Labor Day is rolling in fast and I’m starting to get that nervous, excited feeling about our little Bumbershoot adventure. I created a couple new shirt designs and hopefully they’ll do well in Seattle.

The turtle design was inspired by a visit I took to the Monterey Bay Aquarium a few years back. I’m pretty sure that sea turtles can fly and just choose to do so underwater.

The fire hydrant design is a natural extension of my shuttered fire hydrant obsession. I think they look like little armored men standing around on street corners, sentries posted to observe and report on the human condition. They’re everywhere and when you really start to look for them it feels a bit like you’re being followed.

I feel like the process of vectorizing my sketches in Illustrator sort of has a dehumanizing effect. It smooths out some of my signature imperfections and I can’t quite feel the same magic that’s in my blobbly little sketches. It’s like running something from a typewriter through an optical character recognition program, the letters are all the same but the feel of the printed page is more sterile. I probably just need to get better at using the program so I can preserve what I like and draw out even more.

If you’re interested in publishing video to the internet I strongly recommend visiting makeinternettv.org, the site is packed full of useful information for first time and more advanced users. It was a resource I referred to several times in my work on the Alaska Robotics site and still visit when thinking about how best to present our work.

The site walks you through equipment selection, shooting, editing, obtaining licenses, publishing, and promoting your work. There’s even a distilled version for people feeling a little overwhelmed.

The journey is even-handed, comprehensive, and sprinkled with objective commentary. The site is produced by the Participatory Culture Foundation, the same group behind Miro, and while they make a strong case for their own player and feed based video in general, it’s clear that they’ve gone out of their way to provide all the information you need to make an educated decision of your own.

I also recommend reading Nicholas Reville’s essay on the future of video.

The Alaska Robotics Film Library was featured on Miro today and our feed subscriptions have already jumped a bit. I really have no concept of how many people are using the Miro player but I really like the idea of feed based channels and I hope Mefeedia, Fireant, Miro and others are successful in moving the herd that direction.

What will help is if someone develops an easy system to create and upload videos for a feed. Right now it’s a complicated process that involves quite a bit of technical expertise and time, probably one of the reasons so many people use YouTube instead of self publishing.

Today I added two new pirates to the crew section of the Alaska Robotics website. Cristina draws the Guilty Pleasures comic strip which is a semi-fictional semi-autobiographical story and Dani draws Geek Fetish which is a fount of quirky geek art and humor.

Dani Byers
Born and raised in a small fishing village, Byers has always been close to the sea. An incomparable chef and feared knife fighter, her precision and control of a fine tipped blade are next to none. She’s a bit rough and tumble but Dani has a soft spot for lumbering giants.

Cristina Reitz
A beautiful specter of a woman, a skilled dancer, and a feared assassin, Reitz moves like a steady sea breeze. Her origins are largely unknown, a mix of half truths and secrets. Listen carefully and you may hear her dark laughter come across the water on a cold night.

I think the next crew portrait should be a little chimpanzee with an eye patch and a guitar.

YouTube launched a new video player that you can use to embed customized playlists or channels. This seems like a potentially useful tool and I’ve embedded it here to display all of our Alaska Robotics YouTube videos in one player.

The border colors are limited for no real good reason and the sizing is funky (I had to modify the code snippet to fit this page) but it’s a new feature and it will probably improve. Now I just wish the video quality were as good looking as what’s on Crackle and AKRobotics.

If you have a YouTube account and want to create and embed a custom playlist somewhere just visit the my players section of the site.

Lou and Aaron’s film, “Socks,” was featured today in the animation channel on Crackle!

Sony launched Crackle on Monday, a new video sharing site born from the ashes of Grouper and aimed at the minor league filmmaking crowd. They plan to use the site to find and develop talent in addition to creating a more upscale online viewing experience. The place looks nice enough but the flash interface feels a little slow and clunky sometimes. The quality of videos is superb though and many of the tools are well thought out.

It will be interesting to see if people actually migrate over to Crackle looking for better films or if they’re happier rolling around in the shit on YouTube. I have to say the grungy online video giant is growing on me but I’m enticed by the attention Crackle seems to be giving to their filmmakers. They could potentially build a good community around some happy and productive creative types and Sony has deep enough pockets that they can stand to spend money for a year or two while they build up their talent base.

The revenue sharing agreement isn’t too impressive but it’s better than nothing and maybe more notorious filmmakers are getting better deals than our crew. The payoff in our deal ranges from $150 for 50,000 views to $5450 for 5 million views. At best, that works out to well under half a cent per view. I’m not sure if filmmakers are going to see that as a kind gesture or an insult but I guess most of us just want people to watch our films.

YouTube is king for now but I still prefer the lines sketched out by the Participatory Culture Foundation and their Democracy/Miro project. I like the idea of independent producers manning their own tiny web stations and sending feeds out into the world to be picked up by a variety of readers. Broadcast television for the masses. UHF on the internet.