Fair use: best practices for online video

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John McCain greenscreen

The Center for Social Media at American University has published a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video:

This is a guide to current acceptable practices, drawing on the actual activities of creators, as discussed among other places in the study Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video and backed by the judgment of a national panel of experts. It also draws, by way of analogy, upon the professional judgment and experience of documentary filmmakers, whose own code of best practices has been recognized throughout the film and television businesses.

JD Lasica’s sez:

I wish we had a roadmap like this when we launched Ourmedia.org, the first video hosting site, back in March 2005…. All video producers and content creators should absorb this common-sense set of principles.

Useful!

Who runs newspapers? Who should run news web sites?

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Joel Spolsky from Inc. Magazine (via SVN):

Watching nonprogrammers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf. Even if he has great advisers standing on the shore telling him what to do, he still falls off the board again and again. The cult of the M.B.A. likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand. But often, you can’t.

Readers, I need a hand.  Can you answer two questions for a newbie?

  1. I don’t know who runs newspapers.  Are publishers usually former journalists?  Or are they more frequently experts in publishing topics like ads, printing and distribution?
  2. Who should run news web sites?

I’m constantly amazed at how bad news web sites are.

For example: Search the Chicago Tribune for my dean’s name, “Lavine.”  It returns no results.  There were at least a half dozen articles about Dean Lavine printed in the last six months, I promise.  What gives?

My suspicion is that the folks running the news sites just don’t understand the web.  If the web is the future of news, should technologists be the publishers?  I’m thinking no, instead it should probably be tech-saavy journalists.

The only strong feeling I have is that it should *not* be ink and paper newspaper publishers.

Pimp my newspaper! Printcast my ride!

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Dan Pacheco outed me on Idea Lab: I think printcasting is a kooky idea. But, what the hell – it might just be kooky enough to work. Forgive me as I indulge in a car metaphor…

For the non-Detroiters in the audience, this is an El Camino: a half pickup, half coupe sold by Chevrolet for almost 30 years. By committing to neither role, it’s mediocre at both.

el camino_MG_0852 by John Leverett
el camino_MG_0852 by John Leverett

Something for everyone

The newspaper is the El Camino of the media world.

A newspaper is part national news, part local news, part sports, part coupons/comics/love advice/cooking tips/celebrity smut, topped off with a stack of ads, classifieds, and home listings. It’s got something for everybody, but no part is as good as it could be if it were the sole pursuit of the paper.

Cable and the web are focused: they’re highways for specialized media vehicles. Craigslist is way better at classifieds than the paper. And how can the food section compete with the Food Network, Yelp, and LTH Forum? Ditto for sports and the rest – the generalist newspaper has been outpaced by expert media.

El Camino, by Linda Rae
El Camino, by Linda Rae

Printcast my ride

But the thing is, El Caminos have a passionate group of fans, especially in the custom-car niche. They love that kooky-looking ride. What if newspapers used printcasting to harness a similar passion?

Instead of making a paper for a city, make a paper for a neighborhood. Print a local, focused paper, with ads and the rest directed at a very tight group. You’d still be printing an El Camino, but for a niche.

El Camino 1960, by John Lloyd
El Camino 1960, by John Lloyd

Always crashing in the same car

A metropolitan daily kindles as much passion as a beige Toyota Camry, a car designed to appeal to the widest possible audience. It’s no wonder that the metro-area audience is dispassionate and dwindling. Who wants a gray bundle when it delivers so little satisfaction?

Instead, print out a mess of papers, one for each audience: rearview dice and retirement advice in one, hydraulics and nightclub pics in another. Pimp it out, and maybe you’ll get some folks to pick up the paper again.

The hacker journalist: in whom programming and prose intersect

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In an essay at MediaShift Idea Lab, I’ve tried to enumerate the job roles of a programmer-journalist.  It was a helpful exercise.  I’ve got no idea what I’m going to do six months from now, but a couple of the following are appealing…

  • CMS developer
  • CMS implementor
  • CMS user (Web producer)
  • Applications developer
  • Hunter, gatherer and data-miner
  • Visualizations developer
  • New media translator
  • and my favorite, the hacker journalist:

‘Hacker’ is a compliment in my world. If you’re a hacker, you’re an especially good programmer. So, what are you if you’re a hacker journalist? Think about what photojournalists do — they tell stories with a camera.

A hacker journalist tells stories with code.

The roles will overlap in the real world, and I’m probably missing one or two.  What other hats could a hacker wear at a news organization?

Flash just got better, but it’s still (usually) very, very bad

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From Slashdot:

Adobe systems made an announcement that it has provided technology and information to Google and Yahoo! to help the two search engine rivals index Shockwave Flash (SWF) file formats. …this will provide more relevant search rankings of the millions pieces of flash content.

This is good news

Flash is a terribly popular platform for interactive news, and it’s opacity to search engines was a serious problem. Content in Flash applications was not findable in the same way that regular web content is, effectively hiding large areas of the web from searches.

But it ain’t great news

Ace of Cake\'s has a terrible web site
The navigation at Ace of Cakes is so mysterious, it has its own guided tutorial.  Let’s consider this: You need to study a tutorial. To read about a television program. About cakes.

Eight years ago, usability guru Jakob Nielsen called Flash “99% bad.” Everything he said then is still true now. But there are waaay more Flash apps now.

The problem is that it’s frequently used to present text in a prettier fashion. Add music and some magical menus, and paragraphs get better, right? Wrong. Adobe says that the text will now be searchable, but that fixes only one of Flash’s many problems.

Among many other reasons, Flash sucks because:

  1. You can’t link to content within a Flash app.
  2. Flash apps usually don’t work like the web, so a reader has to learn how to use it.
  3. It usually stinks for people with disabilities.

The above aren’t always true, but the exceptions are few and far between.

When it works

When Flash is at its hottest, it presents information to the user in a way that text never could. The New York Times has been putting out excellent apps that do this, like their Obama-Clinton support visualizer, and their map of the impact of the cyclone that hit Myanmar.

The Spiderman analogy applies: With great power comes great responsibility. Flash lets you jam practically anything into a web site, but the temptation to do so must be resisted.