Monday, October 27, 2008

"Hi I'm Steve Garfield from stevegarfield.com"!

One of the most important parts of video citizen news is in making sure one always names ones Web site, usually the place where the video was originally provided, that's what Steve Garfield said of.....you guessed it stevegarfield.com.

Steve goes around the New England area with his video camera, no his cell phone collecting stories and posting them to the Internet, LIVE. He showed our class all about video blogging and the best ways to accomplish it.

I thought one of the most interesting sites he showed us was Qik, which is a site that allows its users to submit live video broadcast from their cellphones. Yes, you read that correctly. This gives every single person with a compatible cellphone the capability to be a video journalist. Steve demonstrated this in our class by filming us showing off our own websites....I took the opportunity to pitch mine of course, www.magicofmolten.com. As he was filming on his phone we saw that LIVE video on the Internet a second later it was really fascinating, and you can see that here.

From his Web site, Steve has links to all of his different blogs, and even though he has four or five different blogs, all with different names and domains he makes it very easy to access them all by just accessing the site with his name attached (another plug for stevegarfield.com). One of his pilot sites is called Cup-O-Politics and offers videos and commentary by Steve on politics. Take a look, he does a parody audio slide show about Hilary Clinton losing the democratic primary to the tune of great Eagles jam, Desperado, very funny stuff.

Another Steve Garfield video blog website is what he calls Steve Garfield's Video Blog, it's similar to the Cup-O-Politics by being a video blog, although it seems to be updated more frequently and has videos on just about every type of subject, not restricting itself to politics alone. This is a video he posted where he calls out Staples for a false advertising scheme. In it he got a coupon where Staples promised 50 business cards for free. Steve shows the information and then relays what happened when he went to Staples and tried and failed to get the said 50 free business cards.

I really like what Steve is doing by supplying obscure news like this to his audience. He is leading the way in video journalism and doing it with no professional sound equipment, camera, or even a studio. His only tools are his cellphone and laptop, very modern, very cool.

1 comment:

Steve Garfield said...

Thanks.

Staples contacted me and apologized. I'll get the free cards.

I've also got the professional equipment, i just didn't bring that along to class.