There’s a lot going on with EngageMedia in February so we thought we should let you know about some of the more important news. We will be participating in a panel and screenings at the Sustainable Living Festival in Melbourne, there are some new improvements to the website, and the release of a new Facebook application to help you share videos from EngageMedia with your friends.
THE PASSING OF PIP STARR
Our news, unfortunately, begins on a sad note with the passing of a dear friend and fellow video activist, Pip Starr. Pip produced an enormous amount of work during his time. He documented anti-nuclear, climate change, globalisation, indigenous and many more movements and issues. Chances are if you see some iconic footage of Jabiluka, S11 or Woomera, Pip shot it. He was always in the thick of it. His contribution was enormous and his departure will leave a great hole in the world of radical documentary film.
To find Pip’s films on EngageMedia and read more about his work see:
https://video.engagemedia.org/user/pipstarr
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SUSTAINABLE LIVING FESTIVAL (Melbourne)
EngageMedia will be taking part in a number of events at the Sustainable Living Festival, Feb 15-17.
Panel: The Role of Information Technology and Media in Sustainability
Sat 16th February 08 | 4:00pm – 5:00pm
GetUp!, EngageMedia, Engineers Without Borders
The Edge, Federation Square
The mainstream media is catching onto key ideas about sustainability that have existed within the environment mainstream for the last thirty years, and have put a fresh glossy spin onto sustainable ideas and action. This forum will discuss the current formats of the current media landscape, as well as the less seen but vibrant independent sphere and the spread of sustainable ideas viral media strategies.
Link: http://www.slf.org.au/festival/program/talks/1488
Screenings: Twilight Film Festival
Friday 14th – 7-11pm
On the big screen, Federation Square
A selection of works from the EngageMedia site and other locations will screen at the Twilight Film Festival, a showcase of unique films celebrating environmental and social sustainability.
Link: http://www.slf.org.au/festival/program/film_night
EngageMedia on the Big Screen at Federation Square
Films from the EngageMedia website will again be screened at Melbourne’s Federation Square during the Sustainable Living Festival and beyond. Sixty minutes of films will be screened at 1 pm and 5 pm every day between the 16th and 29th of February. Another great reason to keep uploading your content to EngageMedia.
Details to come on the Fed Sq Program Guide:
Link: http://www.fedsquare.com/index.cfm?pageID=284
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SITE UPGRADES
The EngageMedia.org site continues to improve. We’ve made a few key updates to our software this month.
Comments
Comments are a great way of giving feedback to a filmmaker and of continuing discussion about the issues addressed in their videos. Commenting existed previously on EngageMedia but weren’t used as much as they could be. We’ve added some new features that should make it a more useful experience including email notification if someone comments on your video and a listing of the latest comments on the front page.
Vodcasting/RSS2
We’ve improved the performance of EngageMedia’s vodcasting this month making vodcast feeds load much faster so distributing your videos via vodcasting is now easier than ever.
Vodcasting, or video podcasting, is a way to subscribe to a feed of someone’s videos and get automatic notification of new works. It’s a bit like getting the newspaper delivered instead of having to go down to the shops to buy it every day. If you are a video maker it’s an easy way to create your own channel, your video folder in EnageMedia automatically creates a vodcast feed for you. You can also subscribe to feeds on various topics, such as ‘documentary’ or ‘forests’ or subscribe to the latest or featured videos feed. Vodcast applications such as Miro also make great tools for downloading and screening video:
http://www.getmiro.com/
To try this out, you can copy the link from the little orange VODCAST buttons throughout the site, or just copy the links below into Miro:
Link: https://engagemedia.org/featured-videos/RSS2 (for our latest featured videos)
Link: https://engagemedia.org/latestvideos/RSS2 (for the latest videos uploaded to the site)
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FACEBOOK APPLICATION
We’ve released a Facebook application that allows you to share the latest videos on EngageMedia with your friends on your Facebook profile. If you are a Facebook user go here to install the application:
Link: http://apps.facebook.com/emlatest
As a small caveat, we think Facebook can be rather problematic (privacy, intelligence gathering, corporate control etc.) but we also think it’s a good opportunity for outreach and for distributing videos from our community more widely. For one interesting critique of Facebook, you might like to read this article.
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Thanks again for your interest and contribution to the EngageMedia.org community 🙂
The EngageMedia team.
