Help: Collaborative Video

Personally Wikipedia never impressed me from a visual point of view. Not too many pictures; Video? It is there. But the collaborative aspect was missing and that might be about to change. A few weeks ago it announced a new initiative “Help: Collaborative Video”

By using the tools supplied, it will enable Wiki pages to include collaboratively created video, audio, animation, and slideshows as well as text and images. The experiment is carried out by WikiEducator .

What is collaborative video?

The wiki of Kultura, one of the partners in this project describes it as: "A collaborative video is a video created together by multiple users. Anyone with editing permissions can add photos, videos and sounds, edit them in a full-featured online video editor and then post it as a widget on any wiki page. Adding a collaborative video widget takes less than a minute. Once a video is created, any user can then go in and continue to add material and edit the video".

If you play the video you can immediately imagine how complex, how interesting, how hilarious collaborative video could become. (But still difficult to imagine why collaborative video should be preferred over individual video postings on a wikipage).

Is collaborative video new? It was to me, but a quick search revealed some other initiatives, for example http://wikivideo.blogspot.com.

Image vs. text - emotion vs. intellect?

Herlinde Koelbl is one of the most renowned contemporary news photographers in Europe. In a thoughtful dispute with German advertisement guru Sebastian Turner for the christian magazine "Chrismon" she reflects on the power of pictures. Asked what is more important text or picture she states (in my rough translation):

"Of course the picture is more important. It's the picture that adresses us directly. With it's emotions, it's meaningfulness. The word works via intellect. And there are so many events, where we only remember the picture and not the word. Nevertheless many of my works wouldn't be conceivable without text. Anyhow I prepare myself carefully for each new subject by reading. Reading is crucial to me in order to understand and later introduce this into my photos."

The mojo men - watch out for the visual reporters

The standards of visual journalism have to be defined yet. But the tools are already available. At the World economic summit in Davos Nokia provided a couple of VIPs with it's N82 mojo phone and - in co operation with Reuters - asked them to provide photos and videos - real time news coverage by high class citizen journalists.

One of the test candidates was Jeff Jarvis, who now via blog shares his remarkable experiences. The people he interviewed didn't take the Nokia serious as they would have taken a video camera plus a complete TV team. So they behaved less nervous and were more open in their statements. Neverteheless the quality of footage (including audio) was quite good. Jeff's conlusion: Tools like the N82 "may change the job of the journalist in ways more radical than I could have imagined until I started reporting with one".

Brockhaus survived war and revolution, but surrenders to the web

On October 1^st 1808, young book merchant Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus bought all rights to publish the „Conversations-Lexicon“. The Brockhaus encyclopedia became a backbone of German education and culture, a national symbol like Goethe’s „Faust“ or Beethoven’s 9th symphonie. For almost two centuries the fine leather spines of the Brockhaus editions with their golden characters were a must in the living room shelves of the German bourgeoisie.

This week Brockhaus CEO Ulrich Granseyer announced that after more than 200 years the 21^st printed edition was the last. Instead the complete Brockhaus (30 volumes, 24.500 pages, 300.000 entries, price of 2.670 Euro) will be available online and for free by April the 15th. „We had to accept that people are searching on the Internet“, Granseyer explained the dramatic step.

Brockhaus survived wars, revolutions and the iron curtain. In 1943 during the Secod World War allied bombs destroyed the headquartes in Leipzig. Ten years later East German communists seized Brockhaus. For 40 years East and West Germans had their own Brockhaus – the capitalst one published in Mannheim, the communist one published in Leipzig. Brockhaus survived it all. Now it had to surrender to the web and to wikipedia.

As a knowledge aggregator and provider the web is faster, more convenient, more interactive and – of course – more visual than print.The change of strategy comes late. The Encycloaedia Britannica was the first to accept the fact, that there is no future for this type of a printed knowledge base.

Bertelsmann, largest Brockhaus competitor in the German market, decided to go a different way. The day Brockhaus announced the end of the printed edition Bertelsmann‘s encyclopedia subdivision Wissen Media launched Spiegel.Wissen, a knowledge portal that combines the lexical data from Bertelsmann with articles from Spiegel archive and – yes – Wikipedia. Only one day later a beta version of Chroniknet went online, a picture portal, dedicated to collect the private picture stock of Germans and compile an archive of visual private history.

For it‘s portal Brockhaus will offer up to four million pictures they licensed from photo agencies. The portal will also contain permanentely updated info graphic content. The business model? Brockhaus hopes for sufficient ad revenue. But media planners are quite sceptical, whether Brockhaus can generate enough reach to become an attractive place for big brands.

Talking about the future of traditional media Brockhaus rises one alarming question:Who’s next?

Best of visual: www.tenbyten.org

A very inspiring way of re-representing existing material has been developed at www.tenbyten.org.

How it works? I quote the info-page of 10x10:
"Every hour, 10x10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour's most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories. At the end of each day, month, and year, 10x10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input."

Best of visual: cockeyed.com

Another 100% visual approach to information. Take a look at cockeyed.com.

Cockeyed.com attempts to build a height/weight chart, featuring photos of dozens of different body types. Photographs dropped into a matrix "building an online visual index of heights and weights".

When the image rules ...

In it’s February edition the German magazine „View“ (claim: „The news magazine in pictures“) speculates about „The new power of images“ (Die neue Macht der Bilder). Even if we can insinuate that the „View“ editors might have had some egoistic marketing intentions, the objective indications can hardly be ignored. „View“ quotes popular recent examples like ...

- the public love affair between French president Nicolas Sarkozy and singer Carla Bruni which dominated the European media for weeks and captivated the French public before the couple finally got married. The well orchestrated images covered discussions about Sarkozy’s political performance and agenda. “Bling-Bling-President” is the term the French media invented for the Sarkozy way to create visual politics.

- the tv pictures of Hillary Clinton almost in tears after being defeated by Barack Obama for the first time in the pre-electional race in the state of Iowa. The scenes of an emotional Hillary didn’t miss their impact on the American people. Only days later she celebrated her surprising comeback in New Hampshire.

- the visualized story of a new born ice bear baby in the zoo of Nuremberg, abandoned by it’s mother. Photos and videos moved the German public. Youngsters invested their pocket money to download the latest portraits of little „Flocke“. It even was a déjà-vu. One year earlier it was Knut, the ice bear baby from Berlin that made visual headlines around the globe.

- at the same time the security video of two teenagers beating an old man almost to death in Munich’s subway caused a controversial political debate about how to deal with young criminal immigrants. When the incident was taken up by the „Bild“ mass tabloid and the video was repeated in all tv channels the conservative governor (Ministerpräsident) in the state of Hessen changed his election campaign and demanded law and order measures against young criminal immigrants, trying to profit from xenophobic prejudices. Would it have been possible without the scaring pictures?

The new power of images is a fact. But it requires independent and unbiased journalim to protect the world from a dictatorship of images.

Best of visual: Silobreaker

By commenting on the takeover battle between Microsoft and Yahoo Christoph Dernbach („Mr. Gadget“) refers to another compelling approach to envision information. Silobreaker provides a couple of state of the art visual features all based on web search results.

I especially like the network maps, making transparent the links between certain people and subjects. Christoph used such a Silobreaker map to prove his claim that not Bill Gates but Steve Ballmer is the driving force behind Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo. Other elements are geographical hot spot maps and trend charts.

Have a look at Europe's best designed newspaper!

Just a short reference to one of the most innovative newspapers regarding visualization in Europe: “Eleftheros Tipos”. The Greek newspaper is the winner of the European Newspaper Award and the best designed national newspaper. Designed in 2007 by Javier Errea “Eleftheros Tipos” has already doubled the circulation on Sunday and increased by 30 per cent during the week.

Excerpt of the Jury-Statement: “Eleftheros Tipos caught the jury's idea in almost all categories. Front pages: They are often devoted to a single topic and display enormous typographic care. Inside pages: Cover stories are allowed to run over several pages. They are then structured by pictures, quotation blocks, and service boxes and offer the readers new stimuli. Infographics and illustrations are standard elements. Their use of typography and white space creates a special aesthetic appeal, which accounts for the paper's modern, but serious character.”

Javier Errea explains in an interview with the German “MediumMagazin” that the former ET was a “languished newspaper” which did not play any important role in the Greek media landscape. After the relaunch the newspaper would be very interesting for younger and female readers and intellectuals, Errea says. 156 journalists, 56 photographers and 24 layouters are working at the newspaper. Their new concept is to produce a newspaper like a daily magazine with an emphatic visual impact.

This success story shows how to improve newspapers considerably: high quality content presented in the appropriate professional design. We can recognize that the layout is not imposed on the text and dominating the content. Text and design interact in a convincing wise that attracts the reader. Unmentionable that this great newspaper has a tabloid size.