Session 1, Table F consisted of myself, Taymar Pixley of Pixley Flix Productions, Warren Schultheis of City2.0.com, Jon Williams of TableRock Productions, JD Lasica of Ourmedia.org and Dan Gilmor of citmedia.org. I was the note-taker of the group, and the self-imposed leader of the discussion, although I tried to be democratic about it. I had to leave after the first session for the majority of the workshop, so I wasn't able to share my notes with the rest of the group.

I will briefly share my notes, and the links to some cool sites.

Our first topic was a little off topic, and that was how annoying it is to try to keep track of so many different sites and online profiles. Somebody suggested trying the site bugmenot.com which gives a way to sign in universally.

We quickly moved onto talking about video, and JD suggested a site called blip.tv, which Dan then showed us on his laptop. It is a cool alternative to youtube, with better resolution, a cool community of people, a friendlier search engine, and fewer limitations on length. Best of all, it's free.

Precise tagging is very important for creating easily searchable media. This could be called a keyword, tag, channel or category, but basically it's a way to categorize your video so that it can be more accurately and easily found in a search.

We then talked about storage, and whether it is better to store video on your own server, or use a remote server. The sites motionbox.com and JD's site ourmedia.org were given as good places to store video remotely.

Next we adressed some of the complications of video, and how lengthy it can be to consume. JD explained that there is a method called deep tagging in which the video can be broken down into sections that are searchable by tags. This way if your show is half an hour long, somebody could easily find the five minutes that is most relevant to them. He also talked about using tags, channels or categories to be more easily found on the internet.

We briefly discussed the various formats for video, and unanimously agreed that Flash is the best.

Then we quickly moved on to the more complex topic of social media. We talked about citizen media, random acts of journalism when average citizens with video cameras replace the local news, and how to keep the internet an open democracy.

Several sites were thrown out for citizen media - citmedia.org, laobserved.com, baristanet.com, and backfence.com.

We asked the questions "How mutually inclusive is this?" and "Is this competition healthy?" I'm not sure that we answered them, but we did talk about distribution methods of video or rich media, and the democracy player, a site were people share and subscribe to high quality work.

Other sites brought up were odeo.com and libsyn.com.

I haven't had time to check out all these sites, but I'll get back to you with a list of my favorites. Please check out my blog at http://www.pixleyflix.com/blogger/ and join the sbmedia group on tribe.net: http://tribes.tribe.net/sbmedia

~Taymar