Video blogging case studies
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Rainforest Action Network's Greenwash of the Week (funny & informative) Each week, Rainforest Action Network produces a video blog highlighting the most disturbing Greenwash tactics from some of the world's worst corporate polluters (see the Understory blog for more information) Tibetan Uprising (timely & action-focussed) Tibetan Uprising, a blog with regular videos from Tibetans living in exile in India, provides daily updates about activities ranging from their march to Tibet as part of the Tibetan People's Uprising Movement before the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, to footage of the violence and crackdown within Tibet. Video plays a regular part in this blog, along with photographs, audio and daily updates and analysis. Prisoners in Freedom City From Beijing residents, human rights and blogging activists Hu Jia and Zeng Jinyan, 'Prisoners in Freedom City' documents Hu Jia's time under house arrest, where he was barred from any and all contact with the outside world. Hu Jia was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison for 'inciting subversion of state power'. He has repeatedly campaigned for the rights of people with HIV/AIDS, for religious freedom, and for Tibetan autonomy, as well as for the environment, free speech and the release of political prisoners. Mizzima News (informative) Mizzima News was established in August 1998 by a group of Burmese journalists in exile with the aim of spreading awareness about the situation in Burma and promoting democracy and freedom of expression in Burma by improving the flow of information in and out of the country and through advocacy and lobbying. Mizzima incorporates video into its posts on a regular basis, serving as a window through which the international community can peer into news-starved Burma. Alive in Baghdad Alive in Baghdad provides a weekly video for global citizens interested in the real life political, military, economic and social situation in Iraq. Iraqi journalists produce video packages each week about a variety of topics on daily life in Iraq, bringing testimonies from individual Iraqis, footage of daily life in Iraq, and short news segments. |
Finding & playing video
Now that you've put your content out and told people about it they need to be able to find it and play it. In some cases this might simply be a matter of watching it embedded in your website, but they could also subscribe to your video podcast feed or use free software like VLC to play the videos they've downloaded. Elsewhere in this toolkit you can find out how to subscribe to video podcasts using Miro (Read more).
There are millions of videos online and thousands more added each day. How do people find what they are looking for or content that might interest them? Luckily this is a well-known problem so quite a bit of work has been done to make this easier.
The resources below will help you find footage to use in your own film, to aggregate videos from a variety of sources and to build up a broader picture of the issues you're campaigning on.
Aggregating Video
The Miro Player is a great way to subscribe to video feeds and to search channels for content. Because Miro is an aggregator it can bring together videos from a range of different sites all in one place. Miro also allows you to search for videos on popular sites by author, title, keyword etc, and to download them.
If people publishing their video have added enough information to describe their video accurately you should be able to find them.
You can also visit and search the big centralised video hosts like YouTube and Google Video for films referring to your area of interest. You should visit the various non-profit video publishers, where you can find an interesting range of material (Read more in our hosting & domains section.)
The new generation of video sharing sites do not oblige you to visit each of them in turn. Most video sites now will have an RSS feed of the content they produce which you can aggregate in Miro or subscribe to in an RSS reader such as Google Reader, Sage, Bloglines, etc.
You can also use 'Video Feed Aggregators', sites that pull together the most interesting videos from across the net, allowing you to search for material from a range of video publishing sites, then 'aggregate' them in one place, in your internet browser. Websites like Transmission and IFIwatch.tv attract a range of critical media feeds, and search among all the content they discover across the net to display results according to your searches.
If you have a website of your own, you can use it to display other people's videos about the issue that you campaign on, or feeds specific to your region. You can use content management software like Drupal (Read more) or Planet to set up your own version of this free software tool, and aggregate or moderate video feeds to display a channel of videos that touch upon your own area of work and interest.
Click here for more information about using Drupal.
