you be watching TV?

I got a rise out of one guy named Branko, who said "BTW, Chuck, if you do not like us coming here because of the pretty lady and her bubble-gum presentation, then stay at your own vlog, where you have, what?, three viewers? That'll teach us!"

Heh. I'm quite used to the entropy of open comments -- really, it's far more contentious in the political blogosphere. Good thing I don't measure my self-worth by my "viewers" - although if I did, I'd feel pretty good about myself. I hope poor Branko doesn't measure his self-worth that way, because it looks like he doesn't have much more than 3 visitors. It's all so petty, isn't it?

FLICKR ON COVER OF NEWSWEEK

The New Wisdom of the Web: Why is everyone so happy in Silicon Valley again? A new wave of start-ups are cashing in on the next stage of the Internet. And this time, it's all about ... you.

Exciting times. Laughing Squid says, "In addition to Flickr, the articles mention MySpace, Mary Hodder’s new startup Dabble, Craigslist, YouTube, del.icio.us, digg and many others as well as explaining RSS and Open API’s. A lot of people at doctor’s and dentist’s offices well be reading about all of this stuff next week."

CONGRATS MEG + KOTTKE

I can now happily report that both of the "bickering couples" in Blogumentary are happily married. Yay! I have lots of good interview with them that will come to light when I relaunch blogumentary.org as a videoblog.

BOINGED

Check it out! My poorly-lit Bruce Sterling interview for Minnesota Stories is on BoingBoing. Sweet.

Bruce seems happy with it, too:

I'm hoarse and I'm tired in this footage.

On the other hand, that's kind of a nice prop and it's well-edited.

TEMPORARY FASHIONISTAS

CHAIR TODAY, GONE TOMORROW: Lorika and I are featured on the cover of Wednesday's Home + Garden in the Star Tribune.

DIABLO ON LETTERMAN

Yeah, so I happened to turn my video camera on in my living room... you know, documenting what goes on there... and I happened to catch some TV in the background. You know. So you might see our beloved snarkstress Diablo Cody on David Letterman in egregious less-than-VHS quality. Right here in this documentary video of my living room. *cough*

CORY CAN'T TALK

Cory Can't Talk [Quicktime, 2 MB]

In anticipation of sci-fi author Bruce Sterling's visit to the Walker Art Center this Thursday, the man himself has been blogging over at the Walker's Off Center blog. Before that, BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin was "pre-blogging" about Sterling. Or something.

In the spirit of all that zaniness, I offer you this utterly ephemeral (read: banal) video clip taken at one of Sterling's SXSW parties a couple years back. BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow had lost his voice after talking non-stop to legions of devoteés. Here he is, using his voice to tell me he doesn't have one. Nice way to avoid my drunken camera.

I'll be interviewing Bruce for Minnesota Stories and Rocketboom. I'm trying to study up on his world, which is far beyond my capacity to comprehend. I'm pretty much assuming my brain will explode after 5 minutes and that's how we'll know the interview is over.